Interview
Steve
Bannon: 'We’ve turned the Republicans into a working-class party'
David Smith
in Washington
Steve
Bannon
The former
White House strategist and far-right agitator hails the British election as a
‘victory for populism’ with lessons for the US
David Smith
@smithinamerica
Tue 17 Dec
2019 07.15 GMTLast modified on Tue 17 Dec 2019 10.17 GMT
Steve
Bannon: ‘I think the Democrats ought to take the lessons of the working class.
These are lifetime Labour members that voted for a Tory.’ Photograph: Lewis
Joly/JDD/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock
Steve
Bannon, the former White House chief strategist associated with global
far-right nationalist movements, has urged Republicans to “find our AOCs” – a
reference to the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – to claim
the mantle of the party of the working class.
In an
interview with the Guardian at his Capitol Hill townhouse, Bannon, who helped
shape the party in Donald Trump’s image, argued that Republicans have to fight
back against the “perfect casting” of Democrats elected to Congress last year
by boosting equivalents from their own ranks.
The
combative 66-year-old is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which
he once described as “the platform of the ‘alt-right’”, a movement that has
embraced racism and antisemitism, and an ex-chairman of Donald Trump’s divisive
2016 election campaign.
His
transition to a senior role at the White House was hailed as “excellent” by the
former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and “amazing” by Peter Brimelow of the
white nationalist site VDAR. Bannon left the administration in 2017 after
playing a key role in the US president’s equivocation over a deadly white
nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was widely condemned, but
remains influential.
Ocasio-Cortez,
a 30-year-old former bartender from New York, was elected to Congress last year
and has built a huge social media following as a member of “the Squad”, a group
of four progressive women of colour. Her eagerly sought presidential
endorsement went to fellow progressive senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The
Democrats and their supporters have “better casting”, Bannon admitted. “They
did an amazing job in 18. I keep saying I admire AOC. I think her ideology’s
all fucked up, but I want her. I want to recruit bartenders. I don’t want to
recruit any more lawyers. I want bartenders.”
Congressional
Republicans are dominated by ageing white men from comfortable backgrounds.
Among Democrats, Bannon also pointed to military veterans such as Max Rose of
New York and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, both elected as the party swept the
House of Representatives in 2018. “That’s perfect casting. That’s why we got
smoked.”
Democrats
were boosted in the midterms by Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York,
who spent $110m through his own political action committee. An impressive 21 of
the 24 candidates he supported won their races. Bloomberg is now also running
for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 US election.
“People are
missing the point about Bloomberg,” said Bannon, who co-hosts a radio programme
about Trump’s impeachment called War Room. “Trump wouldn’t be impeached if it
were not for Bloomberg. It’s Bloomberg’s hundred million dollars that won the
seats … The Democrat party is just like Republicans: a pass through. There’s no
actual people to do anything. They’re not out in any state ringing doorbells.
Those activist groups are. That’s where Bloomberg put his hundred million dollars.”
In a second
interview by phone last week, Bannon drew parallels with the British general
election, in which Conservative Boris Johnson trounced Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn,
accused of failing to stamp out antisemitism in the party. Johnson took a wrecking
ball to a “red wall” in traditional working-class areas, just as Trump broke
through the “blue wall” in midwestern states in the 2016 election.
“I think
it’s a victory for populism,” Bannon said, “Obviously radical economic ideas
and socialism and more government involvement, coupled with virulent
antisemitism, is not a winning ticket. I believe the Democratic party here,
particularly on the far left – the Squad, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders –
should embrace the lessons because I don’t believe it was just Corbyn’s
personality.”
He added:
“Obviously Corbyn had issues, a personality that seemed to rub people the wrong
way, particularly some of his core voters, but this is much deeper than that
and you just can’t just turn it off to ‘one guy was more popular than the
other’. This was, I think, a very serious vote and people paid a lot of
attention to this and wanted to get Brexit done.”
‘I don’t
believe it was just Corbyn’s personality. People really voted for Brexit.’
Bannon said
he was fascinated by focus groups he saw on British TV during the election
campaign. “These were Labour voters and they were not going to vote for Labour
and the reason was they kept asking, ‘How are these programmes going to be paid
for?’ What I was most impressed with was the specificity and the granularity of
the questions.
