The Bannon-Brooks Interview

America's Two Souls

Monday was consequential for being the day the Trump Immunity ruling came down and Steve Bannon went to jail. Again. His interview with David Brooks published on Monday is pretty disturbing, but clarifying in light of the SCOTUS ruling. Bannon even references Project 2025:

Project 2025 and others are working on it — to immediately focus on immigration, the forever wars and on the fiscal and the financial. And simultaneously the deconstruction of the administrative state, and going after the complete, total destruction of the deep state.

In the first 100 days — this is going to be different than ’16 — we will have 3,000 political appointees ready to go. …

That’s the significance of the Chevron ruling. There will be no impediment to Trump gutting the administration of competent professionals with institutional memory and replacing them with MAGA hacks.

It used to be a mantra of the free press that the greatest disinfectant is sunlight, meaning that as soon as the citizenry understood what malefactors were secretly planning, they would oppose it. That’s no longer true. The amazing thing about living in an age where there’s so much information is that there is no longer a need for the bad guys to hide what they intend to do. It’s all there in plain sight, and yet nobody pays attention because it’s lost among the deafening noise of so much other information that drowns it out. You can’t see —or hear—what you’re not looking or listening for. Bannon makes this point in the interview:

The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump.

I think he’s right. Most people on the Left haven’t a clue what’s animating the MAGA right, and they are distracted by distraction from distraction. They just dismiss MAGA as a bunch of retrograde, racist yahoos who believe the moon is made out of cheese. But Bannon, like most of the really serious people on the hard Right, don’t take Trump seriously. He’s just a means to an end. If the braintrust gets its way, a guy like J.D. Vance will be Trump’s running mate. He’s fully read in, understands the Project 2025 agenda in way that Trump is not capable, and he’ll be in place once Trump is gone. I don’t know that Vance will be acceptable to Trump, but watch out if he is.

Project 2025 is hiding in plain sight, and as I argued yesterday, the Supreme Court Majority is playing a key role in providing the legal infrastructure for it. Indeed, the majority is in essence, rewriting the constitution to make way for it. Sure Project 2025 is getting some attention even now in the MSM, but are ordinary Americans paying attention, or are they drowning in the noise?

I’ve always taken Bannon seriously as a kind of raw articulator of the alienated rage that animates so much of middle America. That rage is real. It derives from what I call ontological dizziness, and it has to be taken seriously. Ontological dizziness is what happens to you when you discover that the world you thought was solidly real isn’t. “All that is solid melts into air,” to quote a famous observer of the effect. This is what happened to Red America since the 80s when their world was gutted by Neoliberalism. The infrastructure of their world, the world they thought was solid, melted into air, and the suffering that they have endured is real and must be taken seriously.

I think that most Liberals are clueless about why MAGA has so much energy. It’s because Liberals are so comfortable in the world that populists like Bannon hate. They don’t understand the alienated rage that Bannon represents, and it’s for that reason that they need to listen to Bannon. He’s a symptom of the disease who mistakenly thinks he's the cure. But he’s important to understand if we’re to understand the disease.

Bannon addresses one of its primary symptoms here and how MAGA offers a remedy:

Bannon: Now, the biggest element that Buckley had that the book “Bowling Alone” had, and you talk about, is the atomization of our society. There’s no civic bonding. There’s no national cohesion. There’s not even the Lions Club things that you used to have before. People tell me all the time: “You changed my life. I ran for the board of supervisors, and now I’m on the board of supervisors.” They have friends that they never had met before, and they’re in a common cause, and it’s changed their life. They’re on social media. Every day, they have action they have to do.

Brooks: This was Hannah Arendt’s point that loneliness is a seedbed for authoritarianism. But you’re not about conversing with the other side, you’re just fighting with the other side.

Bannon: What do you mean, not conversing with? There’s nothing to talk about.

Brooks: Well, how about you have a conversation with the Biden administration. The Biden administration has spent a lot of money. And now, when I go to Central Ohio, they’ve got an Intel plant coming in. You go to Upstate New York, they’ve got a Micron plant. These are benefits for the working class.

Bannon: Some of that stuff’s OK. But on the fundamental direction of the country, we are separate. We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.

Brooks’s PBS/NYT cluelessness is amusingly on full display here. As if Bannon/MAGA was ever interested in sitting down and having a nice, rational debate about the merits of its policy preferences. Oy.

Nevertheless, while I don’t think that most Americans want what Bannon represents, it’s important to understand the spiritual need that MAGA Right fills for so many ordinary Americans. The Left has nothing to match it. So if Biden wins, it will be because most Americans want normalcy rather than finding this kind of life-changing meaning in politics. Do they?

We are truly in uncharted territory now, and anything is possible. We are in the Age of Whatever, and anything goes. And victory likely goes to whoever has the most compelling narrative, and Bannon understands that such a narrative need not be based on facts. The “spiritual” energy on the Right and the narrative that supports it cannot be underestimated, and if the Right wins, its extremist leadership will be in no mood to play nice. They plan to cut through American liberal institutions as Sherman cut through Georgia.

Bannon sees Trump as a third founder following Washington and Lincoln, both of whom led the only two bloody wars fought on American soil. Could it come to that here again? Conservative Institutionalist and NY Times columnist David French wrote a book about how it might come to pass entitled Divided We Fall. It was largely scoffed at when it came out in 2020, but I took it seriously, and wrote about it then in a post entitled “David French’s America”. I wrote —

So while French's book offers a vigorous defense of the culture and values of Red America, he has no illusions about how Red America is being poisoned by Trumpism. Some might argue that principled conservatives like French have been delusional to think that most conservatives think and feel the way he does, and that the contemporary Red American values that he defends were, contrary to what a proud Southerner like him wants to believe, always proto-fascist. It's not primarily about racism, but about a premodern imagination of social order. I have argued here over the years that the New South deep down isn't that different from the Old South, which has more in common with Latin American autocracies than the democracies of North Atlantic societies. That's what defines America's two souls. 

In my post yesterday, I quoted from the Introduction of Project 2025 and then discussed two contradictions, the first being that the writers believe that they represent the ‘soul of America’. Well this is what they mean. The Soul of the Old South is the “American Soul” that Bannon, Project 2025, and the Supreme Court majority think they are trying to save. It should be clear that they are on a spiritual crusade to do so, that this is no longer partisan politics as usual—it’s a right-wing holy crusade akin toi the Spanish Reconquista—and that the defenders of the other half of the American soul, the Yankee half, better wake up to the fact.

If Trump wins, I think it's more than likely that the radical Right that supports him—from the MAGA rank-and-file to the braintrust at the Claremont Institute, American Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society—will look at his victory as a restoration of the true soul of America, the soul of the Old South, the soul represented in the Stars and Bars, and that it must use the full power of the state to suppress any other. They truly believe that they have God on their side, and that they are doing his will.

Forget about the 'rule of law', which was always just a Yankee conceit. It will be all 'law and order', which is completely different. In the Old South the law had legitimacy only insofar as it aligned and reinforced its social order. What matters is the order, not the law.

This the underlying logic that explains the Supreme Court rulings. It’s clear now that those in the majority no longer feel the need to use ‘originalist’ b.s. to justify what they are doing. They have no interest whatsoever in a constitutional rule of law. They want the ‘leader’ to rule by fiat so that he might restore the old order. The sheer audacity of it is breathtaking. But they are confident that history is on their side. Is there vitality enough left in the Yankee soul to prove them wrong?