The Bear Behind Bannon
During a podcast on January 5, 2021, Steve Bannon predicted the insurrection against Congress that would occur the following day. Despite the fact that he had been fired from the Trump administration in mid-2017, Bannon spoke with the authority of someone who had remained an insider, who had now committed treason to support the soon-to-be ex-President.
As soon as Trump took office, Bannon, who had been named chief strategist and senior counselor at the White House, acceded to a seat on the principals committee of the National Security Council (NSC). The executive order behind this move also downgraded the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence, formerly peers on this committee, to spectators meant to attend meetings only when the council considers issues in their direct areas of responsibility.
The NSC’s power cannot be overstated. Bannon, a mean-spirited political strategist and architect of hate, now had the power to influence foreign policy. Moreover, he could recommend the elimination of individuals considered threats to our security. Yes, really.
He has been quoted as saying the following:
I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.
Do not mistake this for idle rhetoric. This is a man who has studied history, who served as a naval officer and who holds a bachelor’s in urban planning from Virginia Tech, a master’s from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He has been an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a media entrepreneur with interests in television. He is driven and ambitious. He has never wavered from his objective: attaining the power to disrupt our democracy.
Despite his subsequent repudiation of the Lenin quote, Bannon’s personality and modus operandi reveal his dedication to civil unrest. Like any two-bit revisionist, he conflates Lenin’s role in overthrowing a Russian czar with his role in uniting the white supremacists and neo-Nazis under the “alt-right” brand he so patiently crafted as CEO of the hate publisher Breitbart. It’s therefore essential to consider the Geist behind his identification with a tyrant of the past, and his obvious conspiracy with a tyrant of the present.
In his authoritative history of revolutionary politics To the Finland Station, a narrative that culminates in Lenin’s ascendance to power, the great scholar and critic Edmund Wilson quotes Pyotr Struve, an incisive thinker who knew Lenin better than most. The following three paragraphs fit Bannon to a tee, hence his confessional discomfort. Remember, these are the words of Struve, a confidant and eventual enemy of Lenin.
The impression which Lenin at once made on me — and which remained with me all my life — was an unpleasant one. It was not his brusqueness that was unpleasant. There was something more than an ordinary brusqueness, a kind of mockery, partly deliberate and partly irresistibly organic, breaking through from the inmost depths of his being, in Lenin’s way of dealing with those on whom he looked as his adversaries.
To me it was clear even then that in those unpleasant, even repulsive qualities of Lenin, lay also the pledge of his power as a politician: he always had in view nothing but his objective towards which he marched, firm and unflinching. Or rather, there always was, before his mental eyes, not one objective, more or less distant, but a whole system, a whole chain of them. The first link in that chain was power in the narrow circle of his political friends.
Lenin’s brusqueness and cruelty — this became clear to me almost from the outset, from our first meeting — was psychologically indissolubly bound up, both instinctively and deliberately, with his indomitable love of power. In such cases, it is, as a rule, difficult to determine which is at the service of which, whether the love of power is at the service of an objective task or a higher ideal that a man has set up for himself, or on the contrary, that task or that ideal is a mere means of quenching the insatiable thirst for power.
Bannon was instrumental in the election of Trump, a power-hungry narcissist with a grudge against humanity. Trump owed many debts, the most oppressive no doubt originating from Russia. Putin was also instrumental in the election of Trump, to a degree unprecedented and unanticipated in American history.
Bannon has studied the history of both countries. He is an expert manipulator of the media, and perhaps an expert agent of dark politics, but not an expert at dismantling intelligence agencies. He had to have help.
The NSC realignment has all the earmarks of Putin, an expert student of our porous information networks, as well as our porous morality. Putin understands his unique opportunity to influence our capitalist society in a way that puts us in thrall to his ideology. Putin runs Bannon the way Bannon runs Trump. Le Carré couldn’t have written it any better.
Woody Lewis is the author of Three Lost Souls: Stories about race, class and loneliness (Gotham Lane, 2016). His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI Online, Consequence, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he spent most of his adult life in northern and southern California, returning in 2010 to New York City. In 2018, he moved to Guilford, Connecticut, where he is at work on a memoir, and a novel about Silicon Valley. Lewis has a B.A. in music and an M.B.A. in finance from Columbia University, and an M.F.A. in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.