Steve Bannon: The Trump Takover

Paranoiac Progressive Hit Pieces

(The Fascists are Coming...)

Steve Bannon,,,, BOO!

To some, he's more of a Super Hero... as opposed to a technofeudal Super Villain

Slavoj Žižek, "Musk against Bannon: Welcome to the world of ‘produsers’"

Perhaps the lowest point in the downward spiral of our public life is the “CostCo Guys,” a duo of father Andrew “A.J.” Befumo Jr. and his son Eric Justice Befumo who found popularity on TikTok and YouTube in 2024 for their videos at the warehouse store CostCo. Their first video to go viral on the platform was of them shopping for meatballs for Eric’s mother. They subsequently began making videos of themselves rating products therein, either positively as a “boom” or negatively as a “doom.” These videos are full of paradoxes that defy understanding: they appear to be spontaneous amateur recordings, but we now know that they were carefully staged with the help of assistants; they appear to be publicity for CostCo, but (at first, at least) made for free, with no collaboration of CostCo — the couple was at some point even thrown out of a CostCo store while doing there a recording.

As such, CostCo Boys epitomize a wide-spread tendency of free publicity — recall just that thousands of girls are putting on the web video clips that publicize some brand of body lotions or lipstick or nail polish... a capitalist’s dream come true, and an unexpected of the economic neo-feudalism. This paradox of publicity made for free is much worse than its opposite, free creation which is secretly financed as publicity. It designates the moment when publicity assumes a life of its own — and this is, perhaps, one of the definitions of the end of the world.

This tendency is grounded in the new way of life that is emerging among the younger generations all around the world; its material bases are the new digital spaces of communication — Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok — which imply short attention span, quick jumps from one to another message, and multitasking. The much celebrated new media first appeared as an anarchist dream come true, the overcoming of the divide between private and public, between producers and users-consumers: we are all “produsers” (a neologism coined by Yanis Varoufakis), involved in direct exchange with no center regulating it and posing limits, no big Other limiting our freedom… and we ended as serfs in a neo-feudal private corporate space.

With regard to Donald Trump, he is a liberal in the sense of allowing corporations to operate outside state control — a stance especially dangerous when we are dealing with global warming. We recently learned that “the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is working to preserve scientific data and research on public government websites amid fears that topics like climate change and green energy will be removed from government websites after President-elect Trump takes office” — a nightmarish scenario where the broad public will be simply deprived of proper information and thus rendered unable to make rational decisions about proper measures in ecology.

There were never so many billionaires in a US government as they are in the list Trump, the self-professed partisan of working people, is proposing. In short, Trump’s liberalism de facto amounts to much more freedom for the new digital feudal masters (to use the term of Varoufakis), and the irony is that Trump himself — who officially opposes big corporations, claiming that they are globalists that exploit American workers — relies on the support of these new feudal masters whose perfect embodiment is Elon Musk. This is why one should be very careful when one designates Trump as a fascist. There is no place for feudal corporate masters in fascism since the ruling fascist party by definition exerts political monopoly. What is happening now in the US – techno-feudal masters directly occupying high government positions – is unimaginable in fascism.

No wonder cracks are already appearing in Trump’s political edifice in the guise of the conflict between digital-corporate masters who support Trump — Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel — and the MAGA populists who pretend to speak for the ordinary workers. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are defending the tech industry’s reliance on foreign-born engineers as the incoming Trump administration prepares to crack down on immigration; Ramaswamy openly complained that Americans are not up to snuff when it comes to competing with brainy foreigners, and he blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a decline in US dynamism in science and technology, leading tech companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote on X.

It is, of course, difficult to harmonize this stance with Trump’s long history of “America First” nativism and racism, calling for “bloody” mass deportations, the end of birthright citizenship, and claiming immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country.” So it is no surprise that the populist MAGA reaction was quick to come and quite brutal; as expected, the most vocal was Steve Bannon, the old Trumpian “leftist” who openly declares himself as a “Leninist for the 21st century,” saying that Lenin “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Recall that Bannon was thrown out of the White House when he not only opposed Trump’s tax plan but openly advocated raising taxes for the rich to 40 percent, plus he argued that rescuing banks with public money is “socialism for the rich.”

