Mick Hartley

Ben Cohen on The illiberal world of Stephen Bannon:

Let me offer a brief explanation of why some aspects of Bannon's intellectual universe should be of concern to anyone who cares about the basic social empathies that are needed to sustain democracy—the same empathies, I would add, that have been badly damaged by the growth of identity politics on left and right.  

Take Bannon's own ideas, insofar as they were set out in a talk he gave to a group of European right-wingers gathered at the Vatican in 2014. In his address, he outlined a vision of a world order based on "strong countries" with "strong nationalist movements."

Bannon does not explain what he means by "strong" here, but the implications are disconcerting. Not least, it begs the question of how one defines and organizes a "nationalist" politics in nations that have achieved independence. 

In European nations, over the course of the last three decades, the answer has crystallized in the twin resistance against liberal immigration policies and the cross-border institutions of the European Union. The corresponding political goal is for nation states to reign supreme on trade, on defense, and—critically—on regional spheres of influence. In this climate, both liberal democracy and its American example will cease to be posited as a system superior to other forms of government. 

As strong as these nationalist movements can hope to be, they will never enjoy periods of harmony or consensus when in government—unless of course they enforce it. Democratic politics will therefore become an ugly confrontation marked by terse and coarse exchanges, character assassination, rewards for doctrinal orthodoxy, retribution for dissent, and dangerous polarization between the races and ethnicities and religions that compose our society. 

Many of the world's illiberal and authoritarian states will become our friends and trading partners, and our new-found tolerance of their norms will eventually come into conflict with the maintenance of our own. I have no doubt that voices arguing that "Russia tried democracy and it didn't work—now we should try it their way" will grow louder and less exotic. 

Is it possible to conjure up a more benign vision of a world in which the democracies are represented by Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and, perhaps, future French President Marine Le Pen, at the same time as authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan become sustainedly more oppressive? Suffice to say, this prospect is what girds the widespread apprehension over what the next four years have in store—and there is perhaps no better emblem of that, for now, than Stephen Bannon.