Few people in American history have been savaged so viciously by the press as Donald Trump during this year’s election. But the media quickly outdid itself when the president-elect announced that Stephen Bannon would be given the coveted role of senior counsel. Without missing a beat, and undeterred by their resounding failure to stop Trump, the press quickly set upon Bannon. They called him an anti-Semite and a white nationalist. A Washington Post writer even suggested that he would serve as the Goebbels to Trump’s Hitler.
The anti-Semitic rumours were started by his ex-wife during their divorce hearing. In any other context, the media would have taken such a source with a hardy pinch of salt. Meanwhile, no one has presented credible evidence of racism. When Bannon ran the conservative website Breitbart it reported widely on violence connected to the Black Lives Matter movement, and, because the mainstream media quickly took up the movement’s case, they decided that anyone who criticises it must therefore believe that black lives literally don’t matter.
Yet the media’s failure to “expose” Bannon leaves one question in stark relief: what exactly does he believe? True, he falls within the burgeoning populist movement in American politics – but then so does Bernie Sanders. So what does that term mean to Bannon, the architect of the Trump revolution?
That question has been eating away at me since I met Bannon last February. It was the day after Trump won the New Hampshire primary, which I’d been covering for Breitbart as a sort of field-training exercise. Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief, summoned me to Manchester, the largest city in the state, for the last phase of my initiation: an interview with the chairman himself.
Bannon was polite and encouraging. He said he liked my work, that I showed promise. But his attention quickly turned elsewhere – namely, my clothing. Why was I wearing a tie? The question surprised me. I always wear a tie, especially when meeting people I hope will give me a job.
I thought this was just small talk. How very naïve. As he began questioning me – about my family, my childhood, my work experience – it became clear that he was scrutinising me for a fatal character flaw. I fed him more than the self-aggrandising half-truths customary of interviewees; one by one he picked them apart.
“You know,” he finally said, leaning in, “our guys don’t get all chummy with the National Review crowd. We don’t get invited to appear on Fox News panels. And we love it. We’re in a completely different league. We don’t pontificate – we tell the truth.”
I could feel my face turn beetroot red. I felt as if I was being accused of something, but I didn’t know what. He let that sink in, his eyes flashing with a cold, probing intelligence. I stammered something acquiescent. He thanked me for my time, shook my hand and left.
And that was the end of my career at Breitbart. After the interview my handlers stopped answering my calls and emails. There was no official break; technically I’m still waiting to be put on the payroll. But the question America is now asking itself – what does Steve Bannon really believe? – is the same one I’ve been asking myself for the better part of a year. What matters more to him than good reporting? What did he see in me that he just couldn’t abide? It took me longer than it should have to realise just what that fatal flaw in my character was: elitism.
One can make too much of Bannon’s anti-elitism. He describes his childhood in a “blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats”. It’s too easy to then turn round and say he’s got a bad case of class envy. At no point did he treat my petit bourgeois self with scorn, and we’ve had a few perfectly amicable encounters since then. His disdain for elites isn’t as base as my desire to join their ranks. No: it’s something more sincere, more refined than that. And, insofar as I can tell, it has its roots in his Catholicism.
Those who know Bannon best testify to the depth of his faith. While he seldom contributes to Breitbart, he makes it known to his associates that the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the faltering of religious liberty under President Obama weigh heavily on his mind. He thinks deeply and often about the governance of the American Church, once accusing its bishops of supporting lax immigration laws because its traditional white membership is “dying”. This is what we know of the man, of whom so little is known outside hearsay and libel.
Then, on November 15 – the same day the Post accused him of being a Nazi propagandist – BuzzFeed published the transcript of an address Bannon gave to a Vatican conference on poverty in 2014, in which he gave the world a strikingly rare glimpse into his own philosophy.
In his address Bannon spoke of three different forms of capitalism. The first was state-owned or crony capitalism, as practised in Russia and China. Consciously echoing Pope Francis, he said this collusion between industry and government/military powers is geared solely towards “creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people”.
The second was what he called “the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism” – “a capitalism that really looks to make people [into] commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them”. Without saying so explicitly, it’s clear who Bannon had in mind: the Republican establishment’s dogmatic, dehumanising neoliberals, for whom the value of a life or a community is determined by their economic output.
The third was what Bannon rather enticingly referred to as “the ‘enlightened capitalism’ of the Judeo-Christian West”. (Strange prefix for an alleged anti-Semite to use, no?)
Here, I think, is where we find the real Steve Bannon. The same man who resents senior Republican Paul Ryan “rubbing his social-justice Catholicism in my nose every second” is yet clearly a student of Rerum Novarum. When he was in charge at Breitbart, his operation seemed always to be screaming: “The elites don’t care about you. They don’t care about the things you cherish: your family, your community, your rights, your home, your soil, your values, or your God. Don’t be complacent. Rise up.”
This isn’t class warfare for its own sake. It’s the cause of an ordinary, old-fashioned Catholic who still believes the imperative of democracy is to “select out of all the people able men who fear God, men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain” (Exodus 18:21).
Disagree with his methods all you like, but to dismiss his motives would be folly. His concerns are the Church’s concerns – indeed, the concerns of all Christians everywhere in history. And he’s made a mass movement out of them, setting the tone for Trump’s devastating revolt against an indifferent elite. At the very least, we should give him a chance.
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