Here are some highlights from this 2019 book:
* Bannon functions as a performance-enhancing drug. The secret of his power over Trump, and over some large swath of the American people, has been his mythopoeic abilities, writing the script, setting the stage, finding the actors, and directing the mis-en-scene so effectively that anti-democratic ideas have, for many Americans, come to seem sensible and inspiring, while democratic ideas appear irrational and profane. Bannon once called Trump a flawed vessel, but into that striving, overheated human container Bannon has poured a magical potion, a fearsome brew. Bannon is a mythologist. He scripted and produced a new and pernicious political movie, and he would like to craft its sequels. In the first social performance, Donald Trump played the heroic protagonist, and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democrats, and Enlightenment ideas played the dark Beast that the barking, bleached blond populist entered the arena to slay. Bannon once confided to Variety that he had a “kinetic editing style that seeks to overwhelm audiences.”
* It is of importance that the far reaches of this symbolic hyperbole are most typically reached only in the intellectual classes, and that the general population likely resists these symbolic extremes, even if they participate to some degree in the same binaries. F93E [Flight 93 Election essay] even acknowledges this, if in a
backhanded way, in its category of “fools,” discussed above. Politics is a sacred realm especially for intellectuals in a culture that has progressively removed traditional religious pathways to the sacred from the public sphere, and most profoundly so for the social and cultural elites who spend the most time in secular educational and other institutions. There is considerable evidence that politics has a tendency to become the new religion for some segment of the intellectual and other elite classes that have lost the religious musicality that was once widespread in their ranks.
* After the election, it was at least as widespread, as even casual observers of the American political landscape must have been able to observe. Some of this language percolated out of the relatively narrow sphere of the written word political punditry and has become integrated into mainstream TV news coverage of politics. A New York Times selection of writers responding to the election results on November 9 gives something of a flavor of
how much apocalypticism dominated the left’s response to the outcome. Paul Krugman predicted an immediate economic freefall from which markets would perhaps never recover. Viet Thang Nguyen and Dani Rodrick imagined the possibility of a plummet into fascism once Krugman’s market collapse took place. Seth Grossman mimicked multiple Hollywood and pop music celebrities in insinuating that moving out of the country might be the proper response to Trump’s election.13 Robert Stavins announced that we now could with certainty say “[g]oodbye to the climate.” The title of Peter Wehner’s piece fairly summed up the entire proceedings: “When the Decent Drapery of Life is Rudely Torn Off ….”
* There is perhaps a case to be made that Americans are an apocalyptic people, that we are somehow, by the accidents of our history or the idiosyncrasies of our deep predilections, uniquely drawn to this mode of meaning-making, and so this may well be a permanent feature of our way of conceiving and settling conflicts. But it is likely that there are also particular developments in contemporary American social structure and culture that have pushed this apocalyptic mode to the fore.
