Why Did The New Yorker Want Steve Bannon to Headline Their Festival?

So, Bannon was due to headline a New Yorker festival. People became upset and now he isn’t.

Why was he invited in the first place?

I’m not one of those who’ll argue that Bannon isn’t smart. He is–very much so. But there are plenty of very smart, and indeed smarter, people on the left. Chomsky has never headlined for the New Yorker, and he’s a straight-up genius.

Bannon was invited because what the alt-right/fascists want is something centrists can live with. Fascists are big believers in corporations. Under the Nazis, executive wages soared. They crushed unions and depressed wages. They managed unemployment by choosing entire classes of people to make non-people, and the rest of the population mostly got a job.

All of this is stuff that centrists can live with. Elevated executive compensation, pro-corporate policies, keeping unions, and the left down.

Remember, always, that Jews weren’t killed first. Socialists and anarchists were.

So the bottom line is that centrists are okay with fascists because fascists are pro-corporate and executive wealth.

(Oh, Bannon says the right things about the working class, but then Trump gives a huge tax cut to rich people and corporations.)

On the other hand, the left-wing is hostile to large corporations and high executive compensation. At the least, the left would highly regulate corporations and break many of them up, while slapping on 90 percent marginal tax rates and punitive estate taxes.

At the most, some left-wingers would nationalize corporations wholesale and redistribute wealth, or they might force employee ownership of corporations or some version of that.

All actual left-wingers would end the obscene system of over-payment in corporate America.

Left-wingers are an existential threat to centrists because centrists are, substantially, supporters of the status quo. The state of the US and the world is (or was before Trump) essentially good to them. The parts of the status quo that right-wingers want to overthrow don’t hurt centrists. The parts of the status quo that left-wingers want to overthrow do.

So Bannon is okay with them. They don’t really believe he means his class war rhetoric (Hitler didn’t). They are sure that they’ll still be okay under him.

They might not be right. But that’s their bet.

It’s a bet that has been made over and over again since WWII. US elites have always been willing to support right-wingers over left-wingers. You see it in almost every Latin American country. You saw it in Greece, in Iran, and so on, and you’ve seen it domestically–repeatedly.

The center prefers the center. But they’ll always choose the right over the left on anything that even slightly smells of economics, because they want to retain their wealth and the right will allow that and the left won’t.

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