RUTHFULLY YOURS

Before he fell out with his president and was ejected from the White House, and after that from Breitbart News, Steve Bannon was the influence who crystalised and codified Donald Trump’s thinking. Gone he might be from the locus of power, but not, to date, the legacy of his prescription for US renewal.

Bannon: Always the Rebel
by Keith Koffler
Regnery, 2017, 256 pages, US$28.99
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In the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, and Steve Bannon’s subsequent appointment to the position of his chief strategist, media speculation reached a near-hysterical pitch regarding the degree to which Bannon was the puppet master pulling the strings of an apparently dirigible and clueless President. On Saturday Night Live, Bannon was portrayed as the grim reaper and actual President, and Time magazine featured him on its cover with the accompanying title “The Great Manipulator”.

In a matter of months, Bannon had gone from anonymity to political stardom—one of the most recognised (and reviled) figures in American politics.

Since leaving the White House and returning to his post as chairman of Breitbart News — a post he has only recently relenquished under pressure from the site’s financial backers after his dalliance with Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff – Bannon turned his attention back to grassroots political organising, attempting to galvanise (and, moreover, bring into being) the “economic nationalist” base that can support Trump-friendly candidates in the congressional elections of 2018.
This essay appears in the current edition of Quadrant.
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Despite having left his post at the White House, Bannon still exerts a tight grip on the imagination of the political media. He has been lambasted with every imaginable political epithet from the Left (“white nationalist”, “fascist”, “anti-Semite”) and until recently he rarely bothered to dispute any of these labels.

Like Trump, Bannon is a savvy media operator, who realises that notoriety confers its own form of power—something he noted to the Hollywood Reporter’s Wolff in a piece written shortly after he was appointed. Depictions of Bannon as the puppeteer behind Trump may have annoyed the President, and possibly damaged Bannon’s standing in the White House, but they also amplified his image beyond Trump—and outside the White House he is using his newfound celebrity to continue pushing his agenda for a comprehensive remake of US policy, domestically and abroad.

Keith Koffler’s Bannon: Always the Rebel is the first full-scale biography, tracing Bannon’s peripatetic career and elucidating the biographical and intellectual influences that underpin his political philosophy. While largely hagiographical (Koffler is clearly an admirer) the book offers a corrective to the many unhinged assessments of Bannon that have come to dominate the mainstream media. Koffler interviewed many people close to Bannon for the book, allowing for personal perspectives that illuminate his character through the different phases of his career. Koffler also interviewed the man himself for over ten hours, and the book does a fine job of discussing the intellectual influences of an notoriously non-bookish President’s bookish adviser.

Born in 1953 to a working-class family of Irish-Catholic provenance in Richmond, Virginia, Steve Bannon was raised amidst the turmoil of 1960s America, the civil rights movement, and a major realignment of political sympathies between traditional supporters of the Democrats and the Republicans. While the family were pro-Kennedy Democrats, Bannon’s sympathies later turned Republican after what he perceived to be Jimmy Carter’s craven response to the Iran hostage situation of 1979.

Professor Victor Davis Hanson spoke about his new book, war, movies and President Donald Trump’s ability to lead with Seth Leibsohn earlier this week. Listen to the audio and read the transcript below.

Seth Leibsohn: Welcome back to the Seth and Chris show. The journalist I.F. Stone once wrote, “I am having so much fun I should be arrested.” We are having a lot of fun today and delighted to bring one of the nation’s great, one of the world’s great public intellectuals, dear friend of ours, contributor to American Greatness, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of the brand spankin’ new book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won”, Professor Victor Davis Hanson. Welcome back to the airwaves of Phoenix, Victor.

Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for having me.

Seth Leibsohn: Thank you. I want to talk to you a little bit about your book in a moment, but first I want to talk to you about someone else’s book if you don’t mind, and that’s what you wrote about at American Greatness, “Is Trump Really Crazy,” in regard to the book that seems like most of Washington is gonna talk about for about another week and maybe the rest of the country’s about to stop talking about, but it’s Michael Wolff’s book. You had some wonderful writing in there.

I’m gonna quote you to you if I can.

“Wolff’s ogre purportedly sloppily eats Big Macs in bed, golfs more than Obama did, has no hair at all on the top of his head, and at 71 is supposedly functionally illiterate. OK, perhaps someone the last half-century read out loud to Trump the thousands of contracts he signed. But what we wish to know from Wolff is how did his trollish Trump figure out that half the country—the half with the more important Electoral College voice—was concerned about signature issues that either were unknown to or scorned by his far more experienced and better-funded rivals?”

This was kind of the topic of the tiff between Stephen Miller and Jake Tapper, and something Jake Tapper and CNN still doesn’t get, right Professor?

