The Furthest Exit:Bannon’s Long-Game

April 2017 4 3

NE OF my favourite alt-right memes is deliciously simple.

It features a badly-drawn obese American on a mobility

scooter. A hamburger is dangled before his eyes. The dan-

gler is not Trump, but his chief strategist Steve Bannon,

himself being led by a dangled headshot of Trump held

ahoist by white supremacist Richard Spencer. This Russian doll

parade extends ever further backwards into increasingly obscure

layers of the alt-right, from Adult Swim prankster Sam Hyde to the

creator of the neo-reactionary movement, Mencius Moldbug.

What I like about this meme is Trump’s insigniﬁcance. He provides

excellent spectacle, but effectively he performs a function, he’s a

means to other people’s ends. Trump is a conduit for two distinct,

but not mutually exclusive, projects: Steve Bannon’s meta-historical

‘Fourth Turning’ and the tech-revivalism of PayPal founder Peter

Thiel. Both projects hinge on a worldview informed by the stagna-

tion of current political conditions and both require a fundamental

re-set of the political order. Both intend, as Trump promised through-

out his campaign, to “drain the swamp” and build condos on top of

it for themselves.

Stand too close to Bannon and Thiel and it is hard to imagine

what unites them. Take a few steps back and the alliance is emi-

nently sensible. They are two highly ambitious libertarians who

owe much to the silent libertarian coup that occurred a little before

Trump’s elevation. This article connects the rise of the alt-right to

Bannon’s philosophy of history. In a second article next month, I

will show the allure of neoreactionary politics for everyone from

cryptocurrency enthusiasts to the controversial philosopher of

accelerationism, Nick Land.

Steve Bannon’s worldview

by Paul Eliot-Ennis

Trump is a conduit for

two projects: Steve

Bannon’s meta-

historical ‘Fourth

Turning’ and the tech-

revivalism of PayPal

founder Peter Thiel

The Furthest

Exit: Bannon’s

Long-Game

ARTICLE

4 4 April 2017

The coup

This was no ordinary coup, but a psychic one and

it was embodied in the Tea Party. Much like

Trump, the Tea Party was often derided for its

tackiness, stupidity, and brash nature. Then, as

now, liberal late-night talk hosts made hay of its

characters. Sean Spicer now, Michelle Bach-

mann then.

But the Tea Party performed an important

function for its backers, those comic-book vil-

lains of American politics, the ultra-libertarian

Koch brothers. The goal was to infuse the Repub-

lican Party, then broadly a middle-of-the-road

alliance of neo-conservatives and evangelical

Christians, with a radical deregulationist strain.

The means was the populist Tea Party narrative,

which turned out to be far more powerful than

they at ﬁrst realised because it was laced with a

sense of betrayal. The political unconscious that

liberalism refused to face up to, the betrayed

white working class, itself faced up to the liberal

consensus, and won. The Koch brothers, who

refused to back Trump, went looking for new

ways to inﬂuence American politics.

Trump had long ago smelled blood, but never

quite had the right opportunity to sink his teeth

into something. It’s easy to forget that he has

never held political ofﬁce, has scant political

experience outside minor campaigns, and has

found shifting political allegiance easy. And

this helped, a lot, because Trump was not

responsible. He had betrayed nobody. As a

result, he was able to personify a new politics

of anti-politics. This anti-politics politics was

really a reversion to paleoconservatism entail-

ing a turning inwards, through tactical

isolationism and protectionism, yearning for

the status quo before malignant globalism

emptied the entire shop out.

From this perspective, Republicans had

allowed parasites to feed off the labour of the

silent majority. Even worse, they had offered

scant reward for the blood sacriﬁces in Afghani-

stan and Iraq. Trump linked the spent war-chest

to the infrastructural decline of mid-Western

American cities, to economic stagnation and bur-

densome debt. It was a story of unpaid debts,

both moral and economic.

In his inaugural address in January, Trump,

almost certainly under the inﬂuence of Bannon,

couched this narrative in the language of the

left-behind, of a nation dying, of loss, most

notably in the memorable image of ‘rusted-out

factories scattered like tombstones across the

landscape of our nation.’ This is the narrative

of a generation that felt it had been consigned

to history. Trump is their punk anthem, no

future for us, just demographic oblivion, but

before that happens one last party listening

nostalgically to America’s Greatest Hits. The

white tribe was not done yet.

The Browning of America

The younger generation of this tribe is enraged

when liberals pooh-pooh their fear of demo-

graphic supersession, the “browning of

America”. They see the restoration of populism

as the strategic opening for the re-assertion of

their birth right, with the result that they are

often portrayed as irresponsibly nihilistic. Their

tactic is to adopt, and spread, a feeling of

ecstatic merriment. Inside this culture – stretch-

ing from 4chan to pick-up artist forums to

“frogtwitter” – fun matters. The restoration they

envisage is almost always expressed in terms of

relief, to be ﬁnally free again to say what they

want to say, to think what they want to think.

The prank is enhanced by the high serious-

ness with which their transgressions are

regarded by their enemies. They are acutely

aware that in the battle of identity politics they

are de facto the enemy. Their enemies, the social

justice warriors of the progressive left, are read

as hysterical utopians bent on subverting the

natural order. The entire progressive project is

mocked, whether for the proliferation of pro-

nouns to describe gender or for the postulation

of rape culture. The alt-right want to expand the

Overton window that deﬁnes what is acceptable

in general discourse.

