Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself by Amanda Marcotte

Author:Amanda Marcotte [Marcotte, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510737457
Google: _miCDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1510737456
Barnesnoble: 1510737456
Goodreads: 39829197
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2018-04-04T14:00:00+00:00

Case Study: Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart who had the official title of Donald Trump’s chief strategist for a few short months, is probably the greatest evidence we have that Trumpism is the first post-modern fascist movement. Authoritarian, proto-fascist and outright fascist movements of the past seem, to this non-historian at least, to proceed without much sense of self-awareness. Bannon’s approach, however, is a sort of meta-fascism. One always gets the sense, watching him, that he is watching himself perform the role of fascist demagogue, and calculatingly models his rhetoric and approach on the greatest hits of fascism’s past.

To be clear, fascists of years past always had a sense of theater. The KKK gave themselves elaborate titles like Grand Dragon and wore costumes with elaborate insignia. The Nazis perfected the art of the operatic political rally. Augusto Pinochet, like many other dictators in history, probably even showered while wearing medals and sashes and listening to dramatic, patriotic music.

But these folks mostly came on their near-campy fixation with high drama naturally. With Bannon, there’s always this lingering sense that he decided that he was going to be the man who revived 20th century fascism, and so is consciously modeling his rhetoric (though not his clothes—the man in a grotesque slob) after authoritarians who have come before.

Bannon is to the KKK as Netflix’s Stranger Things is to Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. It’s fascism as a retro fad.

Which doesn’t mean he’s insincere, to be clear. All one needs to do is watch a video of Bannon speaking for more than 60 seconds at a clip to grasp that the man is an entirely sincere maniac. That he’s playing a role doesn’t mean he’s playing around. It’s just that he has a nostalgic quality to his hate-mongering and populist posturing that is hard to miss, and not a little peculiar. Of all the things from the past to get obsessively sentimental about, it’s just straight up odd to fixate on fascist movements, especially since all that history shows things rarely work out well for those who get really into the idea of turning modern democracies into authoritarian ethno-states.

Then again, there’s always some guy who thinks he can succeed where others have failed. Hitler may have ended up dead and with his body thrown in a river, our modern fascists seem to be thinking, but that’s because he was bad at Twitter.

Bannon likes to pose as a dirt-under-the-nails man of the people, but like most of the self-assigned leaders of right wing populism, he’s far more of an elitist than those liberals he decries. Bannon got his start, with a Harvard MBA, as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs during the absolute height of the yuppie era, the ’80s. He then went on to join another community he now likes to stigmatize as too cosmopolitan—Hollywood, as a film and TV producer. It was there that he got into right wing conspiracy theories, eventually joining forces with Andrew Breitbart, a right wing provocateur who ran a site called Big Government that eventually morphed into Breitbart News.

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