Steve Bannon's Face
He looks like he’s been drinking and raging his entire life. He exudes a kind of ravaged resentment. He looks alcoholic and dessicated. He looks like US empire in decline.
There’s something uncanny about Steve Bannon’s face. On the one hand, he looks like so many of the men I grew up with. We were born the same year (1954) in Richmond, Virginia to Irish Catholic families that moved from working to middling class in segregated neighborhoods. He looks like he’s been drinking and raging his entire life. He exudes a kind of ravaged resentment; he probably smells bad. He’s been running away from a childhood he nonetheless idealizes and can neither really own or escape. He looks alcoholic and dessicated, unable to acknowledge his ultimate defeat, steeled by a doomed determination. I know this guy, he’s a relative. He also looks uncannily like a debilitated witness and bellwether for the fall of US empire, the collapse of global neoliberal centrism, and the persistence of a destructive nostalgia for past glory on the political right.
Steve Bannon haunts the contemporary political landscape in ghostlike fashion—as both a sad fantasy of a lost world and an ominous threat. After a career rife with controversy and scandal during the surprising rise and bumpy fall of President Donald Trump, Bannon the right wing “economic nationalist” has been arrested and pardoned for fraud and kicked off Twitter and You Tube for violent rhetoric. Lately he can be found selling War Room Defense Pack vitamins, his unhealthy visage glowering at visitors to his apocalyptic website.
Bannon has continued his active presence on the far-right post Trump, trying to build connections among right wing ideologues in the US, Europe and Brazil, while drumming up opposition to the perceived threat of Chinese imperial expansion with the support of an exiled billionaire. But he is also hiding his pathos in plain sight via his sickly appearance, careless grooming and pressured speech.
While idealizing the ordered institutions of his youth--the Catholic Church and the phone company that employed his father--he has forsaken them in his own peripatetic life of world travel, yachting with billionaires, and multiple ex-wives (his third ex reportedly having lived in a meth house in Florida that Bannon paid the rent on). Meanwhile he aims his destructive fury at both the “global elite,” the “party of Davos” that destroyed the Fordist middle class, and at the migrant hordes and violent leftists that he imagines as marauders of his remembered world.
Bannon’s path winds through the major nodes of crumbling power—from his years in finance at Goldman Sachs, to his filmmaking in Hollywood and his role in building the alt right website Breitbart, to his time in the Trump administration and after as a global gadfly. Bannon has landed in finance, media and politics precisely when previous institutional anchors for American power and the global economy began to decompose. But despite this tour through scenes of disintegration and collapse, Bannon has also deployed some of the newest cultural and political tools of emergent internet culture and digital surveillance. At International Gaming and Entertainment and Cambridge Analytica, he helped connect the revolutions in big tech to the political goals of simultaneously nostalgic and destructive political restoration.
While Trump is a politically incoherent narcissistic opportunist, Bannon is an ideologue and propagandist. His trajectory through the major institutions of U.S. empire and global neoliberalism in crisis illuminates the appeal of his right-wing populist nationalist movement. His creative deployment of the tools of internet entertainment culture and digital surveillance further demonstrates the looming danger that movement can pose. His use of fascist strategies is both a continuation of earlier political formations, and a historically specific reinvention of those forms for present conditions. It is this combination that makes Bannon a key figure for understanding the present political challenge posed by powerful, digitally connected global right-wing movements at a moment of chaotic transitions in the global circuits of power.
Steve Bannon’s favorite movies include classic war movies (like Twelve O’Clock High with Gregory Peck) and Westerns (like The Searchers with John Wayne) featuring stoic white men in conflict and crisis. In his documentary film American Dharma (2018), Errol Morris runs through this list in search of insight, perceptively noting that Bannon chooses heroes in states of utter collapse. But he doesn’t point out Bannon’s preferred era of filmmaking—the two decades of greatest American imperial dominance in the two decades following the second world war. The crises that Bannon is poised to battle in the political present are those of imperial collapse, particularly in the wake of the U.S. loss in the Vietnam War. The film character he should have chosen to reflect his current struggles is the tragic anti-hero, Coloniel Walter Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now (based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness). After charging into the war to save Western civilization in Vietnam, Kurtz becomes a mad, violent, isolated parody of all that he thought he opposed, barking barely decipherable philosophical rants into the night. Apocalpyse Now was filmed as U.S. imperial power was rapidly waning and predicts its collapse in racial hubris and violence. More than Gregory Peck as Brigadier General Frank Savage taking assured control of his World War II troops through disciplined tough love in Twelve O’Clock High, Bannon now resembles Marlon Brando as Kurtz, driven crazy by the inhumanity and irrationality of the civilizational mission.
