The populist ethno-nationalists in the Trump White House do not believe in this order. Their critique — which is simultaneously moral, religious, economic, political and racial — is nicely summarized in the remarks Steve Bannon made to a Vatican conference in 2014.
Once there was a collection of Judeo-Christian nation-states, Bannon argued, that practiced a humane form of biblical capitalism and fostered culturally coherent communities. But in the past few decades, the party of Davos — with its globalism, relativism, pluralism and diversity — has sapped away the moral foundations of this Judeo-Christian way of life.
Humane capitalism has been replaced by the savage capitalism that brought us the financial crisis. National democracy has been replaced by a crony-capitalist network of global elites. Traditional virtue has been replaced by abortion and gay marriage. Sovereign nation-states are being replaced by hapless multilateral organizations like the E.U.
.. In this view, Putin is a valuable ally precisely because he also seeks to replace the multiracial, multilingual global order with strong nation-states. Putin ardently defends traditional values. He knows how to take the fight to radical Islam.
It’s actually interesting to read Donald Trump’s ideologist, Bannon, next to Putin’s ideologist Alexander Dugin. It’s like going back to the 20th century and reading two versions of Marxism.
One is American Christian and the other orthodox Russian, but both have grandiose, sweeping theories of world history, both believe we’re in an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, both seamlessly combine economic, moral and political analysis.
.. “We must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things,” Dugin has written, “of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy and political correctness — everything that is the face of the Beast, the Antichrist.”
Trump wants to impose a whopping 35% tariff on businesses that move jobs overseas. This is why.
.. The Trump foreign economic plan most closely resembles President Herbert Hoover’s “mercantilist” approach, which tried to deal with the 1929 crash of the U.S. economy by protecting U.S. industry from foreign competition (and Mexican immigrants). The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 dramatically increased U.S. tariffs on imports, thereby hurting America’s trade partners. Those countries, especially the European ones, responded with trade tariffs of their own. The resulting trade war worsened economic problems, produced the Great Depression, and paved the way for Nazis in Germany. If Trump’s “close the borders” approach led to trade wars with China and others that were even half as nasty as those of the 1930s, the world would be immeasurably worse off.
.. Neoliberalism has arguably produced the conditions that are leading to its own eclipse at the hands of Trump. This suggests that it creates the conditions for its own demise, as the political and economic theorist Karl Polanyi suggested in the 1940s.
.. Equally, it is likely to lead to retaliation from other countries, and very strong opposition from multinational firms, who have often supported the Republican party in the past. If Trump and the people around him get his way, America is about to launch a vast new experiment in economic policy, with highly uncertain consequences for the US economy and the world.
Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots “An Entirely New Political Movement” (Exclusive)
“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they” — I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — “get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
.. The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He’s the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it’s Bannon’s job to make it so.
.. What he seems to have carried from a boyhood in a blue-collar, union and Democratic family in Norfolk, Va., and through his tour of the American establishment, is an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness — or betrayal. The Democratic Party betrayed its workingman roots, just as Hillary Clinton betrayed the longtime Clinton connection — Bill Clinton’s connection — to the workingman. “The Clinton strength,” he says, “was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That’s how you win elections.” And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its workingman constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the workingman was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the “donor class.”
.. They — liberals and media — don’t understand what he is saying, or why, or to whom. Breitbart, with its casual provocations — lists of its varied incitements (among them: the conservative writer David Horowitz referred to conservative pundit Brill Kristol as a “renegade Jew,” and the site delighting in headlines
.. He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver” — by “we” he means the Trump White House — “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”
.. Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one:
“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
.. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he continues. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”
.. it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too — not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. “They got it more wrong than anybody,” he says. “Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.”
.. a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors
.. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids.”
.. “I am,” he says, with relish, “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”
What Is ‘Ethno-Nationalism’?
First of all, “ethno-nationalism” is deeply woven into the very notion of the nation-state. The Greek word ethnos, used frequently in the New Testament, is often translated as “nation”: the idea of “a people” and that of a nation were seen as tightly linked. Millennia later, when progressives sought to redraw the map of Europe after WWI, they did so under the principle that each “ethnos” should have its own nation-state. Wilson’s Fourteen Points stresses the principle that each ethnos should be free to develop “autonomously.”
.. Ethno-nationalism,” as I understand the term, asserts only that we, who are living here as citizens, are Americans, and that the foremost end of our government is to protect us and our rights. This idea (properly understood) does not imply any hostility toward people from other countries. It simply means that it is theirgovernments that are tasked with protecting them and promoting their well-being, while our government is tasked with protecting us and promoting our well-being.
.. if the globalists seek to flood our country with low-wage laborers from the third world, they are first and foremost betraying their duty to our African-American fellow citizens
.. I think he was only suggesting that it is difficult to form a workable, coherent culture when the number of newcomers is so high.
.. So is there an alternative hypothesis as to why Bannon has been attacked in this fashion? Well, let us imagine that there is a globalist elite that doesn’t really care at all about the American people. When the housing crisis hit in 2007, instead of bailing out low-income homeowners (many of whom were African-American and Hispanic) who had been duped into taking on adjustable-rate mortgages that only someone with a degree in finance could understand, they instead bailed out the bankers who had made such loans. Instead of worrying about the impact of massive immigration on the lives our our own most vulnerable citizens (many of whom are African-American and Hispanic), they celebrated such immigration, since, after all, it provided them with cheap gardeners and nannies and maids, and their factories with cheap assembly-line workers.