Angel Jaramillo
In 1979, the Shiite clerical revolution in Iran overthrew a regime ruled by the Pahlavi dynasty for several years. During the assault, a group of Iranian students sympathetic to the uprising stormed the US embassy and took the diplomatic staff hostage. The event plunged Jimmy Carter’s administration into crisis, and some believe it contributed to his defeat in the 1980 election by the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan.
In response to the diplomats’ capture, President Carter sent in a marine and military force. Among those stationed at Gonzo Station—from where air cover would be provided for the various sea and land activities of Operation Eagle Claw—was a young man with a promising future: Steve Bannon.
Raised in a working-class Irish-American household, Bannon can be considered, to a certain extent, the representative of a curious mix of populist leftism and medieval thinking. Bannon’s biography could be viewed as the American dream. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, he overcame all odds and managed to penetrate several areas dominated by the American elite, from Wall Street to Hollywood. He is a countercultural figure who knows well the Leviathan against which he has always wanted to rebel.
After a brief but fruitful foray into the military, Bannon studied at the most influential university in the United States: Harvard. There, he chose to enroll in the Business School, with the aim of being recruited by a Wall Street financial center. After being rejected by several, he was admitted to Goldman Sachs, located at the center of the global financial world. Bannon used his influence in mergers and acquisitions to become a Hollywood producer. For a time, he even profited from the most successful sitcom of the 1990s: Seinfeld. Always adventurous, Bannon also ventured into the world of gambling in Shanghai, where he realized the importance of gamer culture. Video game players are not really young people isolated in a basement. Rather, they constitute a culture—as Bannon realized—populated by people who discuss public and political issues with a certain seriousness. This underworld had ties to what would later become known as the Alt-Right, the populist and radical alternative right that, over time, became part of the base of the Trumpist movement.
Seen in this light, it can be said that Bannon managed to position himself at the center where powerful investors with right-wing ideas—such as the Mercer family, conservative and religious groups that had become radicalized due to Barack Obama’s victory, and the new radical right-wing media outlets on the fringes of conservative networks such as Fox News converged.
Having been relatively successful as an investor, Bannon took advantage of his time at major Hollywood studios to produce films and documentaries criticizing the progressive left, the Democratic Party, the Clintons, globalizing elites, the so-called Deep State, Islamic fascism, the European Union, China’s policies, climate change activists, and the arrogance of the baby boomer generation with its countercultural ethos of the 1960s. When he entered Trump’s universe, Bannon was successfully leading Breitbart News, a key outlet for delivering witty invectives against the enemies of the Christian right.
But what are the ideas of the man whom Time magazine named the second most powerful man in the world in 2017?
To understand Bannon, one must understand the prehistory of 20th-century reactionary conservatism. Bannon is an admirer of various figures of what is known as the traditionalist movement, which emerged in early 20th-century Europe and was closely linked to fascism, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and the most conservative forms of Catholicism. Traditionalists believe that there is a primal wisdom shared by various existing religions, both Western and Eastern. According to its supporters, this profound knowledge about nature and the human condition has been passed down from generation to generation since the dawn of civilization and even before. However, although much depends on the type of thinker being analyzed, this transmission ceased around the middle of the second millennium of our era. The solution is to embrace Eastern metaphysics, recover the Catholic tradition of the West, and initiate a revolt against the main culprit: modernity.
Like any intellectual movement, traditionalism has a center and a periphery. The core corresponds to the person many identify as its founder: René Guénon. Geopolitically, traditionalism can be considered Mediterranean in origin. It is no coincidence, then, that it has had a significant influence in both Europe and the Islamic world. As Mark Sedgwick, one of the most renowned historians of this movement, has said, traditionalism in Europe was close to fascism, primarily through Julius Evola, and, within Islam, to Sufism. It is no coincidence that Guénon ended his days in Egypt, where he converted to the faith of Allah and changed his name to Abd al-Wâhid Yahyâ.
It could be said that the goal of traditionalists is to recover what the Italian Renaissance Catholic priest, physician, and philosopher Marsilio Ficino called philosophia perennis. The idea that there are eternal truths that all the great religions have discovered. According to Guénon, the sixth century BC was a decisive moment in the world, as these primordial truths were found simultaneously. This proposition is somewhat reminiscent of the “Axial Age,” proposed by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, which holds that great thinkers appeared in China, India, and the Mediterranean between 800 BC and 200 BC.
But there is a difference between the philosopher Jaspers and the theologian Guénon: while the former did not necessarily accord the status of truth to what the Buddha, Socrates, or the authors of the Pentateuch said, the latter believed that the words of the ancient sages conceal perennial truths.
It is in this light that we can understand the yearnings of traditions such as occultism, theosophy, hermeticism, and even some Masonic lodges that captivated poets, artists, and intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although Guénon drew on notions from all these sects, the truth is that traditionalism carries with it a powerful critique of modernity.
