Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?
Web Publication: Time, by David Von Dreble
What might be most striking about this piece by an outlet often accused as left leaning is that you will not once see the word “Nazi” or “alt-right”. Time has taken its knocks over the years but for a publication that is not known for conservatism, it’s journalism is mostly respectable.
The piece regarding Steve Bannon is mid-length, thoughtful and gives sufficient background to understand the person. I found myself better informed. In the more volatile daily-hourly news cycle and especially on social media, Bannon is routinely referred to as a Nazi, alt-right, Rasputin, or other such monikers. In my limited reading thus far, I had also noted that he had turned around a sinking Trump campaign that was basically run by thugs and that his formative associations, education, and job experience didn’t quite add up to the characterizations that were hurled at him to date. Nevertheless; some of the news from Trump’s first week and about Bannon’s influence was troubling.
To summarize the article, Bannon has roots and influences that place him squarely in the middle of red-state fears and sympathies. This is not evil unless you’re on the far-left and view any resistance to far left thought as inherently evil. The bad Bannon is his orientation as a quasi-religious thinker and his feelings about comprehensive social meltdown and rebuilding, somewhat on the scale of the American civil war or WWII. It’s one thing for history to deal you that deck of cards but it’s another thing to seek or to cause it. After reading the article, I’m left unsure of which of these two narratives he is embracing.
There is the smallest hint that Trump has modified his MO over the immigration fiasco that was supposedly engineered by Bannon. If there is hope in moderation, it is that there is a whole other set of administration members that can in theory, modulate the bad-Bannon but still green-light the good-Bannon.
