Steve Bannon. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Bannon Must Go, but After That, Protesters Should Listen to Bernie
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
14 August 17
Steve Bannon ran, and is still likely pulling the strings at, Breitbart, the
"Stormfront" in a business suit with a skinny tie. Bannon once characterized
it as enabling what he called the "alt right," by which he meant a slightly
more presentable version of the skinheads, KKK, bikers, Neo-Nazis and other
far right fringe supremacist groups that might appeal to today's youth,
including the educated.
Breitbart has been wildly successful, since conspiracy theories, race
resentment, Islamophobia, misogyny and other base emotions have a visceral
appeal.
I would argue that the success of the Neo-Neo-Nazis calling themselves
"alt-" lies in an unconscious class dilemma that they displace onto race.
That is, not only must Trump dump Bannon, but so should the youth protesters
who have been misled by Breitbart fake news. They should turn instead to a
different challenger of the status quo, Bernie Sanders
Since the Reagan restructuring of the tax code in the 1980s and following on
further such changes under Clinton and Bush, the United States is becoming.
more and more unequal society. The top 1% owned 25 percent of the privately
held wealth in the US in the 1950s. How much they own now is controversial
but it is between 36% and 42%. The trend line is not in doubt. They take
home 20% of the country's income annually now, up from 10% in the 1960s.
These inequalities build up year after year. If 1% gets 20% this year and
next year and the year after, after a while they will have it all.
This increasing economic inequality is bad for workers, lower middle class
and middle class people but very good for the upper middle class and the
wealthy.
The rich and government institutions in the US have for decades conspired to
knock any realistic sense of class out of the American public. Workers
making $21,000 a year, middle class families pulling down $40,000, and
businessmen making a million dollars a year are all typically rolled up into
"the middle class" in American political discourse. But the fact is that the
top 10% or the top 1% or most importantly the top 0.1 percent benefit from a
different set of policies than do working and middle class Americans.
Businessmen like few regulations and not having to pay fringe benefits, and
very low taxes on business earnings and capital gains, so that even though
they use the national infrastructure most intensively, the working and
middle classes are made to pay for it.
If you want to understand why the Republican Party often sounds like it is
on Mars, denying Climate Change, arguing that all problems can be solved by
lower taxes, not wanting universal health insurance, etc., you have to
understand that it represents the 1%, not the 99%. It lies to the 99% about
standing up for the little guy, as Trump did. But look at their actual
legislation to see whom they help and whom they hurt.
The move to greater income and wealth inequality destroys opportunity for
upward mobility among working and middle class youth. Europe now has more
opportunities for upward mobility than the United States!
So the angry young people protesting about being replaced or being made
redundant aren't wrong. They are victims of class oppression, and especially
of Neoliberal policies that privatize public services like education and
even water delivery and deregulate in favor of businesses and against
consumers. They are wrong that this is being done to them by Jews or
globalism or Mexicans. Most Jews are suffering from these policies along
with everyone else, and the most articulate critic of inequality in our time
is not Trump or Bannon but Bernie Sanders.
Bannon, a multi-millionaire, tells these young people that they should
idolize wealthy businessmen like Donald Trump, and that the reason they are
having trouble getting a job is not increasing inequality and concentration
of wealth in a few hands, but because immigrants or Latinos or African
Americans are taking their jobs and pushing them to the bottom of the pile.
And Muslim terrorists are lording it over them.
In fact, studies show that immigrants don't have good enough English to take
jobs away from most white workers, and that they fill different niches in
the economy. Immigrants actually expand the economy and would be helping
white workers and middle classes do better except for one thing. The top 1%
is capturing 20% of the annual income of the country, so the expansion of
GDP made possible by the immigrants isn't going proportionally to white
workers.
Bannon and Breitbart are the purveyors of the ultimate false consciousness,
the illusion of race oppression to hide from their dupes the reality, of
class oppression. Of course, dividing people by race and national origin and
religion is extremely convenient for the Rupert Murdochs and Koch Brothers
and Scaifes and others. Why do you think respectable WASPs who yearn to be
invited to white tie PBS donor parties fund an Islamophobia network to the
tune of tens of millions of dollars? To give people some other target to
hate than their increasing share of the national wealth.
Nobody needs to hate anyone. All we have to do is go back to the tax code as
it existed under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower and make sure there
are opportunities for energetic young people to move up.
Trump and Bannon are taking us in the other direction. The tax code they are
cooking up with the GOP Congress will be like a firehose spewing money at
the wealthiest and depriving everyone else. Trump's Scott Pruitt is
destroying the EPA so that corporations can poison us at will for a profit
without facing any backlash.
So the corporations and the 1% benefit from Charlottesville. Who cares about
some old Confederate general? Whether a statue to him stands somewhere won't
put money in anyone's pocket. And if young white people want to be proud of
something, they can be proud of America's role in defeating Nazism or our
Catholic president Jack Kennedy's successful moonlanding project, or
American science triumphs and Nobel prizes, often won by Jews and members of
other minorities. Hanging your self-worth on the Confederacy having been
glorious is a fool's errand.
So if they were smart, and really wanted to take back their country, these
young people would turn to Bernie Sanders and not a hot duplicitous mess
like Bannon. They would join unions and support a substantial raise in the
minimum wage and get behind a single payer health insurance program. These
things would all benefit them in a way that the dust of Jefferson Davis
cannot. It is true that they will also benefit African-Americans and Latinos
and women. That's called synergy, when something is bigger than the sum of
its parts.
It won't help Bannon, though. It will raise his taxes and it will drain the
hatred that fuels his support base.
These youth are being trained like circus animals, to hate the Left, which
is the only political force that can actually rescue them. They are being
trained to hate Jews and African-Americans and Latinos and Muslim-Americans,
when it is only by joining forces with them that they have a prayer of
outwitting the billionaires on public policy. They are being taught to reach
back to rickety nineteenth century plantations for their social ideal, when
the future is Elon Musk and Tesla and the gigafactory- enterprises that they
can take part in if they get the right training.
Of course Trump needs to fire Bannon, whose propaganda for the Far Right in
the past decade led directly to the Vanilla ISIS car-killing in
Charlottesville. But more importantly, the people with genuine grievances
about lack of jobs and lack of opportunity and lack of dignity need to be
taught how to get those things in a positive way.
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