Milo Yiannopoulos embodies this trend per

fectly, a walking manifestation of the

contradictions of identity politics, leveraging his

status as gay and Jewish to shield himself from

critique. It is his ability to verbally machine-gun

the mixed stew of enemies of the alt-right that

made him a media star. Those targets are varied

– feminism, globalism, Democrats, Black Lives

Matter. But above all it is animosity towards

Islam that weds the alt-right to the wider popu-

list nexus.

The alt-right sees in Islam not just a terrorist

threat, but a long-term demographic one too. Yet

it is not really Islam ‘proper’ that matters to them

now, but rather the role Islam occupies in the

hierarchy of progressive politics. For the alt-

right, Islam lives at the top of the identity totem

pole, with all other oppressed groups subservi

ent to its whims. This status essentially inverts

how most of society sees Islam, where Muslims

might be a vague liminal threat or an oppressed

minority, but certainly not on top.

Within the alt-right, however, the deference

shown towards Islam is evidence of an insidious

alliance between Cultural Marxism and Salaﬁst

extremism. Progressives are useful idiots so

dedicated to the erasure of white hegemony that

they cannot foresee their eventual elimination

by hard-nosed Islamism. They are infected by a

self-destructive, self-believing fervour that

blinds them to such long-term consequences.

This is why Milo, despite the seemingly noxious

aspects of his identity - for traditionalists, is

accepted. He may not be perfect, but at least he’s

Both intend, as Trump

promised throughout

his campaign, to “drain

the swamp” and build

condos on top of it for

themselves

POLITICS

Check what the plan is after the draining

April 2017 4 5

not a Muslim. In other words, in the inverted variation on

identity politics found in the alt-right, Islam has its own

unique status at the bottom of the pile.

Enter Bannon, stage right. His background is varied,

to say the least, but his most inﬂuential before being

Trump’s advisor was as executive chair at Breitbart

News. Breitbart is an ultra-conservative news outlet

that, amongst other quirks, trades in sordid tales about

Islamic immigration. If one were to read only Breitbart,

one would conclude that Sweden is a satellite state of

ISIS. As the British philosopher of accelerationism Nick

Land puts it (more on him in the next instalment of this

article), Breitbart sees the West as being sucked slowly

into an Islamic vortex.

From Gamergate to Milo

Breitbart is permeated with Bannon’s favoured theme of

a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. Yet

it does more than this. It acts as the mouthpiece for adja-

cent clashes, most notably the relatively obscure

Gamergate scandal. Gamergate was a battle between a

large cohort of male videogamers and mostly female

tech journalists over the perceived attempt to render vid-

eogames more progressive. Bathed in the no-boundaries

militancy of 4chan culture, it quickly descended into a

prolonged misogynistic harassment campaign before

petering out.

Who emerged as a key voice of the nascent alt-right

movement from this skirmish? Milo, who was originally

a tech journalist. Milo helped Breitbart add the youth

wing of the alt-right to its arsenal. For Bannon, Milo

encapsulated the voice of Generation Zero, his name for

the current generation and its inheritance of nothing of

value from the previous generation. An army with noth

ing to lose.

In Bannon’s vision, the baby boomers engaged in the

systematic annihilation of Generation Zero’s inheritance,

an act that conforms to a natural tendency engrained into

the process of history. Bannon subscribes to an esoteric

version of history known as the ‘Fourth Turning’. Devel-

oped by amateur historians William Strauss and Neil

Howe in the 1990s, it might never have been more than

a curio clogging up second-hand bookstore shelves,

were it not for Bannon. The Strauss-Howe generational

theory follows the tradition of cyclical history dominated

by ﬁgures such as Mircea Eliade and Oswald Spengler.

If you don’t recognise those names it is probably because

unlike me you didn’t spend a

chunk of your graduate studies

reading about the exploits of

populist quasi-fascist intellec-

tuals (I was studying Heidegger,

so I had to).

In the ﬁrst half of the twenti

eth century you could still ﬁnd

history books that read like

Hegel without hope: half-manic

with brute fatalism. Russia has

carried on this tradition with its

very own philosopher of des-

tiny, Alexander Dugin, for

whom world-historical entities

are endlessly locked in stub-

born geopolitical spats. Dugin

is a Heideggerian, so I understand him, but unlike me he

is Putin’s favourite thinker, his beguiling Rasputin.

Strauss and Howe are not quite as intellectually impres-

sive, but they re-insert, through Bannon, the concept of

history as not just “not over,” but this “not over” as itself

a part of history, the crisis-phase of cyclical history. This

is why ours is set to be one of the most philosophical of

eras, because ideas have been shown to be powerful,

when not too long ago we had come to believe they were

not. All that time of intellectual slumber in the West was

not misspent; the fringe thinkers were simply biding

their time, since they trusted in the inevitability of the

crises that would give them voice.

How did Bannon apply the logic of cyclical history to

the United States? What is the signiﬁcance of his removal

from Trump's National Security Council? What is the

attraction of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to the neo-

reactionary movement? And what has PayPal cofounder

and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel got to do with all

of this?

To be continued.

This article was commissioned for

Village Magazine by Field Day.

Founded in 1980, Field Day is a

publishing and theatre company

dedicated to cultural critique. A

Field Day podcast will be launched

later in 2017. www.ﬁeldday.ie

Intellectual slumber in

the West was not time

misspent; the fringe

thinkers were simply

biding their time, trusting

in the inevitability of the

crises that would give

them voice