I’m beginning this commentary on the recent assaults on Steve Bannon by quoting my response to questions that a CNN-Digital reporter asked me concerning President-elect Trump’s friend and adviser:
There’s no indication that Steve Bannon, the Breitbart executive and Donald Trump adviser, who has been characterized as a white nationalist, is a racist or anti-Semite. Bannon is not a white identitarian or race realist. He comes from the world of Washington politics and journalism, not white identity politics. Although I don’t know the man, I doubt Bannon hangs out with people who burn crosses on other people’s lawns.
I expressed this view, more or less, not only to CNN-Digital. I also expressed it in a phone-call marathon to representatives of a Danish daily and the Jewish Forward and, in an hour and a half German conversation, with an editor of the German conservative weekly Junge Freiheit. In all these exchanges I had to answer the question of whether Steve Bannon was in fact an anti-Semite and racist, a judgment that was coming from, among others, such exemplary American “conservatives” as Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, and writers for the Wall Street Journal. I was also asked whether as the co-inventor of the term “Alternative Right,” which has now been shortened to “Altright,” I could tell if Bannon, who likes the term in question, enjoys the company of “white nationalists.”
I tried to explain that the exceedingly elastic term “Altright” has been claimed by a number of groups that belong to the non-establishment Right. All those on the Right who are at war with the GOP establishment and neoconservative politics and who are combatting PC with particular ferocity have embraced the designation “Altright.” This is especially true of Millennials who scorn establishmentarian positions. But it’s not at all clear to me that those who write for Bannon’s website publication, some of whom are Orthodox Jews, have much to do with white identitarians who also use the term “Altright.” I would doubt that these writers go out to drink with the Philonazi blogger Matt Heimbach, who also claims the Altright moniker.