For Guénon, this negative assessment of the course taken by Western civilization is based on the distinction between East and West, on the one hand, and on the crisis resulting from the dissolution of the Middle Ages in Europe, on the other. In his view, the East—Chinese, Indian, and Islamic cultures—have not lost their connection to the “pure intellectuality” of their origins. The proof of this is that, despite everything, it has resisted succumbing to the modern project that has flooded the West since shortly before the Renaissance.
But what does this project consist of? First and foremost, it consists of being a materialistic culture. Materialism is not only a political and economic philosophy, such as that of Karl Marx, but a kind of destiny. A consequence of such a Weltanschauung is what he calls “scientism,” which is not really the science of the philosophia perennis, but its perversion. Like Martin Heidegger, Guénon published The Crisis of the Modern World in 1927, the same year as Being and Time—the French thinker castigated the calculating nature of industrial society, which reduces reality to mathematical manipulation.
Hence, Steve Bannon is a great critic of both Silicon Valley culture and what he calls “the Davos man.” Seen in this light, Bannon’s hostility toward Elon Musk’s appointment as head of the Office of Government Efficiency is no coincidence, even though in theory both agree on the need to reduce federal bureaucracy.
As an exponent of the tech-mogul class in Silicon Valley, Musk embodies the hyper-technologization of Western civilization that Guénon so strongly criticized. In contrast, Bannon believes that the Trump administration should promote public policies that benefit workers and the lower classes, especially in the red Republican areas of America. Bannon’s dream is that of white, Christian, nationalist families, whose fathers toil in the factories of the second industrial revolution and attend Protestant and Anglo-Catholic religious services on Sundays. Not the nerds of Silicon Valley, but the healthy iron and steel workers, wearing baseball caps and knowing the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” by heart, will be the foundation of the nationalist America of the future.
But Bannon’s criticism of what Daniel Bell called the “post-industrial society,” Zbigniew Brzezinski the “technotronic era,” or Alvin Toffler the “third wave” does not stop at the United States; it has global reach. Perhaps more than the digital entrepreneurs of San Francisco Bay, the main target of Bannon’s invective is the World Economic Forum based in Davos, Switzerland. Located in the region that inspired Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Davos has become the symbol—among several members of the radical right in Europe and the United States—of a globalizing project that is ultimately unnatural. Peter Thiel has gone so far as to say—in a description that would have made Guénon smile—that globalization is the Antichrist.
For Bannon, figures such as Klaus Schwab—founder and leader of the Davos Forum—do not represent progress toward something better, but rather the “decline of the West,” in the words of Oswald Spengler. No doubt Bannon would have agreed with Naphta and disagreed with Settembrini in their discussions to win the soul of young Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain. Significantly, the annual meetings of the world’s rich and powerful take place in a location Thomas Mann chose for his tuberculosis hospital.
In this sense, Bannon has given a curious twist to an idea developed by Guénon: the cyclical view of history. Based on his studies of India, Guénon proposed that the modern era was on the brink of a great crisis that would destroy it. In this cosmogony, the “fourth age” in which we live is the “age of darkness” or Kali-Yuga. Its darkness stems from the fact that the industrial and technological West has perpetuated the concealment of the primordial truths discovered at the dawn of civilization. The more the West develops, the more it escapes the inaugural and permanent wisdom that the East has apprehended and learned. The result of this process is the collapse of Western civilization.
Bannon has made various uses of this apocalyptic vision of modernity. In 2016, he pointed out that the fourth epoch of world history would be characterized by a “global existential war” between the Judeo-Christian West and Islamic fascism. Apparently, Guénon’s conversion to Muslim Sufism has not prevented Bannon from proposing a religious war against the Islamic world. Part of his criticism of Europe—which overlaps with that of Guénon—points out that the secularization of the European world and its rejection of its Christian origins have left it defenseless against the supposed invasion of European lands by the Muslim world. Hence, his reproaches of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policies.
Bannon has also found a way to apply Guénon’s quasi-sacred history to his own country. Drawing on the work of two somewhat obscure historians—Neil Howe and William Strauss—Bannon has proposed that the United States is in its fourth civilizational crisis. The first was the Revolution, which made the American republic independent from the British Crown; the second was the Civil War of 1861-1865; the third was the Great Depression of 1929-1933; and the fourth is happening now. According to Howe and Strauss, historical cycles in American history occur every 80 years, with 20-year periods characterized by different “moods”: elevation, awakening, disentanglement, and crisis. In this historiography, Trump is the promise of a new period that will give renewed impetus to the cyclical wheel of time.
One would think that these rather thoughtless, eccentric, and vulgar attempts to explain history would have little influence on the policies of the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet. One would have to think twice before agreeing with this opinion. Bannon was not only the architect of the successful campaign that led to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, but the US president also allowed him to remain in the White House during his early days as head of the executive branch. We know, for example, that from that position Bannon maneuvered against the interests of the European Union.
Although Bannon left his position—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the Trump administration relatively early, this does not mean he has severed ties with Trump, stopped working on behalf of his movement, or ceased to be an influential figure in public discourse. Even today, the president remains in contact with him.
In Washington, D.C., not far from the Supreme Court, Steve Bannon insults the American airwaves with messages from the Middle Ages. ~
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