Nearly two weeks ago, Steve Bannon, an influential voice in the American right wing, spoke at length in a conference organised by a popular television channel. Bannon, who was Donald Trump’s campaign manager, now amplifies the inchoate but stubbornly held beliefs of the American President. When in flow, Bannon is the most cogent and voluble enemy — “it is war” is his favourite refrain — of the progressive-corporatist left of the Obama era. In that room full of corporate wheelers and dealers, Bannon’s fire and brimstone rhetoric about America’s challenges had a flavour of a religious sermon as he disparaged their conveniently held secular pieties (tariffs are bad, a rising China can be managed, immigration is good for America, Trump is terrible, and so on).
Like all great political actors, there was an element of performance in Bannon’s purported sense of grievance and betrayal of America’s working class by the elites who benefited from NAFTA, offshoring industrial production from the U.S. to China, etc. Hearing him, one realises that while his world view overlaps with Trump’s, it is he who endows the ideas and instincts of the Trump-era right wing with a historical and contextual reading of what constitutes American society. While Trump plays to the gallery when convenient, Bannon has little use or need for the approval of other people. Seeing this disdain for popularity, I was reminded of another ideologue who I heard years ago — Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS sarsanghchalak. Unlike Bannon who speaks with excitement and barely concealed exasperation, Bhagwat is a patient explainer of why the present is fraught with real and imagined dangers. Both men, and there are others elsewhere, speak not just of elections but of longer term, generational challenges.
Seeds of doubt
To their enemies, such men on the right appear as dogmatic, compromised, and almost always dangerous. But what men like Bannon do in a political system, when outside the full glare of the media, is little noticed by our democracies where attention spans rarely go beyond the next election. They cast the seeds of doubt against the status quo, they water the grounds of ever-present discontent, they contest the boundaries of what can be said publicly. They wait in the shadows, their minds brim with ideas, contestations and conspiracies, watching for a political force to appear into whom they can pour their visions freely when the wheels of history turn and opportunity arrives.
The logical goal of their visions is not just a string of electoral victories or the rearrangement of economic life but something more fundamental. They seek to undo the culture of the present and remake it in the image of a past. In India, given the length of our histories, such nostalgias are relatively easier to discern. In America, when Bannon insists on the need to raise tariffs, increase regulation in the economy, penalise corporates that offshore, reduce legal immigration, and so on, it is an effort to use the iron hand of the state to help communities across America to reassert control over its economic sovereignty. This is a form of nostalgia, a longing to return to an era when communities — small towns with factories, propertied landlords, farmers with their own tracts of land — controlled their own destiny.
A return to the past
Pressed further, this political project is also a form of longing to return to a state of affairs in American society before the beginning of industrial capitalism (1865-1885), when an individual’s desire was subordinate to the primacy of the community. What followed with the rise of commercial and industrial capitalism changed the nature of American society, the relationships between its members, and democracy itself. Material comfort, which was one of the facets of American community living, now became the singular focus. Commercial capitalism, through its genius for insinuation and marketing, convinced people — not without struggle and violence — that owning goods was more important than property and being independent. What Bannon leaves unsaid (and one suspects Trump is unwilling to pay any electoral cost) is that ultimately the democratisation of desire that actualises through rampant consumerism would itself need to be checked. For the sake of society, the individual must forsake Chinese-manufactured iPhones and cars built in Mexico, if need be.
The enemies of this political vision are familiar. Corporate capitalism, which has watered the growth of an ideology where the only relevant unit in society is a consumer who is just as easily replaceable by another with purchasing power. Feminism, which has argued that a woman is an individuated self and not merely a bundle of roles — as a mother, wife, or daughter — to be played. Neoclassical economics and its institutional embodiments in the post-Bretton Woods institutions, which lays primacy on the individual’s utility maximisation.
All these intellectual and institutional frameworks challenge the underlying ethos that demands the subservience of the self to the needs of a community. It is little surprise then that as traditions are challenged in the name of individual rights and globalised commercial interests trample over citizens, greater counter-challenges such as Bannon’s that seek to bolster community level aspirations will find admirers, even if it comes at a cost to their own selves.
