In the folds of the varied administration of the new Trump presidency that is taking shape, we see a name known to us reappear: Steve Bannon.
Although he did not have, at least officially, codified roles in the electoral campaign that he brought back to the White House Donald TrumpBannon, as per his own admission, helped provide significant strategic support to the new American president. Chief strategist of Trump’s first electoral campaign, then fired following disagreements with the Trumpian inner circle (especially with his daughter Ivanka) now completely revolutionized, Bannon has gone through ups and downs and some judicial inconveniences.
In a recent interview he warned old Europe that things could really change this time both in terms of defense and the market. What is perhaps most fascinating about Bannon is its very varied cultural background. Multifaceted and a little approximate, as befits a true American accustomed to possessing more intellectual than cultural capital, he ranges in his references from Guillaume Fayes to René Guénon, from Alexander Dugin (the so-called theorist of Eurasianism much listened to by Putin) to (they say) Julius Evola. On the latter, much authoritative doctrine is not in agreement, especially if we consider it the undeniable populist trait of Bannon’s thought and it is related to the marked elitism of Evoli’s work. Bannon often used the Sanskrit word dharma“duty”, but also “place in the world” and “divine task” according to the fundamental text of classical Hinduism Bhagavadgītā. Perhaps a recovery of the forgotten “manifest destiny” of the American people, that is, the divine task of rising above other fraternal peoples, long buried under the molasses woke. The “populist international” (the right-left short circuit is evident from the name itself) which he propagandised, bringing together the populist and Eurosceptic right-wingers of old Europe and beyond, clearly led by the USA, would also fit into this sense.
The entire so-called Alt-Right, the American alternative right, of which he is the leading exponent, presents itself as a singular mixture of twentieth-century doctrines concerning living space, the refusal of globalization, nationalism, the supremacy of Western cultural traits with its Judeo-Christian derivations which, according to Bannon himself, should also orient the market. Rejection of liberalism and terror of Chinese techno-communism considered the true great enemy of the present and the future, as well as a rapprochement (it’s about time!) with Russia as bearer of the same values of the lost Christian West which no longer appears in the speeches of Vladimir Putin if not with aggressive tones.
Edmund Burke also figures among Bannon’s cultural references, an anti-revolutionary theorist who is perhaps responsible for the former chief strategist’s suspicion of all the recent excessive secularization as well as the desire to destroy the symbols of the past (what is a revolution if not this?!) considered shameful.
It must be said that the Alt-Right is a very varied cauldron that winks quite a bit, in a superficial way as befits the thought made in the USA, to many sad pages of the past (Nazism, racism, anti-feminism , xenophobia), elements from which Bannon stays well away even if they are always convenient for electoral purposes. The good thing is the rejection of the devastating neo-con ideology which has caused so much harm to the entire world and a desire to get closer to what people with a Christian tradition have in common, through tradition and worship.
Of course, there is a president in command who does not seem to have much sympathy for the cultural world that Bannon is perhaps referring to, preferring “concreteness” to thought, decision-making to strategy. The fact that a glimmer of cultural roots appears in American political action, after decades of aggressive confusion, can only be a good thing. Everything will depend on how much and who Trump listens to in this second, decisive, presidential mandate.
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