Doppelganger, page 14
Steve Bannon, regardless of whatever else he may be, is first and foremost a strategist. And he has a knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away. This is what he helped Trump do in 2016. He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton. Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats—most of it white, but not all of it. Bannon crafted a campaign message out of the betrayals of his rivals: Trump would be a new kind of Republican, one who would stand up to Wall Street, shred corporate trade deals, close the border to supposedly job-stealing immigrants, and end foreign wars—moreover, unlike Republicans before, he pledged to protect social programs like Medicare and Social Security. This was the original MAGA promise.
Of course, it was a bait and switch—Trump filled his administration with former Wall Street executives, made mostly minor changes to trade policy, escalated tensions abroad, and lavished the rich with tax cuts. Of his populist campaign rhetoric, all that really survived was the race baiting—against immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and anything having to do with China. It was enough to hold on to his base, but not enough to win reelection, certainly not after his murderous mismanagement of Covid-19.
At the time my doppelganger started appearing on War Room, less than three months into the Biden presidency, Bannon was getting serious about sculpting his new MAGA Plus coalition. It was in this context that he recognized Wolf’s “slavery forever” message about vaccine passports as a potentially potent crossover issue. Other Naomi’s surveillance warnings, regardless of how divorced they were from the reality of the apps, were generating deep passion among a sizable number of people who were concerned about privacy and surveillance but were being dismissed by establishment liberals in politics and media. That’s Bannon’s kind of issue: ripe for the picking.
He quickly folded the vaccine apps into a basket of issues he calls “Big Tech Warfare,” a category that includes not only familiar complaints about social media companies suspending the accounts of high-profile conservatives but also more obscure and even esoteric concerns. For instance, Bannon has a dedicated “transhumanism” correspondent whose sole role appears to be to scare listeners with accounts of the many ways that technology companies dream of an “upgraded” humanity aided by implants, robotics, and gene splicing. Once again, Bannon has identified a neglected issue with cross-partisan appeal: many leftists are concerned about the dehumanizing impacts of tech on workers treated as extensions of machines (I know I am), not to mention the dystopian possibilities of a future in which the rich can buy genetic upgrades for themselves and their kids. Many conservatives, meanwhile, oppose this kind of techno fetishism for different reasons; they see it as an affront to God’s plan.
Bannon recognized similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma. Drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left; they’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against. But aside from some grumbling, there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering from the pandemic, and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed—but, once again, via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than the real scandals.
Bannon sometimes plays audio montages of MSNBC and CNN shows being “brought to you by Pfizer”—the clear implication being that they cannot be trusted because they are in the pay of these companies. It’s rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy—against you,” he says. “Until you wake up.” When he does this, it strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky. Or Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader known for his EAT THE RICH jacket. Or, for that matter, me. But, as always in the Mirror World, nothing is as it seems.
There are many rising stars on the right who follow a similar playbook. Flush with dollars from tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, and endorsed by Trump, they promise a mix-and-match of bringing back factory jobs that pay family-supporting wages, building the border wall, fighting the toxic drug supply, liberating speech from Big Tech, and banning “woke” curricula. Among those building careers around versions of this platform in the United States are JD Vance in Ohio, Josh Hawley in Missouri, and Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her bid to become governor of Arizona (and claimed, of course, that the election was stolen). Very similar versions of electoral diagonalism have taken root in countries around the world, from Sweden to Brazil.
I’m not surprised that these messages are resonating. For years I was part of internationalist left movements that protested outside meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum in Davos, G8 summits, and the International Monetary Fund for their roles in undermining democracies and advancing the interests of transnational capital; in the United States, we called out both major parties for being beholden to corporate donors and serving the rich rather than the people who voted them into office. This was the energy behind Occupy Wall Street, and then behind Bernie, and that coursed through various battles against new oil and gas projects. But our movement never won power.
