Steve Bannon Declares War on – What, Exactly?

David Brooks interviews Steve Bannon, quite fascinating (NY Times). Bannon is all about anger, all about fighting:

Bannon:  I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt.

but it remains entirely unclear to me what he is rebelling against, unless it is the nature of the universe, or at least the nature of human society.

The best definition of populism I ever heard came from a long-ago news article about a guy running for the Virginia Utilities Commission, who went around telling everyone, "They're screwing us, and I'm sick of it."

And the heart of Bannon's schtick an an assault on "elites." Whoever they are. Like this:

Bannon: Well, I think it’s very simple: that the ruling elites of the West lost confidence in themselves. The elites have lost their faith in their countries. They’ve lost faith in the Westphalian system, the nation-state. They are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.

Brooks: When did you come to see the world this way? I mean, obviously, you were at Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs. Did you have a front-row seat and think, “Oh, this sucks”?

Bannon: I took Michael Porter’s classes at Harvard back in the ’80s, and globalization was — Harvard, at that time, treated this as the second law of thermodynamics. It was a natural property that could not be questioned. And then I went to the M. & A. department at Goldman Sachs and I worked with Hank Paulson. I was put on a lot of things to sell companies. You could just see America was being gutted. You had Mike Milken and the junk bond guys, and they were after these companies. And you go out there, and the companies were not particularly well run.

The guys were always going to the country club, and the management was very detached from labor — you see this evisceration, you saw these jobs going, and they were never coming back.

And, ok, it sucks that Wall Street guys can gut companies and make people's jobs disappear. I complain about it all the time. But it seems like a strange issue to use against Joe Biden, who might be the most pro-labor, anti-free trade president of my lifetime. Much more so than Trump was, I would say. But bigger questions come in when we ask who else, besides Wall Street guys, is in the elite. I'll come back to this.

Brooks: Let’s get back to the big narrative. Do you think immigration is the core issue here? That seems to be one issue that drives populist support everywhere.

Bannon: Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking.

Speaking as a pro-immigration moderate, I want to ask, how is immigration a symptom of a lack of self-confidence? I would say it is a sign of confidence. For me it reflects a belief that America is a great place for any sane, healthy person who wants to work hard, with plenty of room for millions more people who meet that description. I love our culture so much I want to share it with as many more people as we can readily fit it. I want to see America grow and thrive and prosper, and that is why I support immigration. Bannon likes to say that he is not an ethno-nationalist, just a nationalist; but without the ethno-, what's the complaint about immigrants who want to live the kind of life Bannon extols?

Not that Bannon doesn't have arguments:

I came up in the golden age of Pax Americana, a working-class dad who had a housewife and five kids. All went to Catholic schools. I mean, a guy who was a foreman and then lower-level white-collar management. That’s the kind of thing we aspire to have in this country. If you look at it country by country, it’s all the same. The lack of jobs, the lack of opportunities, the lack of self-confidence.

And I say, this is baloney. Anybody who wants to live at the level of working families in the 1960s – no air conditioning, one land-line phone, one car per family, etc. – can do it easily. I know people who have. To the rest of us, they seem poor, but in world-historical terms they are still rich. These days Americans need two salaries to support a family of four because we have opted to pursue a much more lavish standard of living. Maybe Bannon thinks there was some way we could have gotten much richer without all the economic changes of the past 50 years, but I doubt it. Certainly nobody else in the world has managed it. I have said this before, but I will say it again: it is just stupid to blame the system or the government or the elites for choices that we have made for ourselves. We opted for more stuff, and so we have to work for it.

And as for any lack of jobs, unemployment is under 4%.

How do immigrants fit it?

What we should be doing is cutting the number of foreign students in American universities by 50 percent immediately, because we’re never going to get a Hispanic and Black population in Silicon Valley unless you get them into the engineering schools. No. 2, we should staple an exit visa to their diploma. The foreign students can hang around for a week and party, but then they got to go home and make their own country great.

This is the worst nonsense yet. It is very common on the right to complain that somebody – white men, natives, whoever – can't get into college because some other group of people is taking up all the places. But in America, anybody who wants to go to college can. My local community college takes anyone (anyone) with a high school diploma or GED. I say that the problem is the reverse of what Bannon posits, which is that our colleges are full of students who shouldn't be there at all. And many of the students agree, which is why half or more of them drop out. Anybody with the brains and drive to become an engineer can go to college here and, and rather than being over-full, most engineering departments are constantly scrambling to find students. I suppose it's true that foreign students take up places at Harvard and Stanford that might have gone to natives, but who cares? Go someplace else and stop whining that other people are better students than you are.

Bannon: Our movement is metastasizing to something that’s different than America First; it’s American Citizens First.

Brooks: What does that mean?

Bannon: It means Americans have to get a better deal.

How? Personally, I think Americans get a great deal. Taxes is one of Banon's issues, so, ok, we could theoretically lower them, but that would mean spending less, and we all know what a hard problem that is.

But how else? Instead of offering actual ideas for changing things, Bannon just doubles down on the rhetoric of war:

We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.

So you’re going to go to war with the existing administrative state and the Praetorian Guard deep state. My point is, let’s, in the transition, get all the federal contracts. Close them all down. Let’s get MAGA in there. Right. Let’s get our guys in on the contracts. It’ll be a hostile takeover of the apparatus.

Let me refer back to my favorite example of what the government actually does: help build long-distance powerlines. Let's say the fantasy Trump administration decides to fire everyone at FERC and appoint MAGA people. What would they do differently? Would a MAGA administration be more aggressive about building powerlines? Or would it take the side of the populists who fight new powerlines through their neighborhoods? Would they continue the loan guarantees that help build the lines, or discontinue them because they are an expense that helps rich guys on Wall Street? 

How about the National Park Service? If anybody in America believes in American history, it's the NPS, where they proudly stand watch over our battlefields, presidential birthplaces, and so on; they think the national park is one of America's greatest creations, and they think the parks we have are one of the things that makes the US special and wonderful. Are we going to fire them for being leftists and replace them with MAGA people? Why? How would MAGA people run the parks differently? Sure, there are programs that could be cut, but most of the NPS budget goes for maintenance, law enforcement, safety, and administration.

Bannon seems to think that the "administrative state" is run by the "elites", so abolishing it would somehow help the rest of us. But without the administrative state, who is going to keep watch over the Wall Street guys and keep them from looting pension funds? Who is going to keep corporate polluters from poisoning our water? I know lots of people in the administrative state, and they see themselves as waging a constant battle against the country club elites that Bannon also sees as his enemies.

I simply don't see how Bannon's us vs. them framing makes any sense in these contexts, or in many others.

The one position Bannon holds that is at least clear and consistent is isolationism. He says he would cut off all aid to Ukraine tomorrow, and presumably forget about defending Taiwan and South Korea. Ok, that would save a lot of money, and it does represent a major break with the conservatism we have had for the past 75 years. I doubt it is a good idea, even for the Americans Bannon wants to put first. But even more it highlights how narrow and ultimately selfish Bannon's concerns are. He wants to lift his middle finger, not just the the pension-looters of Wall Street, but to everyone who doesn't look, act, and think exactly like him. 

The motto of this movement seems to be, to hell with everyone else, what's in this for me?