Harvard may not want to claim Bannon as one of its own, and vice versa, but he has all of the attributes. H.B.S. provides its alumni with a license to lead, teaches them that they belong in charge, whether of a mayonnaise company or the nation. A Harvard Business School graduate sees his power, and wealth, and goodness, as part of the natural order of things. H.B.S. professor Bill George tacked an adjective on to it—authentic leadership—and the rewards for wielding it aren’t just pecuniary anymore; they’re spiritual as well. “For authentic leaders, there are special rewards,” George wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2007. “No individual achievement can equal the pleasure of leading a group of people to achieve a worthy goal.”

One of the school’s most notable alumni of the past half century put it another way. “Bannon’s worldview is not consistent with what most H.B.S. leaders profess to believe, but it makes plenty of sense that he was educated there,” this person told me. “Yes, there’s plenty of time spent on ethics, integrity, and giving back. But H.B.S. also teaches you to win, to get your way, to make people follow you, to get to the top.”

Whether it requires, say, firing half the staff of a mayonnaise company or the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Bannon recently described his mission as the president's chief strategist, H.B.S. provides you with the confidence to execute your vision.

The case method, as Zwern noted, is central to the H.B.S. experience. A Socratic method of teaching, in which M.B.A. students debate real-life historical business situations in a “What Would You Do?” discussion, students run through nearly 400 individual cases in just two years. As much as anything, Harvard Business School focuses on rhetoric. It’s not designed to teach right from wrong, but to make and defend arguments. “When you’re sitting there, it’s entirely about being able to argue your line of reasoning,” says a female classmate from ‘85. “It’s never about whether you’re doing the right thing versus some other option.”

Closing the circle, it reinforces the erroneous message that those who win were right to begin with. The case-study method helped teach Bannon to weaponize his considerable charisma, to give his ideas the best possible chance of winning. In the hyper-competitive Darwinian bubble of the first year of business school, Bannon more than survived. It’s a posture that’s never left him.

In truth, Bannon arrived at H.B.S. with a confidence that gave him a leg up in the classroom, and classmates recall that he startled them with his poise from the very first day, when he opened a discussion about the bedding company Fieldcrest with a joke: “This is a sleepy industry.” “He was quite gutsy and pretty much blew the class away with an incredible performance,” classmate Cornelia Tilney told The Boston Globe. “I remember thinking after watching him, ‘I am definitely flunking this class if this is where the bar is set!’”

Bannon’s vision of protectionism and economic nationalism is a distinct minority opinion among his former classmates. “Nothing he’s saying makes sense from an economic standpoint,” recalls the female classmate. “All that stuff about bringing jobs back to the U.S.—he’s missing the point. We’re all in favor of having people work, because it’s important for self-esteem. But jawboning companies into keeping employees in the U.S. is just a short-term fix that won’t address the long-term forces causing jobs to disappear. That includes changes in technology, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as longevity.” Another former classmate was similarly galled. “When we were there, the country was enjoying a positive economic environment, and everything was discussed in the context of growth, expansion, and globalization. As far as I know, no one in the class had—or has—a similar worldview to what Bannon is exhibiting now.”