David Brooks, "Let Bannon Be Bannon!"
David Shasha
David Brooks Continues to be a Delusional Idiot: “Let Bannon Be Bannon!”
In his bizarre Friday column “Let Bannon Be Bannon!” David Brooks articulates in detail something he has been saying in interviews for a long time now.
Brooks is under the delusion that Alt-Right guru Steve Bannon has a “coherent” ideology and rational sense of how to govern.
And he is very “worried” for the poor Bannon.
Let’s get out our hankies!
The underlying reason for this delusion rests in the fact that Brooks is not just a puffed-up elite snob who thinks he knows everything and can explain it to us simpletons, but that he is an obsessive Republican ideologue who cannot admit that his beloved GOP has become a trash-heap of racist slime and decrepit Idiocracy without a shred of human decency.
From Reagan to Dubya to the Tea Party to Trump it has all been about stupidity, malevolence, political subversion and the institution of cruelty and barbarity under the banner of Republican orthodoxy.
This is likely too much for Brooks to handle, so he pathetically tries to explain the Trump-Bannon era in a rational way, even as there is nothing rational about it. Brooks seeks to pretend that there is a clear Bannon vision when in point of fact there is only dementia.
It must first be noted that Brooks never once in the column mentions Alt-Right racism and the uptick in Anti-Semitism that Bannon has unleashed through his Breitbart platform.
Racism is the most important value in the ample Bannon arsenal of bells and whistles.
In addition to this there is no discussion of Bannon’s love of anarchy and the way he wishes to undermine the American political system that has been in place for so many years.
Bannon is not a rational actor. He is a racist muckraker who wants to see people squirm and who wants to sow discord in our pluralistic democracy.
Brooks is actually dumb enough to believe that Bannon is an authentic populist, when in point of fact he is a White Supremacist who has learned his debased values from European Fascism and been inspired by degenerate Hollywood-TMZ Idiocracy.
The current redefinition of populism shows us how elites have no idea what is going on. The so-called populists do not reflect the diversity of Western Democracies today, but are a tiny sliver of discontented White people who hate those who do not look like them.
These White racists do not represent a majority of Americans, but act as if they are the only truly “authentic” Americans.
Bannon is a moral degenerate who rose to prominence, not because he had good ideas or was concerned about helping people, but because he is an ambitious psychopath who will do anything to attain power.
It is this corrupt power that is currently being deployed to crack up our democracy through the political clashes we see daily and by the tactical deployment of the White Christian racism that permeates Trumpworld.
Bannon continues to use Trump as his marionette; something we have seen most recently in the Andrew Jackson episode:
While Trump has no idea who Andrew Jackson is and what he did as president – or even when he lived, Bannon – the one who reads books – wants to use the Confederate-hero Jackson as a dog-whistle to his Alt-Right followers and highlight a spurious populist message which he has no intention of delivering on.
Unless Bannon is an idiot – highly unlikely – he knows exactly what Trump is doing and how it fits into his nihilistic plan to screw America into the ground.
Bannon is no bleeding heart who wants to lift up working class Americans; he is a crafty Millennial who follows Machiavellian precepts as he seeks to send us back to the Stone Age.
He is using Donald Trump as his pawn to achieve the desired anarchy.
He will likely lose his fight given that Trump has all the power and might well dump him as things come to their inevitable collapse.
But before that happens he will have made his malignant mark on the culture in a big way and will be free to expand his brand into a media empire which will provide him with a permanent platform to spew his anarchy and hate, as well as line his pockets with plenty of cash.
But once Trump realizes that the Bannonhate is not working for him anymore, he will do what he always does to those who he has no use for.
“You’re fired.”
It is the Trump way.
But even if Bannon was fired tomorrow, he will have achieved far more than he could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. The damage his shenanigans have caused to our country will linger for years to come.
So as the inevitable Impeachment looms in the wings, Trump will surely dump those who got him into his impossible spot, but by then it will be too late for him, for them, and for us.
Let Bannon Be Bannon!
Let Brooks Be Brooks!
Let Satan Be Satan!
Indeed, let us all drown in the pool of racist toxicity generated by the Trump/Bannon regime in our Brave New World.
David Shasha
Let Bannon Be Bannon!
By: David Brooks
I continue to worry about Steve Bannon. I see him in the White House photos, but he never has that sprightly Prince of Darkness gleam in his eye anymore.
His governing philosophy is being completely gutted by the mice around him. He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies. I’m beginning to fear that he’s spending his days sitting along the wall in the Roosevelt Room morosely playing one of those Risk-style global empire video games on his smartphone.
Back in the good old days — like two months ago — it was fun to watch Bannon operate. He was the guy with a coherent governing philosophy. He seemed to have realized that the two major party establishments had abandoned the working class. He also seemed to have realized that the 21st-century political debate is not big versus small government, it’s open versus closed.
Bannon had the opportunity to realign American politics around the social, cultural and economic concerns of the working class. Erect barriers to keep out aliens from abroad, and shift money from the rich to the working class to create economic security at home.
It was easy to see the Trump agenda that would flow from this philosophy: Close off trade and immigration. Fund a jobs-creating infrastructure program. Reverse the Republican desire to reform and reduce entitlements. Increase funding on all sorts of programs that benefit working-class voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Many of us wouldn’t have liked that agenda — the trade and immigration parts — but at least it would have helped the people who are being pummeled by this economy.
But Bannonesque populism is being abandoned. The infrastructure and jobs plan is being put off until next year (which is to say never). Meanwhile, the Trump administration has agreed with Paul Ryan’s crazy plan to do health care first.
Moths show greater resistance to flame than American politicians do to health care reform. And sure enough it’s become a poisonous morass for the entire party, and a complete distraction from the populist project.
Worse, the Ryan health care plan punishes the very people Trump and Bannon had vowed to help. It would raise premiums by as much as 25 percent on people between 50 and 64, one core of the Trump voter base. It would completely hammer working-class voters whose incomes put them just above the Medicaid threshold.
The Trump budget is an even more devastating assault on Bannon-style populism. It eliminates or cuts organizations like the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that are important to people from Tennessee and West Virginia up through Ohio and Michigan. It cuts job-training and road-building programs. It does almost nothing to help expand opportunity for the working class and almost everything to serve defense contractors and the national security state.
Why is Bannonism being abandoned? One possibility is that there just aren’t enough Trumpians in the world to staff an administration, so Trump and Bannon have filled their apparatus with old guard Republicans who continue to go about their jobs in old guard pseudo-libertarian ways.
The second possibility, raised by Rich Lowry in Politico, is that the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump won on populism, but congressional Republicans won on the standard cut-government script. The congressional Republicans are better prepared, and so their plans are crowding out anything Bannon might have contemplated.
The third possibility is that Donald Trump doesn’t really care about domestic policy; he mostly cares about testosterone.
He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health.
But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs.
Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy. It lavishes attention on every aspect of hard power and slashes away at anything that isn’t.
The Trump health care and budget plans will be harsh on the poor, which we expected. But they’ll also be harsh on the working class, which we didn’t.
We’re ending up with the worst of the new guard Trumpian populists and the old guard Republican libertarians. We’re building walls to close off the world while also shifting wealth from the poor to the rich.
When these two plans fail, which seems very likely, there’s going to be a holy war between the White House and Capitol Hill. I don’t have high hopes for what’s going to emerge from that war, but it would be nice if the people who voted for Trump got economic support, not punishment.
For that, there’s one immediate recipe: Unleash Steve Bannon!
From The New York Times, March 17, 2017