“People
don’t want to be spun any more. They don’t want to be BS’d any more. They want
to know what you’re laying out and how you’re going to effectuate it and, most
importantly, how you’re going to pay for it and ‘if paying for it means more
increased taxes or less opportunities for me, you’re not going to get my vote
no matter how good it sounds’.”
He added:
“I think the Democrats, on whether it’s Green New Deal or healthcare for
illegal aliens or whatever, ought to take the lessons of the working class.
These are lifetime Labour members that voted for a Tory.”
Bannon
regards Johnson as neither a nationalist nor a populist and likens the prime
minister’s vision of Brexit to “Singapore-on-the-Thames” – very different from
the version hoped for by those who voted for him. Even so, Bannon argues that
both the Conservatives and Republicans should aim to seize their traditional
rivals’ territory by appealing to the working class.
Critics say
Bannon is an ardent nationalist, nihilist and attention seeker hellbent on
disrupting and destroying the political establishment. He suggests his desire
to transform the Republican party as a working-class force stems from a
worldview that pitches the elites against the so-called “deplorables”, a term
based on a comment by Hillary Clinton that was widely seen as an insult to
long-disparaged and forgotten people.
“My whole
theory on the right is that we if we want capitalism to survive, we need to
make people capitalist. The problem is they’re not capitalists. We have
oligarchs and serfs. That system is not going to survive. I tell the donors,
you may hate me, but all your Paul Ryan bullshit at the Heritage Foundation
can’t win national elections. He can’t win Wisconsin, OK? Donald Trump can.”
Trump and
Bannon’s claims to champion workers have run into credibility problems. Two
years ago the president passed a $1.5tn bill that slashed taxes for
corporations and the rich, including himself and members of his cabinet. The
nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a thinktank in Washington, said 80% of the tax
cuts would wind up in the pockets of the top 1% while the middle class
continued to struggle.
The White
House adviser Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, told Bannon in a 2016 radio
interview that America could be “decimated” by immigration and lose its
sovereignty. Bannon, who has worked with openly racist far-right leaders across
Europe, denies that racial resentment is central to the resurgent populism –
even though the FBI reported last month that personal attacks motivated by bias
or prejudice have reached a 16-year high, with a sharp increase in violence
against Latino people.
Recalling
the Brexit referendum of 2016, Bannon said: “As soon as we won in London at the
end of June, I kept saying this is a lock for Trump, we’ve just got to drive
the same topics. That’s why, when I took over the campaign, it was let’s get
back to some basics: stop mass illegal immigration, limit legal immigration,
protect your workers. Why do you think Trump today is at 34% approval rating in
the Emerson polls among blacks and 36% among Hispanics? He’s going to get 20%
of the black vote and here’s why: everybody’s working.”
A woman
waits for President Donald Trump to arrive for a Black Voices for Trump rally
Friday, Nov. 8, 2019, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Other polls
offer a very different picture. About 78% of likely black voters have an
unfavourable opinion of Trump and 84% rate his job as president negatively,
according to research published on 13 December by the BlackPac political action
committee. In addition, 83% of likely black voters say that economic conditions
have not changed or have got worse under Trump, and 87% says they will vote for
the Democratic nominee in November 2020.
The Trump
administration has notoriously attacked workers’ rights, cutting the number of
workplace safety inspectors, tightening qualifications for who must be paid the
minimum wage or overtime and pushing trade unions to the margins.
Bannon
appears untroubled by having helped put a man endorsed by white nationalists in
the Oval Office. “Look, this is what drives me nuts about the left. All
immigration is to flood the zone with cheap labour, and the reason is because
the elites don’t give a fuck about African Americans and the Hispanic working
class. They don’t care about the white working class either. You’re just a
commodity.
“So they
have unlimited labour and they’re paying you nine bucks an hour. ‘Let more guys
in and, by the way, it’s bigger markets.’ It destroys the working class. That’s
what we’ve got to protect. Once we show working-class people of every ethnicity
and race that you being a citizen you get a special deal, you get that
realignment.”
A former
naval officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker, Bannon’s emphasis on
citizenship would be unlikely to satisfy current US citizens who endure immense
class, gender and race inequalities. The gap between the haves and have-nots
grew last year to its highest level in more than half a century of tracking
income inequality, according to US Census Bureau figures released in September.
The independent not-for-profit CDC Foundation says black women are three to
four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white
counterparts.
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