There are two striking contrasts that mark Bannon’s mind and face: (1) the clash of idealized representations from the 1940s and 50s with the realities of the exercise of American global economic and military power during those decades, and (2) the stark conflict of Bannon’s stated nostalgic ideals with his “honey badger” aggressive and amoral approach to abusive political trench warfare. These contrasts are not just products of Bannon’s fevered imagination. They define the political vision and daily practice of the current right-wing populist movements in the US and help define their fascist elements.
Bannon’s most repeated verbal tic in interviews is “remember…”. And remember he does, in highly selective ways that define his political purpose. His Irish Catholic boyhood in Richmond, Virginia, where he grew up with four siblings and attended a Catholic military academy, is a constant explanatory touchstone in his storytelling. For Bannon, the rocks of his existence were the church and the phone company that employed his father for fifty years, first as a lineman then as a manager. Despite the pinched, angry look on his face in published photos from his teenage years, he recalls his life in Virginia as largely secure and idyllic.
The tragedy that he says explains his definitive turn away from his family’s Democratic Party allegiance is the moment when his father sold his phone company stock in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, depleting his life savings. In Bannon’s telling this is the moment when he saw clearly that financial and political elites, on Wall Street and in both major political parties, had sold out people like his father Marty.
He’s not all wrong. Unregulated Wall Street greed and government deregulation has been responsible for widespread losses and costs that harm working people, while the culprits have been largely unpenalized. But he “remembers” some things and not others about the lives of the Marty Bannons of his time. For Steve, his father was a hardworking family man who went to church and stuck loyally with his company--only to get royally screwed out of nearly all that he had accumulated. The layers of state and federal regulation that created the stable phone company where his father worked, AT&T, and that provided benefits to white male homeowners like Marty, are not “remembered.” The white settler colonial project at the foundation of land and home ownership, and the organized forms of extraction of economic resources from subordinated countries around the world that produced prosperity for some Americans and not others, are completely erased. There is more forgetting going on in Bannon’s story that remembering.
The historical context created the actual conditions surrounding his supposed family idyll—the establishment of a limited regulatory welfare state (the “administrative state” he now aims to “deconstruct”), rooted in hierarchies of class, race, gender and sexuality, in the post-World War II United States. The fascist element of amnesiac nostalgia in Bannon’s repertoire has specific political economic underpinnings.
Despite the idealized description of his childhood world, Bannon left to live in the elite world of Ivy League education and global finance. After graduating from Virginia Tech in 1976 and serving in the Navy for seven years, he enrolled in Harvard Business School. His first job at Goldman Sachs began in 1985 during the heyday of “Greed is Good” go-go finance. Goldman Sachs sent him to Hollywood as investment banker to the movie production industry, but he left in 1990 hoping to establish his own partnership business, Bannon & Co. Until he sold this business in 1998, Bannon was a financial dealmaker helping the media and entertainment business to globalize. He represented Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, worked with banks in Japan and France, and traveled to Hong Kong and Singapore in search of investors.
In Bannon’s telling he observed, up close and personal, the betrayal of benevolent American capitalism. Through foreign investment and production outsourcing, Bannon says, “globalists gutted the American working class.” He criticizes financial firms for abandoning in the 1990s their long-reliable dedication to building American businesses with significant ties to the welfare of their communities. This story is not entirely wrong. Global competition and the transformation of partnership-based financial firms into publicly traded companies did shift the liability structures and incentives on Wall Street. The short-term interests of shareholders began to replace all other interests in corporate decision-making. But Bannon’s world of benevolent community-oriented national capitalism before globalism did not exist.
Bannon’s version of 1990s globalization is the primary basis for the appeal of the “economic populism” he promotes. In interviews, he sometimes sounds like a left economist taking down the period’s exploitative expansion of global neoliberal financial capitalism. People who have lost jobs and benefits, who live with degraded public services in deindustrialized wastelands, can resonate powerfully with this story of the destructive upward redistribution of wealth. Speaking with PBS Frontline, Bannon explained:
The American elite (political apparatchiks of both parties and their sponsors on Wall Street and in corporate America) have allowed the nation to decline. They are in managed decline for unacceptable outcomes for average citizens. They don’t bear the brunt of it—the health care collapse, the educational system collapse—they’re taken care of. They bring about the largest collapse in the country and they’re better off in ten years. It’s not managed decline for them. They’re making more money on the way down than on the way up.