Victor Davis Hanson: I think so. Just from a purely logical point of view, if you’re making the argument that someone who destroyed the ’16 Republican primary really brilliant, experienced candidate, destroyed them in the primary and then took on ‘Clinton Incorporated’ and destroyed her, and you’re saying that he’s either incompetent or he’s naïve or he’s stupid. Then the logic of that would be, “Well, that was all a fluke,” and his first year shows that it was a fluke, because he’s a total failure.

But when you look at the stock market, their GDP, their business growth, their unemployment, or any traditional metric of economic activity, he’s had a very good first year. This is besides Mattis and Gorsuch, McMahon, all the great appointments he’s made, so then the question becomes, “Well, if he’s so stupid, how was he so successful as a politician, and how has he been so successful in a way that a Harvard law graduate, Barack Obama, was not in his first year?” It sort of makes us either say, “It’s all a fluke,” or “It’s all an accident,” or the criteria that Michael Wolff is using are just bogus, or his book is bogus, but the people who appreciate it and fawn over it, their criteria is bogus, but something doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical.

Seth Leibsohn: Something isn’t logical. Added to the list of the illogic is another part of Michael Wolff’s book and pieces, is that he didn’t wanna win. For someone who didn’t want to win, he did an awfully bad job at that.

Victor Davis Hanson: He did, but that is sort of another boomerang. It suggests that somebody who had a lot more money, experience who really wanted to win, like Hillary, couldn’t beat an amateur who didn’t want to win.

Seth Leibsohn: Right.

Victor Davis Hanson: Again, it means that, well, Trump would just like I guess he would say to us, “Well, even when I don’t want something, I’m more successful than the people on the other side.” It doesn’t make sense.

Seth Leibsohn: There was the old line of Irving Kristol: “Smart, smart, stupid.” A lot of these people Washington and elites say are smart and they have the right pedigrees, maybe Hillary Clinton would be in that crowd, Donald Trump is not. He’s part of the vulgar crowd of course, but there is some kind of reevaluation of what constitutes smart in this country now, isn’t there. There’s something about common sense. Something about conservatism.

That Hitler and his inner circle were mad is not a matter of controversy. The source and character of their madness, though, is subject to debate. Eric Kurlander wants us to understand Nazi ideology as an outgrowth of occultism, characterized by endemic beliefs in parascience, magic, ­astrology, ­crackpot theories of racial origin, and other weird notions. There exists an extensive literature on Hitler and the occult, but Kurlander’s new book is the most ambitious offering to date. It is likely to be the standard work for some time to come on a bizarre but revealing facet of Nazi ideology.

Truly strange ideas had currency in Hitler’s circle. In addition to their obsession with spurious “race science,” Kurlander reports, “Nazi leaders sponsored everything from astrology, parapsychology, and radiesthesia [dowsing] to biodynamic agriculture and World Ice Theory (Welteislehre, or WEL).” The last of these tried to explain events in prehistory by the earth’s collision with moons of ice. They sent expeditions to find the Holy Grail, a vanished master race in the mountains of Tibet, Aryan magical rites supposedly still practiced in Karelia, and an Aryan calendar in the Andes.

Morbid curiosity makes all of this entertaining, but the reader finds it hard to determine just how important any of it was to actual Nazi internal policy or war strategy. One didn’t have to be an occultist to be a Nazi, although evidently it helped. Otherwise rational men and women joined Hitler not because they believed in pixies, but out of profound historical despair. Martin Heidegger, for example, embraced Nazism because he believed that “resoluteness” required the embrace of “historical authenticity” in the form of the “fate” of the German nation in its concrete circumstances (see Being and Time, section 74). Some occultists eschewed Nazism; although the Nazis drew some ideas from Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, the Steiner schools closed rather than take the loyalty oath to Hitler, a fact Kurlander fails to mention.

The very abundance of material overdetermines Kurlander’s argument. It is more parsimonious to state that the Nazis were mad, but in a specific way: They were pagans who abhorred Christianity for the same reason they hated Jews. In passing, Kurlander mentions a Nazi accusation that Jews conspired with the Catholic Church to exterminate the vestiges of German pagan religion by killing witches. The SS formed a Witch Division, which produced a report alleging that a connection between Jews and Catholics was behind the persecution of witches:

One reason many Americans don’t trust the media is because they treat every Donald Trump outburst as a Defcon 1 level threat to the survival of the republic. The latest example is the panic over Mr. Trump’s legal threat to the publisher of Michael Wolff’s book and his lament that libel laws are too weak.

Mr. Trump had his lawyer send a letter on Thursday to Henry Holt demanding that it “cease and desist” publication of Mr. Wolff’s book. This is a longstanding Trump tactic designed to underscore his claims that a book or article is false. Invariably the threat vanishes as the controversy does.

