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Breitbart News merchandise is for sale in the Exhibitor Hub during the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, February 23, 2017, in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
So in the midst of a national firestorm over neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates coming together under the banner of white nationalism to “Unite the Right” last weekend in Charlottesville, presidential adviser Steve Bannon, former publisher of Breitbart News, the self-proclaimed “platform of the alt-right,” decided out of the blue to call up Robert Kuttner of the liberal American Prospect to chew the fat. Kuttner told Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi that he believes Bannon when he says he forgot to say it was off the record and that he really saw it as “a candid strategy talk with a comrade.” Kuttner said:
[Bannon] simultaneously tries to make alliances with lefties on economic nationalism, while doubling down on the racist, anti-immigrant stuff, and assumes that people will naively work with him on selected issues and excuse his larger role. It’s classic hubris.
If Bannon had been able to persuade his boss to tackle infrastructure right out of the gate when the Democrats were still reeling in disbelief, and if he had distanced himself from the worst elements of the right once he took office, that might even have worked. But that also would have required the boss to be someone other than who he is.
People have been focusing on Bannon’s comments that the far right are “losers” who need to be crushed, and his taunting of the left, which he hopes will “keep talking about race” so Team Trumpists can win on economic nationalism. This is disingenuous to say the least. To the extent Bannon truly believes that the neo-Nazis are “losers,” it’s largely a matter of aesthetics. As Vice reporter Elle Reed explained on MSNBC on Wednesday, the “alt-right” is re-branding itself as the new fascism:
That means getting rid of swastikas because they call that a dead ideology so there’s no point in bringing that out. They also want to cut out, as they call it, “white trash.” They want to look like a middle-class movement with clean-cut, good-looking men. It’s a movement focused on aesthetics. They want to look like successful people so that people want to join them.
When Bannon was the publisher of Breitbart News he oversaw the publication of the manifesto for what Taibbi describes as the” snooty, college-based wing of the racialist right Bannon leads … the thinking man’s Nazi movement” called “The Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” Bannon knows which side his swastika is buttered on. Insulting the “low-IQ thugs” of the neo-fascist right may best be seen as his own version of Bill Clinton’s Sistah Souljah moment.
Bannon’s “outreach” to the American Prospect was a transparent attempt to exacerbate what he sees as the division on the left between economic populism and “identity politics.” Perhaps he was under the weather or had had a few cocktails but Kuttner was not born yesterday, and saw through his ploy. Choosing this moment to make such a pitch was ill-timed to say the least.
But if Bannon’s stategic prowess is overstated, his propaganda chops are not. At that he is very, very good and extremely influential. On Wednesday Robert Faris, Ethan Zuckerman and a group of scholars at Harvard’s Berkman Center and MIT’s Media Lab released their full study about the effects of media, particularly online media, on the last election. If there is a superstar among all the media outlets it was Breitbart News.
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