But the tale goes askew both as history and as populism. Though the dawn of neoliberalism intensified many of the exploitative and oligarchic features of American economic life, from the days of colonial settlement through the growth of American empire the extraction of profit has been the primary motive force of capitalism. Bannon ignores this history. And while his populist rhetoric calls for a workers’ uprising against elites, he does not actually support downward distribution of power or resources to workers per se. Bannon’s populism promotes capitalist profit-seeking and private corporate prerogatives over the conditions of production and labor. He and his comrades do not support union drives or income equality—Bannon once even mused that the vote might be restricted to property owners. What Bannon’s economic nationalism sets itself against is the liberation of global capital from the dominance of the American nation state—the conditions of stable economic imperialism. His rage is directed at the political and economic institutions that allowed the interests of global capital to override those of American corporations and citizens.
The underbelly of Bannon’s political vision surfaces in his films. As he became increasingly disillusioned with his role as investment banker to the movie moguls, he shifted into making his own films as producer, director and writer of many. From 1991 to 2016 he made eighteen films. After helping to produce films directed by Sean Penn (Indian Runner, 1991) and Julie Taymor (Titus 1999), Bannon jumped in as writer and director for In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed (2004). Enraged by the 9/11 attacks, he focused on Reagan as a historical reference point. As heroic holy warrior for American freedom against what Bannon calls “The Beast,” Reagan battled the forces of communism. The film ends with an echoing call to arms against “Islamic fascism.”
Though he aspired to be a “quality” filmmaker, his technique was propagandistic and apocalyptic, his vision dark, violent and consumed with war imagery—more crude unintended parody of Apocalypse Now than Twelve O’Clock High. After the 2008 economic crash, which focused his rage at destructive elites, he went on to make Generation Zero in 2010, and The Undefeated in 2011. Generation Zero is based on Neil Howe and William Strauss’ 1997 crackpot generational theory of history, The Fourth Turning, that predicted a violent conflict to come. In the film, Bannon uses crude images and booming dark music to blame the permissive culture of the baby boomers for loss of mid 20th century stability and order. The Undefeated is a hagiography of Sarah Palin, represented as a Tea Party champion of the people vs. the elites.
It is during this time of his engagement with culture and the politics of representation, following 9/11 and the 2008 economic crash, that Bannon developed his vision of Western Civilization and Judeo-Christianity threatened by invading hordes of Muslim terrorists and legal as well as illegal immigrants. His opposition to immigration on economic grounds, based in his overall analysis of globalization and the wage competition posed by “foreign” workers, is exposed as a cover story. The “foreigner” increasingly appears as more of an existential threat than a labor competitor. During this time his filmmaking is inspired by his reading of European proto-fascist philosophy as well as apocalyptic fiction. Consider his repeated recommendation of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints. Widely read on the political right, the novel tells the story of the invasion of Europe by a “caravan” of a million Indians aboard ships led by an untouchable pariah, “the turd eater,” who carries his “monster child” on his shoulders:
At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet….
And everywhere, a mass of hands and mouths, of phalluses and rumps. White tunics billowing over fondling, exploring fingers. Young boys, passed from hand to hand. Young girls, barely ripe, lying together cheek to thigh, asleep in a languid maze of arms, and legs, and flowing hair, waking to the silent play of eager lips. Male organs mouthed to the hilt, tongues pointing their way into scabbards of flesh, men shooting their sperm into women’s nimble hands. Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers. Bodies together, not in twos, but in threes, in fours, whole families of flesh gripped in gentle frenzies and subtle raptures. Men with women, men with men, women with women, men with children, children with each other, their slender fingers playing the eternal games of carnal pleasure.
When recommending this novel, Bannon no longer resembles a left economist. The racialized images of disability and sexual and gender polymorphous profligacy congeal into cartoon tropes of primitive savagery and threat. The combination of economic populist analysis of the destructive impact of globalization, combined with such fantasies of invasion by the vengeful, greedy formerly colonized world, draw on familiar historical narratives. The stories together produce the fascist character of much of the so-called populist right.
