Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus at CPAC 2017.

The rise and fall of Steve Bannon.

Back in early March Steve Bannon stepped onto the Front Nationale’s stage to resounding applause as they relaunched the party after a defeat in the last French election. His comeback came after an embarrassing fallout with Trump over the comments he made in interviews with Michael Wolff.

A few days after his speech in support of Marine Le Pen, news surfaced that Cambridge Analytica, a company started by Bannon and Robert Mercer, had stolen private information from 50 million Facebook users and targeted pro-Trump and anti-Clinton propaganda at them, based on their individual psychometric profiles. The company also had it’s fingers in a number of other propaganda pies: like the UK’s Brexit vote, Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, and operations across the world from Nigeria to India.

After several public failures since emerging as a chief Trump ideologue, some commentators have argued that Bannon’s influence will gradually fade into insignificance as those in power realise how polarising and underhanded his tactics often are, and how unpopular he is as an individual. Sadly I think such hopes are misguided, since Bannon has an incredible ability to survive political turmoil and find power-hungry politicians who want to sway the odds in their favour with the manipulative strategies that he has used so effectively. Many of his biggest failures have been public and visible, but the depth and significance of his successes are less easily quantified; perhaps they go deeper than we think.

It is clear, however, that Bannon has strategic skills which are in demand from certain highly powerful ideologues. It is equally clear that Bannon cares little about his public image being tainted by the mass media, he thinks it only grows his appeal as a political radical, and he may be right: ‘Let them call you racists, let them call you xenophobes… wear it as a badge of honour, because everyday we get stronger and they get weaker.’

Bannon’s rejection of simplified political categories.

The aim of this article is not to draw attention to Bannon’s imperviousness to negative media image, nor his ability to influence political discourse with his volatile strategies. Instead I want to draw attention to something else he said during his speech in France. Its something he has said many times before, and it's something that we can all learn from.

Bannon claims that some of the distinctions we ordinarily use in political language sow confusion and division which gets in the way of effectively expressing our political goals and gaining support for them. He rallies against the divisive language of identity politics, as well as rejecting the age-old distinction between the left and right wing. During his speech in France, he argued that ‘today’s politics cannot be summed up by the left-right divide. During the 2008 financial crisis, the governments and banks looked after themselves above all, they saved themselves and not the people.’

Bannon refers to ‘the people’, ‘society’, and the ‘population’ rather than ‘whites’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon Americans’. This doesn’t prevent him from appealing to racist and exclusionary demographics, and it doesn’t stop racists from knowing where he stands, but the implicit character of this appeal means that he can promote a radical nationalistic (some would say neo-fascist) agenda without becoming publicly unpalatable in the way that someone like David Duke is. Indeed, he is happy to associate himself with non-whites, non-heteronormative people, or whoever happens to enable his ‘economic nationalist’ agenda. When Bannon calls the Charlottesville neo-Nazis a bunch of ‘losers’ and ‘clowns’ he is not undermining the support of his base, he is widening the appeal of his views by presenting himself as being unattached to the extreme right.

When your views have the support of a particular demographic, its strategically unwise to endlessly retreat deeper and deeper into that group by harping on about their particular identity and interests (that would be preaching to the converted). Instead, it’s better to broaden the appeal of your political interests by making them appear untied to a particular set of demographics. Using terms like ‘the people’, ‘the population’, ‘the majority’ sound appealing to pretty much everyone, whereas using terms like ‘anglo-saxons’, and ‘whites’ have obvious exclusionary implications which are bound to be rejected by many white Anglo-Saxons, as well as almost everyone else. As long as extremists keep appealing to other extremists, they are unlikely to significantly broaden their popularity. The more they learn to appeal to the ‘mainstream’ discourse of politics, and downplay the exclusivity of their political ideology, the more effective they will become at gaining widespread popular support.

Bannon’s refusal to use explicitly exclusionary language doesn’t just change the way he articulates his ideas in public. It’s not just a case of avoiding explicitly racial language — replacing it with populist rhetoric to gain wider appeal. His aim isn’t simply to swing public opinion further to the right, but to drive political support towards whichever individuals or groups he is working for, with the aim of gaining power for both them and himself. Power is his game, not imaginary political abstractions like ‘left’ and ‘right’ wing. He couldn’t care less about labels and names; he cares about where power lies and where it’s going to be in the future, and he cares about putting himself in a position to gain influence over that power.

‘Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s real power.’

Bannon TIME front cover, 2017.

Propaganda doesn’t care what you look like.

