In the previous post, I tried to lay out the mindset that animates what might be called Bannonism, which is really a form of white nationalist revanchism. Its roots lie in Jacksonian populism that was until the 1960s one of the primary constituencies, especially in the south, along with the white ethnic blue collar workers in the North that composed the Democratic Party until the Nixon realignment.
Both of these constituencies have felt marginalized in the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights laws passed under Democratic leadership but with Republican support in the 1960s. Since then, there has been a major party realignment with Southern Democrats defecting to the Republicans along with many so-called Reagan Democrats in the 80s. At the same time, African Americans, long loyal to the party of Lincoln, switched to the Democratic Party, which also attracted urban, educated cosmopolitans, who were quite open to the feminists' and gay-rights' agenda, which further alienated Jacksonian traditionalists in the south, in rural white areas in the Midwest and Mountain West, and blue-collar ethnic and educated traditionalist Catholics in urban areas.
The Parties are currently constituted not so much by economic policy objectives as by cultural or tribal allegiances. As I have argued here for years, culture-war politics became the strategy of corporate elites in both parties, but mostly in the GOP, who saw the culture war as a way to divide and conquer middle class Americans to distract them from issues of power and wealth distribution. Wealth, as a result. has aggregated to the top 5% in the last 30 years reminiscent of the era of the Robber Barons in the late 19th Century.
The result has been felt especially in rust-belt regions of the country, where both black and white middle class Americans have found themselves increasingly falling into the underclass. They are angry and fed up with the Washington establishment, and if they're white, they blame Liberals in the Democratic Party epitomized by Hillary Clinton, whose cultural values they find abhorrent and whom they perceive, quite correctly, as having abandoned them while caring more about the interests and values of the top 20%, educated knowledge workers and professionals.
These are the conditions for which the rise of Trump has been a symptom. Trump is a warning shot; we should be grateful his ego could not co-exist with someone who was far smarter and more strategic like Bannon. Trump was much more dangerous as a political figure when Bannon was his adviser. Since Bannon's departure, Trump has become a buffoon, a 3rd-rate gangster using the government to line his own pockets and the office of the presidency to inflate his fragile ego. He is a rather sad and foolish man who is supported by a base of sad and foolish Americans whom he has conned.
The real threat does not come from Trump, but from Bannon who saw Trump as an instrument to galvanize Jacksonian resentment that has metastasized in the last forty years for the reasons explained above. He understood in a way that Trump would only play lip service to that a very powerful political realignment rooted in traditionalist American values linked to New Deal style government programs. The Cultural Right could capture populist energies of the bottom 80% if it adopted programs designed to alleviate their economic stresses. Such a program could insure right-wing dominance for decades to come in American politics.
If I were a Bannonite, I would still feel hopeful that the Democrats will find a way to blow what should be an easy win in 2020. Trump blew it in that he played the culture card but not the economic infrastructure card, and as result he is, imo, likely to fail in 2020, especially if he goes against economic populists like Warren or Sanders. But in 2016 Trump was a protest vote by many independents who are not likely to vote for him again since he's turned out to be worse than anybody thought he could possibly be. I would say that Trump has a hard-core Jacksonian base of about 30% of the electorate. There's another 10 or 15% who will vote for him if the Democrats put up someone they see as an elite cultural Liberal like Clinton.
So I'm not that concerned about another four years of Trump, although we are living in times when we are fools if we do not expect the unexpected. So who knows? But assuming that Trump loses, there will still be a pressing need to address the underlying symptoms that made Trump and Bannonism an attractive possibility for so many Americans. I want to make the case for a kind of Progressivism that might unite most Americans rather than divide them as the current alignments do. It requires agreeing to disagree about intractable cultural issues and focusing instead on where the real dangers and best possibilities for us as a nation lie.
Trumpism is moronic; Bannonism is not. So in making this case, I want to rebut Bannonism's claims, but the goal is not just to say those claims are stupid and dangerous. They are dangerous precisely because they're seductively intelligent. So what makes Bannonism so attractive has to be addressed, and since any argument that does not present a more desirable alternative for people who find Bannonism attractive is unlikely to be even remotely persuasive, I have to make the case for such an alternative.
More to come as I have time in the next couple of weeks. I don't have this mapped out in my head, but I'll do it in parts. I think the next step will likely be to make the meta-historical case that I believe situates us in time to define as clearly and plausibly as I can what the real dangers and the real possibilities are.