Perhaps it’s just me, but a few weeks into the Trump presidency, between the tweets, executive orders, attacks and counterattacks, I feel dizzy. So I’ve decided to take a break from the daily barrage and try to find the signal amid the noise: What is the underlying philosophy of this administration?
The chief ideologist of the Trump era is surely Stephen Bannon, by many accounts now the second-most-powerful man in the government. Bannon is intelligent, broadly read and has a command of American history. I’ve waded through his many movies and speeches, and in these, he does not come across as a racist or white supremacist, as some people have charged. But he is an unusual conservative. We have gotten used to conservatives who are really economic libertarians, but Bannon represents an older school of European thought that is distrustful of free markets, determined to preserve traditional culture and religion, and unabashedly celebrates nationalism and martial values.
In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2012, for example, Bannon explained his disgust for Mitt Romney and his admiration for Sarah Palin, whose older son, Bannon noted, had served in Iraq. The rich and successful Romney, by contrast, “will not be my commander in chief,” Bannon said, because, although the candidate had five sons who “look like good all-American guys ... not one has served a day in the military.”
The core of Bannon’s worldview can be found in his movie “Generation Zero.” It centers on the financial crisis of 2008, and the opening scenes — in their fury against bankers — could have been written by Bernie Sanders. But then it moves onto its real point: The financial crisis happened because of a larger moral crisis. The film blames the 1960s and the baby boomers who tore down traditional structures of society and created a “culture of narcissism.”
How did Woodstock trigger a financial crisis four decades later? According to Bannon, the breakdown of old-fashioned values resulted in a culture of self-centeredness that measured everything and everyone in one way — money. The movie goes on to accuse the political and financial establishment of betraying its country by enacting free trade deals that benefited them but hollowed out Middle America.
In a strange way, Bannon’s dark, dystopian view of American history is closest to that of Howard Zinn, the popular far-left scholar whose A People’s History of the United States is a tale of the many ways in which the 99 percent of Americans were crushed by the country’s all-powerful elites. In the Zinn/Bannon worldview, everyday people are simply pawns manipulated by their evil overlords.
A more accurate version of recent American history would show that the cultural shift that began in the 1960s was fueled by a powerful, deeply American force — individualism. America had always been highly individualistic. Both Bannon and Trump seem nostalgic for an age — the 1930s to 1950s — that was an aberration for the nation. The Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II created a collectivist impulse that transformed the country. But after a while, Americans began to reassert their age-old desire for personal freedom, individual fulfillment and advancement. The world of the 1950s sounds great, unless you are a woman who wanted to work, an African-American who wanted to vote, an immigrant who wanted to move up or an aspiring entrepreneur stuck in a large faceless corporation.
The America that allowed individuals to flourish in the 1980s and 1990s, of course, was the place where the young and enterprising Bannon left a large bank to set up his own shop, do his own deals and make a small fortune. It then allowed him to produce and distribute movies outside of the Hollywood establishment, build a media startup into a powerhouse and become a political entrepreneur entirely outside of the Republican hierarchy. This America allowed Bannon’s brash new boss to get out of Queens into Manhattan, build skyscrapers and also his celebrity — all the while horrifying the establishment. Donald Trump is surely the poster child for the culture of narcissism.
In the course of building their careers, Trump and Bannon discarded traditionalism in every way. Both men are divorced — Bannon three times, Trump twice. They have succeeded in achieving their dreams precisely because society was wide open to outsiders, breaking traditional morality did not carry a stigma, and American elites were actually not that powerful. Their stories are the stories of modern America. But their message to the country seems to be an old, familiar one: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Fareed Zakaria’s email address is comments@fareedzakaria.com.
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