Jeffrey Alexander will give his talk, Fascist in the White House? Steve Bannon’s Rage against the Enlightenment, at the Tufts University Department of Sociology on September 19th.
Steven K. Bannon has been called “Trump’s brain,” the man whom Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke identifies as the “individual who’s basically creating the ideological aspect of where we’re going.” Bannon’s ideas are shockingly anti-democratic. He gestures to fascists, authoritarians, and theocrats, with nary a word for democratic icons. Bannon sees himself as one of the “lost men” whom Trump has ostensibly dedicated himself to resurrecting. His sense of being left behind, of being dissed and excluded by the establishment, has fuelled resentment, anger, and life-long, supercharged aggression, making him a perfect flag bearer for the American right. At the core of Bannon’s ideology is a series of simplistic binaries that create dangerous “others” who threaten the good folks of “real America.” Bannon weaves these binaries into an apocalyptic narrative that pits good against evil in a fateful, bloody, battle-to-the-death fight. “History is seasonal,” Bannon opines, “and winter is coming.”