In a CNN interview back in June 2018, Steve Bannon declared his political ideal to be the unity of the right and left populism against the old political establishment. He praised the coalition of the rightist Northern League and the leftist populist Five Star movement which ruled Italy a decade or so ago as the model for the world to follow, and as the proof that the politics is moving beyond left and right. The stake of this (politically and aesthetically) disgusting idea is, of course, to obfuscate the basic social antagonism, which is why it is condemned to fail — although it can cause a lot of misfortunes before its final failure.

While any pact between Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders is excluded for obvious reasons, a key element of the left’s strategy should be to ruthlessly exploit divisions in the enemy camp and fight to get Bannon followers to their side. To cut a long story short, there is no victory of the left without the broad alliance of all anti-establishment forces. One should never forget that our true enemy is the global capitalist establishment and not the new populist right which is merely a reaction to its impasses. If we forget this, then the left will simply disappear from the map, as it is already happening with the moderate social-democratic left in much of Europe, or, as Slawomir Sierakowski put it: “As left-wing parties have collapsed, the sole option remaining for voters is conservatism or right-wing populism.”

The split in the Trumpian movement is thus personalized in two names: Elon Musk versus Steve Bannon. Bannon demanded “reparations” from Musk and other tech leaders for cutting Americans out of jobs; for him, the visa issue is “central to the way they gutted the middle class in this country.” He noted: “We love converts, but the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.” They should not “come up and go to the pulpit in their first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be.”

“If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off,” he said.

Trump is here in deep trouble: his appeal stands or falls with the “impossible” coalition between digital feudal masters and exploited workers — if he chooses one side, the MAGA movement falls apart. At the end of December 2024, in his first clear choice, Trump took the side of Musk, but in the long term, he is condemned to make compromises — what compromises? The only way out for him that I see is to mobilize distinction between the good (highly skilled and educated) immigrants and the bad ones (criminals, rapists, poor homeless refugees) — in short, he will have to play the racist card more and more.

This strategy may work in the short term, but the paradox is that if it does succeed, its unintended result will be double: new highly skilled immigrants will be well-paid and thus strengthen the rich strata of the US society, while ordinary low-paid Americans will have to take the jobs hitherto reserved for poor or illegal immigrants — anti-immigrant populists will thus be even more dissatisfied with the system. Not to mention the fact that immigrants are doing many (mostly illegal) jobs, from domestic ones (housecleaning, gardening, babysitting…) to seasonal harvest collecting, which enable the middle classes to enjoy their way of life. If Trump goes too far in throwing out illegal immigrants, he will soon face discontent from an unexpected source: it is totally utopian to presume poor white Americans will take over the jobs now covered by illegal immigrants.

Now already a rage is burning among poor Americans, directed at well-paid and highly educated immigrants who employ white Americans to take care of their home life — Indian programmers have already achieved a mythic status (although they are not as numerous as it may appear). More than a decade ago, a young British babysitter employed by a (relatively) wealthy couple of Indian programmers living in Boston was accused of causing the child’s death by her neglect — the surprising fact was that in this case, the public sympathy was on the side of the British nanny, and the hatred directed at the Indian couple. (When the Indian is a nanny serving a white couple, then she is demonized, of course.)

There is also an ideological tension immanent to each of the two aspects of Trumpian politics: the corporate feudal masters present themselves as radical liberals, they advocate the use of mass media free from restrictions imposed by the state (the actual result of this freedom is, as we have already seen, the freedom of digital masters to control their digital feudal domain), while the self-declared partisans of ordinary people are deeply authoritarian, they advocate stronger state control over political and cultural life, banning phenomena they consider subversive — LGBT+ pressures, leftist protest movements). Just recall what legislation was passed in Florida in the last years, from book prohibitions to direct state interventions in curriculums.

Trump advocating ordinary people’s interests is like Kane from Welles’ classic movie — when a rich banker accuses him of speaking for the poor mob, he answers that, yes, his newspaper speaks for the poor ordinary people, but it does that in order to prevent the true danger which is that the poor ordinary people will speak for themselves.

So how will this tension end? There is no automatic solution; the outcome depends on political struggle, not on “objective” socio-economic processes. We can in no way be sure that the described tensions will lead Trumpian politics to ruins — it is quite possible that it will endlessly postpone its downfall through improvised new compromises. We can only be sure of one thing: the longer Trumpian politics reign, the more catastrophic the long-term situation will be.