Steve Bannon on Revolution
A Chronicle of Revolution (ACOR4)
In my book End Times I wrote about Steve Bannon in several chapters, because I felt that he was an important figure in the MAGA movement, well worth paying attention to. Bannon first met Donald Trump in 2010. In 2016 he became the chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign. In 2017 he was appointed as Trump’s chief strategist and senior adviser, but he resigned from this position in August of the same year. The relationship between the two reached a low point when Bannon’s disparaging comments about the president and his family were made public in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury.
For a while, it looked like Bannon’s sun has set. On top of everything, he was subject to several criminal prosecutions—for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering (eventually he pleaded guilty to one felony count and was sentenced to a three-year conditional discharge) and for contempt of Congress (for which he was convicted and jailed for four months in the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury, CT).
Despite these legal woes, Bannon’s political influence greatly increased in the past 3–4 years. Or, perhaps, it’s the other way around—being jailed by the regime only burnishes a revolutionary’s reputation as, for example, happened to Vladimir Lenin. And Bannon is self-described “Leninist”, who reportedly said “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today's establishment.”
During his first presidential term, Trump didn’t see himself as a radical. According to Benjamin Teitelbaum (in War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers, published in 2020):
As he [Bannon] told me, “to Make America Great Again, you’ve got to . . . you’ve got to disrupt, before you rebuild.” In Bannon’s eyes, Donald Trump is “the Disrupter.” I’ve heard him say “destroyer” as well. That’s Steve’s understanding, at least. Steve recalls having a quick conversation with Trump about it all in the White House in April 2017, following some media coverage of his reading of The Fourth Turning. The president wasn’t amused. He saw his role as that of a builder rather than a destroyer, and was turned off by all the weird talk of doom and destruction and collapse. Steve didn’t push it. It was just a quick exchange. And besides, there was no need to make Trump see the world the way he did.
Perhaps at that time Trump thought of himself as a builder, but the first 100 days of his second presidency showed that Bannon’s 2017 characterization of Trump as “the Disrupter” was accurate, or even an understatement.
Becoming a loyal member of Trump’s power network, while avoiding a formal position in either his 2024 campaign, or administration, served Bannon well. Today he is probably the most influential social media figure and political strategist on the right, and his influence now reaches well beyond the MAGA movement. Here are three examples:
Gavin Newsom Finds Some Surprising Common Ground with Steve Bannon. The California governor hosted one of the architects of President Trump’s political movement on his new podcast, and their friendly sparring revealed a few points of agreement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/us/politics/gavin-newsom-podcast-steve-bannon.html
The Democratic Senator Taking Cues from Trumpism. Douthat: Is there a parallel — obviously you think that the substance is different — but is there a parallel there between the Chris Murphy agenda and, let’s say, the Steve Bannon agenda, particularly on this idea that the structure of the economy is unfair to the working class?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opinion/democrats-working-class-chris-murphy.html
Bannon’s interview on NPR: How the First 100 Days of Trump Changed the World
Interestingly, although not surprising, there was quite a pushback against allowing Bannon to air his views on that bastion of the left, so that NPR’s public editor felt necessary to defend this choice: Why is Steve Bannon on NPR? Diverse viewpoints lead to a more complete picture.
As my readers, who have read my statement on the non-partisan and non-ideological stance of this blog, know, I am fully in agreement with the sentiment that “diverse viewpoints lead to a more complete picture”. Let’s, therefore, delve into this interview to see how my vision of where we are, as laid out in A Chronicle of Revolution (ACOR) blog series, corresponds, or not, with what Bannon says (note that all previous ACOR posts I wrote before watching the Bannon’s NPR interview). The following quotes were checked against the interview transcript.
On where America is today: It's a revolution about America's role in the world, our position geopolitically, the global commercial relationships, plus the administrative state and how the country's governed.
On the DOGE: I do believe you had to have a trauma-inducing force like DOGE to kind of rattle the administrative state.
On 5D chess: I think he (Donald Trump) looks like a very smart deal guy trying to move the chess pieces.
On where we are going: There's going to be a confrontation. I think the convergence, particularly of spending cuts, and the simultaneously constitutional crisis that we're hurdling to, is going to make this summer a summer like no other.
During the interview I heard him say additional things, which apparently didn’t make it to the transcript (those of you who will listen to the podcast, let me know if I garbled anything):
On Voice of America: Demolish it all down to the statutory deck plates, and then rebuild it.
On the post-WWII liberal world order: it made the elites wealthy (those who run it), while working class, middle class people are worse off, basic Americans got screwed.
On balancing the budget: If you don’t cut Pentagon, you are not serious.
On the “hemispheric defense”: ally with Russia (against CCP), reduce military budget by $300-400 million.
So, what’s my take on all this? In my view, Bannon deserves to be characterized as the chief strategist for the MAGA movement. He presents a fairly coherent doctrine for the movement, which helps us make sense of specific actions of the Trump administration (more so than listening to Trump himself, whose statements tend to be much more situational and can change from one moment to another). This doctrine is a revolutionary one, so the current emphasis is on destruction. But there is also a positive aspect (what kind of new world should be built in the future), and at least some political opponents of the MAGA movement are, apparently, taking note of that.
An alternative to such a focus on a single individual is to delve into massive program documents such as Agenda 47 or Project 2025. What do people think?
I live in Wuhan and have a very different view of how change occurs, and HOW we all should want it, and it's not the way Stevie imagines. What Stevie is imagining is way more pain that Americans can deal with. Given the fractious nature of American society, imagining something lovely is going to organically form and become a great society is nonsense of the most childish sort. Talk to folks that lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They'll tell you what burning it all down gets you.
We should be partnering with China, not Putin. The length, depth, and breadth of the characterizations, misrepresentations, and a few outright lies about China are criminal. China is not a communist country; it hasn't been even remotely commie since 1998. It is a market economy, an entrepreneurial capitalist country, with the difference between the US and China being capital does not control the political state. Chinese are the most hard wired for capitalist entrepreneurial activity as exist anywhere on Earth. The Chinese economic explosion happened when the old line commies finally took their boot of the necks of the populace and the place exploded in entrepreneurial business.
China needs natural resources. Previous civilizational advances (Tang, Ming, Qing) pretty much used up what was once one of the world's greatest repositories for natural resources. We need Chinese engineers, manufacturing innovations, and general work ethic. Popular media misrepresentations of China has them sneakily working to turn the world into a Marxist state. Nope. Chinese just want to do business. To explain the dynamics and actual conditions would take way more time and energy than I am currently inspired to provide. Most Americans will never believe it anyway.
Why anyone imagines Bannon as some sort of brilliant tactician is beyond me. Undertaking earth shifting change by burning it all down and then imagining magic will rise like a Phoenix out of the ashes is ludicrous. The guy has no plan. Zip. Nada. Just burn it down. This is the tactic of a child moron, not a strategy for advancing civilization.
I think that Kurt from Wuhan has identified what Bannon's misses: The problem is not the "administrative state" but oligarchs (billionaires & Wall Street) who have taken over the US state. As Kurt says, "the difference between the US and China being capital does not control the political state [in China]". Also, "Talk to folks that lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They'll tell you what burning it all down gets you." And the Bolsheviks led to Stalin.
What needs "disruption" is not the administrative state (= the DOGE target) but US hegemony (military "full spectrum dominance", endless geopolitical wars and maneuvers, economic and cultural domination, etc). But Trump's pretend retreat into nationalism will fail because the problems are global. That is, a new global political and economic order will come about one way or another. Let's do our part to help something worth salvaging to survive the collapse.