Monday, July 1, Steve Bannon report He was incarcerated at a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he will serve a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. Claimed He was “proud to go to prison” and, in doing so, “standing up against tyranny.”
Bannon is scheduled to be released on November 1, just four days before the 2024 presidential election.
Ahead of his sentence, Bannon spoke with The Washington Post’s David Brooks. to discuss what Brooks calls the “global populist rise.” In the interview, Bannon repeated some familiar themes but broke new ground by laying out his vision for a second American revolution.
“The ruling elites of Western countries have lost confidence and faith in their own countries,” Bannon said. He noted that these elites are “increasingly detached from the lived experience of their people.”
Bannon compared Trump to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and praised him as “the most nationalistic man in history,” but told Brooks that many people, especially those on the political left, don’t understand that the MAGA movement “is much further to the right than President Trump.”
Bannon’s vision of a second American revolution combines an embrace of Christian nationalism with an “American people first” program.
Americans need to take that vision seriously.
Many progressives seem to dismiss talk of a second American Revolution as nothing more than a demagogue’s populist fantasy. Currently consumed They’re trying to figure out how to handle President Biden’s struggling campaign.
Meanwhile, populists like Bannon offer a vision of what America should be like. They speak for millions of people, not just MAGA enthusiasts. Their calls for a second American revolution respond to their deep discontent and embody their desire for change in the existing political and cultural establishment.
What is the vision of change that people on the left are offering, and is there anyone on the left who has been doing the kind of work that Bannon has been doing every day, for years?
I can’t think of anyone.
As the race progresses, progressives must do more than condemn Bannon’s policies. They need to present clear, compelling policies of their own that speak to the desire for fundamental change widely felt in this country. They can’t win a fight over what President Biden wants. Calls By simply promising to maintain the institutions that many Americans want to reform, President Trump can protect the “soul of the nation.”
They should pay attention to sentiments like those recorded in a January 2023 Gallup poll. At the time, Gallup found “Most Americans remain dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in the U.S., with just 23% saying they are satisfied and 76% dissatisfied. The largest group, 48%, are ‘very dissatisfied.'”
This May, ABC News Confirmed The survey results showed that “Voters are generally deeply dissatisfied with the state of democracy, feel the country is heading in the wrong direction, and are pessimistic about whether things can be improved.”
According to an article in The Guardian I got it. It is not surprising that “anger and radicalization have grown” among American voters over the past year.
Steve Bannon is not the only one expressing his anger and radicalization, laying the groundwork for a new revolution. Let’s talk revolution. Very popular A leader of the American ultra-conservative movement.
One of them, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, responded to the Supreme Court’s recent decision.Give the president immunity from criminal prosecution As Newsweek puts it, ReportsThe decision “strengthens the second American revolution,” Roberts argued, allowing the next president to lead that change without “triple-guessing every decision he makes in public office.”
Roberts not only explains the Supreme Court’s decisions, I have written“The American people of 2024 are in the midst of carrying out a second American revolution to take back power from elites and tyrannical bureaucrats. These patriots are committed to starting a peaceful revolution at the ballot box.”
“Like the First, the Second War of Independence began with a corrupt ruling class trying to overthrow America’s existing institutions. But where Britain wrote laws and coerced colonial officials, our elites acted more subtly,” Roberts continued.
According to Roberts, the coming revolution will target the “corrupt elites” in universities, the mainstream media, and urban cultural centers who, in his view, are responsible for imposing “destructive and tyrannical change” on the lives of ordinary Americans.
Reading what Roberts wrote, I I remembered a point This was done not by any MAGA figures, but by Harvard professor Michael Sandel several years ago. Sandel Recognized “For all the thousands, even tens of thousands, of lies Trump tells, the only thing that’s real about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment toward the elites he sees as having looked down on him his whole life, and that’s a crucial clue to his political appeal,” he said.
“The Democratic Party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to pay more attention to the legitimate grievances and resentments that progressive politics have generated in the age of globalization,” Sandel warned. He said liberals fail to understand that “we need to redistribute not just money but prestige as well, and that more money needs to go to the millions of people whose jobs don’t require a college degree.”
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer agreeHe recognizes that calls for a second American revolution are deeply rooted in the kind of resentment that Sandel diagnoses.
“If the foundations of Trumpism were simply economic, rather than social or political, Biden would be closer to the president Trumpian intellectuals want,” Serwer wrote in a July 4 post. “But Trumpism is about giving status, class and control to ordinary voters in exchange for an upward redistribution of power and income to the elites, and that’s not what Biden is offering.”
Taking up that theme, Bannon argues that “the spiritual part is at the root of the second American revolution.” To be successful in revolutionary work, he says, “you have to get people to understand it, so we’re constantly fighting a narrative war. It’s an unlimited narrative war. Everything is a story.”
Figures like Bannon and Roberts are using narrative warfare to appeal to and mobilize widespread discontent with the American system. They know it. According to a survey by IPSOSthat “belief The idea that the system is broken is not a heretical idea.”
They know that many voters “feel that their country’s system is broken, that their economy is rigged to favor the rich, that many agree that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about them, and that experts don’t understand their lives.”
That is why they now speak openly and confidently of a second American Revolution.
The question we face is not whether change will come to this country; rather, what kind of change will come. Bannon has laid out his vision. What alternative can progressives offer?
Austin Surratt is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law and Political Science at Amherst College.
