On Thursday, April 13, Jeff Alexander will give the lecture Steve Bannon: Rage Against the Enlightenment at the Yale Political Union.
Steve Bannon looks to fascists, authoritarians, and theocrats for intellectual guidance. He sees himself as one of the “lost men,” whom Trump has dedicated himself to resurrecting. The sense of being left behind, of being dissed and excluded by the establishment, has fueled resentment and anger. Bannon’s ideology is composed of simplistic, othering binary codes and dangerously irrational apocalyptic narratives. At the ideological core is a series of extraordinarily simplistic contrasts between good and bad, sacred and profane, a series that, taken together, create dangerous “others” whose continuing existence threatens the people who make up the “real America.”