Mr. Trump tried this with us when we criticized one of his debate performances during the presidential campaign. His lawyer sent a letter threatening the Journal and the editor of these columns, in his personal and professional capacity, with a defamation suit if we didn’t apologize and retract the editorial. We ignored the letter, repeated the criticism, and Mr. Trump dropped the subject.

Mr. Wolff’s book may be partly imagined, as his work often is, but that is no reason to block publication. Unless an author has violated national security, or some contractual agreement with an agency like the CIA, no court is going to ban a book in advance of publication. The Supreme Court declared such “prior restraint” on free speech unconstitutional in the landmark Near v. Minnesota case in 1931. Henry Holt knows this and responded to Mr. Trump’s letter by moving up the publication date.

Mr. Trump’s libel lament is also familiar and feckless bluster. “Libel laws are very weak in this country. If they were strong it would be very helpful,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday at a press event, joining the queue of politicians who wish they could sue journalists.

In February 2016 as a candidate, Mr. Trump declared: “One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we’re certainly leading. I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” The difference now is that he’s not even claiming he can change the libel laws; he’s merely griping about them.

Michael Wolff has done what the rest of us chump writers can only dream of: He has gotten himself and his book denounced by a sitting U.S. president on live television. That, together with a cease-and-desist letter sent from the president’s attorneys to the publisher, will ensure not only that the book makes Mr. Wolff a truckload of money but also that it gets talked about for a generation. “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” is thus in a class with Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”—by itself a forgettable book, certainly not Mr. Rushdie’s best, but remembered forever as having provoked a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

Mr. Wolff was allowed to lurk around the White House for something like six months, presumably because someone in the first days of Donald Trump’s administration thought he would write a sympathetic account. It was an idiotic decision. Mr. Wolff is known in New York and Hollywood for his withering takedowns of popular public figures; he was only ever going to write one kind of book.

In one sense, “Fire and Fury” is a typical piece of “access journalism,” as it’s known, like many titles by Bob Woodward or, on the more gossipy side, like the “Game Change” books by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Mr. Wolff takes the genre to another level, and perhaps a lower level. If he has employed objective criteria for deciding what to include or exclude, it’s not clear what those criteria are. By the looks of it, he included any story, so long as it was juicy. We’re told, for instance, of Mr. Trump’s supposed method of bedding other men’s wives in his pre-presidential days; of Mr. Trump’s promise to his wife, who had no interest in being first lady, that everything was OK because he wasn’t going to win anyway; of the president’s scolding of the White House cleaning staff for picking up his shirt from the floor (“If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor”); and many other such weird tales.

Former chief political strategist Steve Bannon was evidently the source of the book’s most staggering revelations—if “revelations” is the right word for the sort of titillating office gossip that Mr. Wolff reports as fact. A typical story: Mr. Bannon, in a heated argument with the president’s daughter Ivanka, called her a “liar”—with a choice modifier to go with it. This took place in front of the president. The father’s response: “I told you this is a tough town, baby.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His background is ideal for an analysis of the Second World War. “Wars” are plural in the title because, as Hanson notes, it was fought in many different places, from Singapore to Finland, and in many different ways, on air, sea and land, with weapons ranging from side arms to atomic bombs. It was the first war which saw more civilians die than soldiers.

The book is divided topically, with chapters titled “Ideas,” “Air,” “Water,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “People.” A complaint may be that the book is repetitive, but different aspects are looked at from different angles. The War was fought on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, with combatants from every continent except Antarctica. It was fought on the land, the sea and in the air, and Hanson reviews all facets. The facts he assembles are sobering: From a world population of about two billion, five hundred million people were displaced, perhaps a hundred million mobilized, and sixty million died, two thirds of whom were civilians. Seven million Jews were killed. “No other deliberate mass killings in history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized or spontaneous, have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust – not the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian ‘killing fields,’ or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting.”

His details are encyclopedic. In 1939, the U.S. spent one percent of GDP on defense. By 1944, forty percent of GDP was going to defense. During the war years, the U.S. produced forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and one billion rounds of artillery shells. In 1939, 9.5 million square feet of industrial plant space was devoted to aircraft production. By 1944, that had grown to 165 million square feet. Britain, despite being bombed, having been defeated in most every major battle during the first two years of the War and having mobilized 3.5 million men, added more ships to its fleet during the war than the entire naval production of the three major Axis powers. The Allies were more efficient manufacturers; The thousandth B-29 to roll off the production line required half the man hours as the four hundredth. With his eye for detail, we learn that in 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a hundred thousand dead each month. “In that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a quarter million vehicles.” About three hundred thousand planes were destroyed or badly damaged during the War.