In 2006 Bannon went to Hong Kong to steer global investment in an internet-based company, International Gaming Entertainment. While there he had an epiphany. The company employed thousands of Chinese workers playing computer games to win tools and weapons internal to the games. These tokens were then sold primarily to gamers in the US, allowing them to gain points and skip levels without actually achieving the game credits required. Game owners objected to this practice as a form of cheating. Bannon fought them, while inducing Goldman Sachs to invest in IGE. Bannon ultimately lost both money and investors in this scheme to exploit the fruits of cheap Chinese labor for the advantage of wealthier American gamers. In the process, though, he realized that the millions of alienated, internet-obsessed young male gamers constitute a powerful exploitable resource.
In 2007, Bannon helped found Breitbart News with Andrew Breitbart. His business model was also his political model—to use outrage, conflict, hyperbole and provocation to draw these largely apolitical, even nihilistic digital denizens into the orbit of the newly emerging “alt-right.” As Bannon explained in an interview,
As soon as you’re able to create the structure or the context … they can then start making their own decisions or force multipliers. We’ve helped provide the information to people who are jacked up.
The structure or context was Breitbart News, but Bannon needed financial backers. He found them in billionaire father and daughter team Robert and Rebekah Mercer. Robert was an early artificial intelligence developer and CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Rebekah wanted to play an active role in far-right politics. They bankrolled three Bannon projects--Breitbart News, the Government Accountability Institute and Cambridge Analytica. The digital news operation depended on sensational headlines and professional trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos. GAI underwrote serious investigative reporting that was passed on to mainstream news organizations. Cambridge Analytica pioneered data mining techniques on social media that fed into the 2016 online Trump campaign. All together it was a broad strategic plan to deploy the mass mobilizing energy of internet gamers to power viral headlines, influence mainstream news reporters by providing investigative services, and use secretive social media data mining to power new targeted political advertising techniques.
The moments of Steve Bannon’s greatest triumph—his success as campaign strategist for Donald Trump, his work on Trump’s notorious “American Carnage” inaugural address, and his entry into the White House as key consigliere—also marked the beginning of his downfall. He helped craft a range of legally defective or unpopular policy initiatives, and he launched his “honey badger don’t give a shit” internal battle strategies in a White House where they continually backfired. His economic populist war against the Republican establishment shifted gears into a conflict-laden collaboration. Bannon’s preference for the conflict over the cooperation got him booted out the door back to Breitbart News, until the Mercers pushed him out there as well. But even from his battle position outside the arena of direct presidential power, Bannon has continued to shape Trumpism as a politics of hyperbole and rage. He carried his agenda to Europe, where he worked to construct a paradoxical global coalition of anti-globalists, with mixed success. After losing the backing of the Mercers, he gained new financial support from exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wen Gui, also known as Miles Kwok (a strange and controversial figure accused by many of being a Chinese spy). His long campaign against the threat of Chinese imperial aspirations escalated dramatically with this new support. He launched a campaign against the Chinese government, supposed creator of the “China virus,” via his obsessively manic podcast War Room Pandemic. Meanwhile, his efforts intersected mysteriously with the viral online conspiracy cult QAnon.
But everything truly went to hell for Bannon when he was arrested for defrauding Trump supporters who contributed to his We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. Though later pardoned by Trump, he was also kicked off Twitter and You Tube for violent rhetoric and lies. The underlying deceit, corruption and violence of his populist rhetoric, his deployment of fascist strategies, burst more dramatically into public view.
The Trump administration brought the hard libertarian neoliberalism of the Republican party and the Koch brothers together with Bannon’s brand of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic anti-globalism. Bannon’s forces largely lost that war on the legislative battlefield, but they still command significant popular support, demonstrating the still enduring appeal of his economic resentment combined with apocalyptic racial rhetoric, and the continuing effectiveness of digital surveillance and propaganda.
Bannon was recently spotted at Mike Lindell’s (the My Pillow Guy) Cyber Symposium, where he was busy cozying up and offering campaign advice to right wing thug Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil via his son Eduardo. In the photos, his face tells a story. Pugnacious but degenerate, determined and defeated, powerful and pathetic—avatar of the destructive energy of deterioration at the heart of his political movement.
(This is the starting salvo for a book on Bannon. It is drawn from the research of Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain (and other popular bios), Erroll Morris’s interviews in his documentary American Dharma, a series of PBS Frontline interviews, and a mountain of news clips.)