The controversial White House counselor says his father’s 2008 financial trauma helped crystallize his antiglobalist views and led to a political hardening; ‘I’m going to be totally wiped out’
“The only net worth my father had beside his tiny little house was that AT&T stock. And nobody is held accountable?” Steve Bannon, 63, said in a recent interview. “All these firms get bailed out. There’s no equity taken from anybody. There’s no one in jail. These companies are all overleveraged, and everyone looked the other way.”
.. Steve Bannon idealizes the bygone corporate era that gave his father the kind of stability that he himself never pursued. Marty Bannon, who voted for Mr. Trump, sought a life of security, while the thrice-divorced Steve Bannon craves chaos and drama. He has served in the Navy, dabbled in penny stocks
.. “He’s the backbone of the country, the everyman who plays by the rules, the hardworking dad that delays his own gratification for the family,” Steve Bannon says. “The world is probably 95% Marty Bannons, and 5% Steve Bannons. And that’s probably the right metric for a stable society.”
.. Under his leadership, the site ran increasingly controversial headlines such as “The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ Is Simple: Women Should Log Off,” “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women In Tech, They Just Suck At Interviews,” and “Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.”
.. ideology is less about Republicans and Democrats than about middle class versus elites—nationalists versus globalists. He says that explains his opposition to open borders, political corruption and what he views as political correctness.
.. He expected to become a priest as an adult, he says, but met his future wife and soon started his family. He declined an offer to play for the Washington Senators
.. I had great faith in AT&T,” Marty Bannon says. “At their peak they were the best company for service. That was inbred. Fire, flood, storm or whatever, they called you and you went. Whatever time of night. And you stayed out there until the job was finished.”
.. His children nicknamed him “Safety Sam.”
.. Marty Bannon says he lost more than $100,000 because he sold the shares for less than he paid for them. It was a decision he made without consulting a broker or his family, including his two sons with investment backgrounds, who only learned about the sale days after it was finished. The shares subsequently regained much of their value.
.. Jim Cramer told “Today” show viewers to pull money from the stock market if they needed any cash for the next five years. Steve Bannon says the warning spooked his father.
.. “He was older, in his 80s. But all these guys from the Depression, it’s a risk-averse generation because of the horrible things they saw in their youth. He was rattled.”
.. The way Steve Bannon sees it, the institutions his father put his faith in failed him.
.. Steve Bannon thinks U.S. companies should once again feel more responsible to their communities. “Why can’t you revert back to a golden age?” he asks. “You can.”
.. “The government created this problem,” Marty Bannon says. “The elites, they got bailed out. Everybody else in the country, whatever happened, happened, and they just had to move on.”
The Trump administration’s most disturbing trait
A case in point is press secretary Sean Spicer’s continuing refusal to confirm that Trump campaign officials were in touch with Russian diplomats and other Russians before the election, despite persuasive reports based on law enforcement and intelligence agency intercepts — and the Russians’ own confirmation.
.. Some of the best analysis I received in the late 1980s on the impending collapse of the Soviet empire came from a KGB agent and from an East German intelligence officer, both of whom could see the internal rot spreading rapidly.
.. They have incubated suspicion that Trump’s business interests depend on foreign financing that has given the Russians leverage over this president.
.. Spicer has now been caught in so many bare-faced falsehoods that a Nixon-era saying has become current again: He lies not just because it is in his interests but because it is in his nature.
The State-by-State Revival of the Right
But even if they win, Democrats will not have the power to reverse conservative legislation. Wherever possible, Republicans in these 23 statesredrew legislative district lines after the 2010 census with the express purpose of preventing any Democratic bid to dislodge conservative majorities for the rest of this decade.
.. The current Republican strategy has all the characteristics of a holding action – a finger-in-the-dike approach to the demographic growth of pro-Democratic minorities and the relative decline of pro-Republican whites. The Republican tactics may prove successful in the short term, serving their interests as quickly as they can before the new demographics take hold and perhaps giving the party time to adjust before whites lose their majority status.
.. Jacobson’s conclusion:
We are in for divided government for the rest of the decade if not beyond, and it will not be a pretty sight, given how polarized the elites are these days.
Public discontent with the current state of affairs is high. According toGallup, the percentage of Americans describing themselves as “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied “with our system of government and how well it works” has nearly tripled from 23 percent in 2002 to 65 percent in 2014.
.. Polarization has made both the Democratic and Republican parties hostile to candidates challenging respective partisan orthodoxies. The paradox is that if dissatisfaction with government continues to deepen, the status quo will become increasingly unsustainable.
.. Democrats today convey only minimal awareness of what they are up against: an adversary that views politics as a struggle to the death. The Republican Party has demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice principle, including its historical commitments to civil rights and conservation; to bend campaign finance law to the breaking point; to abandon the interests of workers on the factory floor; and to undermine progressive tax policy – in a scorched-earth strategy to postpone the day of demographic reckoning.