Speaking of Bannon, I know the official left position is that liberals basically hallucinated him and Putin entirely, but I really remain convinced that we are deeply lucky that Trump's ego wouldn't allow him to tolerate the man in the White House after SNL puppetmaster sketches.

Idk that Bannon is anywhere approaching genius, but he absolutely had a streak of brilliance when it came to building common cause and narrative between reactionaries in the white working class and eugenicist billionaires.

I talk a lot about the importance of vision, and Bannon was an expert at both articulating a vision of a protectionist white nationalism that appealed to reactionaries across the economic spectrum, and an alternate vision of horror that terrified those racists across the board.

It's extremely unusual for billionaires to be swayed by the same arguments and narratives as swaths of working class folks, which is why populists very often struggle to locate the capital they need to capitalize fully on the hold they may have broadly on a narrative level.

Bannon was able to use the same carrot narrative of a white American manufacturing rennaissance and stick narrative of violent Camp of the Saints post-whiteness to mobilize both capital and working class popular energy in a novel and dangerously powerful way.

I don't think we'll ever be able to understand how Trump managed to ride popular fascist movement to the White House if we don't recognize Bannon's talented syncretization & weaponization of narratives from communities as diverse as manufacturing labor, eugenicists, & Gamergate.

It was often a messy syncretization, but his other expertise was disinformation.

With disinfo, fuzziness and incoherence and self-contradiction are features, not bugs.

The idea is to erode folks' very belief in a locatable truth in order to clear the road for loud lies.

Bannon's narrative and basebuilding work mirrored his persona in its messiness and inartfulness.

If you aren't used to disinformation tactics, that seems to lend credence to the idea that Bannon's sloppiness likely indicated a lack of efficacy.

That isn't and wasn't the case.

Bannon's Achilles' heel is his inability to show proper deference to the fascists he empowered.

He didn't grasp in time that the eugenicist billionaires he mobilized would always understand him to be one of the servants, even after he delivered them the presidency.

I don't think Bannon ever quite grasped that fascist billionaires were motivated much more by his stick (the threat of increased equity) than his carrot, and that his dream of a white nationalist worker state was a pretty picture they liked to point to, never an actual goal.

That's how Bannon lost his governmental power and his Mercer money: he assumed he was a team member on shared mission that did not exist, rather than a servant working at his fascist overlords' pleasure.

Had Bannon taken the servile Stephen Miller approach to relating to his funders and strongman, he'd still be present in the palace.

It is our extreme good fortune that he learned that lesson too late.

I suspect we'd be looking at very different election results, otherwise.

Bannon isn't Darth Vader and never was, but he was and is an extremely perceptive and canny manipulator of disinformation, public narrative, the limbic systems of reactionaries, and the digital environment.

His station is reduced, but he remains a dangerous object lesson.

If we're able to drive the Trump administration out of office (and I think if we stay militant and mobilized, we will do just that), we will still be left with a country where broad swaths of the population have developed a keen taste for fascism.

We have been lucky-- VERY relatively speaking-- that our first overtly fascist president is a person so transparently insecure that he cannot not bear to tolerate competency in his administration for fear of being overshadowed and outglowed.

This inability to tolerate competence will ultimately be Trump's undoing.

And while this sort of narcissism is classically fascist, his is extreme even for a fascist strongman (which is saying something).

Fascists thrive when they are underestimated.

That's the story of the Trump presidency, frankly.

Fascists are absurd, and that apparent silliness leads liberals to assume the whole thing is an act, not fascism.

Liberals were half-right, actually: fascism is always an act.

Remember Glenn Beck on Fox talking about being a "rodeo clown"?

You can trace Bannon's disinformation campaigns directly to the groundwork laid by Beck.

It was always an act, yes.

But it was also always fascism.

Beck pioneered the clown show, Murdock innovated the carnival, and Bannon succeeded as ringmaster until he was removed by the carnival barker he himself had hired.

Bannon and Beck both forgot to bow and scrape properly before their respective overlords.

Their downfall was ultimately that failure to know their place, not one of external political strategy.

The techniques they pioneered are still extremely effective and extremely dangerous.

They're not gone or dead, either.

Murdock's disinfo empire still exists (supplemented in the US by Sinclair).

Bannon may be experiencing legal difficulties, but he and Beck are still very much the wings ready for their second act.

Putin remains eager to supplement US fascist disinfo efforts with Kremlin digital weaponry.

Qanon is a violent cult built around that disinfo.

Fascists will be restless under a Biden administration.

4chan is still, well, 4chan.

The ingredients are there. All it takes is one charismatic fascist with enough connections and sense to let those puzzle pieces come together.

That is what Trump did in 2016 (and then, thankfully, undid pretty effectively immediately upon taking office).

It can very easily happen again.

Trump had the sense to let Bannon help him put those parts together, but felt threatened by the machine's power and disassembled it.

A fascist with just a little more sense could quickly reassemble it and harness its full power.

The components are there.

All it would take is some charisma, some elbow grease, and some competence to have the machine up and running.

Not a lot, even. Just some, in the right combination.

That's not a tall order, really.

That person will come along.

When that happens, we need to have not just come to terms with the realities and peculiarities of US fascism, but to have consciously and intentionally developed a collective immune system that can meaningfully counter it.

Otherwise, it's this again, but worse.

We do that by collectively agreeing to look past the absurdity, to see through the act of fascism to the mechanics and power dynamics that rest beneath the clown mask.

That is going to be very difficult.

Underneath that mask is a mirror, and what it reflects won't be pretty.

It's the only way out, though.

Unless we do that work, a Biden presidency isn't going to be anything more than the briefest reprieve from the march towards a successfully totalitarian fascism here in this country.

We're going to have to face down the clowns and circusmasters-- Beck, Bannon, the Trumps, Murdock, Kirk, and many others-- recognize the cunning of their strategy, unpack the disinformative and populist arts they innovated and/or mastered, and figure out why they worked.

That means facing down the darkest aspects of ourselves and our nation, and confronting the very profound ways we've collectively invited certain evils into our hearts, and understand just how long that invitation has been standing and just how frequently it has been accepted.

It is not easy work, but liberation is never easy work.

It is difficult to imagine it getting done, but the discipline of hope will help us locate and hone the skill of vision.

The only way out is through.

It is a dangerous and difficult path, but there is a path.

This election is not the path, but it is a victory that opens up the possibility of finding a moment to catch our breath and find our footing.

To get our bearings, though, we have to learn to look at the map.

It is a hard study.

There are traps and steep cliffs, it is a terrifying terrain.

There is little joy in recognizing that.

At the same time, those cliffs are there, whether we want to recognize them or not.

We have to learn the map to survive.

It's that simple.

So, as much as we never want to think about this hell-circus again, we need to go back and look at the clowns.

We have to stop buying into their act, stop allowing their messiness and absurdity to disguise the threat.

Otherwise, the circus will come back and set up again in town.

And, there's never any promise it won't stay.

(the end)