Bannon’s rejection of naive and simplistic political distinctions goes beyond the way he uses language, as the Cambridge Analytica revelations makes all too clear. Like many effective algorithms used to track, analyse or manipulate public opinion, they didn’t target users based on demographic categories like skin colour or sexuality, or whether people identified as left or right wing; instead ‘they use psychometrics. It’s a simple idea, really. Rather than assuming that all women or African Americans or working-class whites will respond to the same message, they target individual voters with emotionally charged content — in other words, ads designed to tug on emotional biases.’

This effective use of propaganda shows us how clunky, ill-defined concepts of ‘the left and right’, and the sectarian language of identity politics inevitably simplify the complex psychological distinctions between us. They hinder our attempts to gain widespread support for political movements, and they tend to get in the way of effective communication about politics.

Bannon speaking at CPAC, 2017.

Wherever you views sit on the political spectrum, you gain nothing by aiming your speech only at people who possess particular physical characteristics, or who identify as being affiliated with one side or the other of the vastly complex political spectrum. Steve Bannon knows this, and he knows that there are far more effective means of promoting your political views than aiming them at ‘the right’, or ‘whites’ or ‘people of Anglo-Saxon heritage’. As I’ve already said, his work with Cambridge Analytica demonstrates one way of overcoming the flaws of appealing to people on the basis of identity. They aimed messages at people based on their personal biases and vulnerabilities, based on personalised psychometric profiles, which reveal vastly more about a human personality than any isolated fact about their gender, race, sexuality or ethnicity. This is evidently an effective way to change people’s minds, but it is inevitably a form of manipulation and high-tech propaganda.

Psychometric profiling uses people’s personalities against them. It uses information about you to try to change the way you think without you knowing it. We’ve known for years that Facebook could manipulate users emotions and beliefs, and that it has done it for ‘experimental’ purposes, but until Cambridge Analytica we hadn’t seen this manipulation being used by private companies to secretly promote highly-controversial political goals.

Personal vulnerabilities or shared grievances?

There is, however, another way to broaden the appeal of political movements without the flawed use of identity politics or the manipulative tactics used by Bannon and Cambridge Analytica (and countless others, of course). Rather than using people’s personal psychological vulnerabilities, we can articulate shared grievances and common interests which almost all of us share, irrespective of political affiliation or personal identity. This second route might be a more effective means of gaining long term cross-sectional support for genuinely popular movements, but its not going to lead to Bannon gaining power for himself, so he is unlikely to be interested.

We all have grievances, vulnerabilities, weaknesses and frustrations. That’s why we need politics, to try to work out our differences and solve our shared problems. Our weaknesses can be used cynically against us to turn us towards politicians and movements which end up going directly against our interests and compounding the problems which led us to vulnerability in the first place. Alternatively, our weaknesses and grievances can be a means of coming together. We can discover that we share the same plights; that the pains that we feel are not so different from those felt by people who look different from us or say they belong on the opposite side of the political spectrum. To see these grievances in perspective though, as different experiences of a shared socio-political world, we need to overcome our tendency to group ourselves and others together on the basis of frivolous similarities and political simplifications.

Bannon at bloggers briefing, 2010.

Bannon’s flawed identity.

A rejection of identity and ‘left-right’ political language need not be affiliated with the kind of proto-fascism which Bannon promotes. Indeed, a rejection of these imaginary distinctions may be the best way for a political movement can gain widespread popular support.

The person championing the abandonment of outdated and divisive political distinctions should not be a reactive, nationalistic, xenophobic power-grabber like Bannon. But it is. While his sophisticated political position self-consciously sees the distinctions between left, right and identity groups to be strategically ineffective, he continues to argue that one form of political identification is uniquely true and politically significant: nationality.

His support of isolationist nationalistic ideology is the reason that his forward thinking politics becomes so dangerous (and so closely associated with the right-wing). Whatever the reason are for his attachment to nationalism — whether it comes from genuinely deeply held commitment to his nation, or from a cynical attempt to become bedfellows with those who possess power over national governments (I suspect the latter) — makes little difference. His use of national identity allows him to articulate xenophobic messages in a way which comes across as modern, open and based on populism rather than racism. This is politically smart, and it has led to his significant influence over a number of national governments. However, for those of us whose aim is not to gain personal power — unlike Bannon, Darth Vader or Satan — but to improve the world we live in, there is no reason to make an exception for nationalistic identity, since it is just as divisive as any other identity or division based politics.

Steve Bannon presents us with two opposing lessons. On the one hand, his criticism of identity politics and the left-right divide is illuminating and timely. We all would benefit from taking it on board. On the other, his nationalistic adoration and fascistic tendencies make it clear just how important it is for people who want to improve the world to overcome their tribalistic and divisive affiliations before the worst of us do. Some people are beginning to realise how counter-productive these distinctions can be, and it is vital that people with a social conscience realise this as well as the likes of Steve Bannon.