And now our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into dark doppelgangers of themselves. The structural critiques of capitalism are gone, and in their place are discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise. This trend is perfectly distilled by Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022 and is leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), which has deep fascist roots in the country. An early partner in Steve Bannon’s international populist project, Meloni threads her speeches with pop-culture references and rails against a system that reduces everyone to consumers. She also declared, in a supposed rebuke to “woke” ideology, that “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian.”
Watching her meteoric rise, I was reminded of how different Italy was in the summer of 2001, when the alter-globalization movement reached its highest point, drawing a million people to the streets of Genoa during a G8 summit to protest corporate attacks on democracy and culture, and the effects of rampant consumerism. That movement came from the left—young Italians, alongside farmers and trade unionists, defended labor rights as well as migrant rights, while taking pride in their country’s distinct culture. But in a pattern that repeated itself in many countries, left-wing parties lost their confidence after the September 11 attacks and attendant security crackdowns, and the legacy of that surrender is obvious: today it is Meloni denouncing a system in which everyone is reduced to being “perfect consumer slaves”—only instead of offering an analysis of capital, a system that must enclose all aspects of life inside the market in order to mine them as new profit centers, she blames trans people, immigrants, secularists, internationalism, and the left for a hollowness at the core of modernity. And while she rails against the “big financial speculators,” she has no policies to rein them in, only attacks on Italy’s meager unemployment protections.
Bannon isn’t offering his listeners any real alternative to the corporate predation he rails against, either—he’s just fleecing them in more small-time ways, telling them to buy precious metals and FJB coins and disaster-ready meals, as well as towels from his main sponsor, MyPillow. (“The War Room is a cash machine because it costs nothing to produce,” he told The Atlantic.) He adopts many of the arguments of what was once a robust anti-war left to oppose ballooning U.S. military spending in Ukraine, accusing the “cartel” ruling Washington of being in the pocket of “the military-industrial complex”—and then does everything he can to aim that same sprawling complex directly at China, a surefire recipe for World War III. Still, you can’t blame a strategist for being strategic. And it’s highly strategic to pick up the resonant issues that your opponents have carelessly left unattended.
To return to an earlier theme, corporate branding offers some useful tools for understanding the dynamic. Under trademark law, a brand that is not actively being used can be deemed dormant and thus fair game for another party to usurp. I started to feel that what had been happening to me, with Other Naomi, has happened to the left much more broadly—with Bannon and Vance and Meloni and others. Issues that we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces. And now they were being usurped, taken over by their twisted doubles in the Mirror World. If the arrival of one’s doppelganger is a message that something needs attending to, it feels like this flashing message is something to which a great many of us need to attend.
A Theater of Inclusion
As Bannon gazes through the one-way glass, he is not only learning what issues his opponents are neglecting and ignoring, and finding fertile new territories to claim as his own, or at least pretend to. He is also taking note of more subtle failings—the way issues are discussed, the way disagreements are negotiated, the way people are treated by their friends and comrades. Through the one-way glass, he is studying all our hypocrisies and inconsistencies so that he can make a show of doing the exact opposite.
Speaking of the movements I know something about, I can say this: On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring—universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And in contrast to Bannon’s courting of disaffected Democrats, we also don’t put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren’t already in our movements. Sure, we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger.
And there is something else that I have noticed while listening to Bannon—he sticks, fairly judiciously, to the issues where there is the most common ground: hating Biden, rejecting vaccines, bashing Big Tech, fearmongering about migrants, casting doubt on election results. He skates lightly over more traditionally conservative issues that he may care about but that are likely to alienate some of his newfound friends, including abortion and gun rights. He doesn’t ignore them, but they don’t take up nearly as much airtime as one might expect.
This, once again, is the opposite of what happens on large parts of the left. When we have differences, we tend to focus on them obsessively, finding as many opportunities as possible to break apart. Important disagreements need to be hashed out, and many conflicts that arise in progressive spaces are over behaviors that, when unchallenged, make those spaces unwelcoming or dangerous for the people they target. But it’s not a great secret that plenty of people routinely go too far, turning minor language infractions into major crimes, while adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings often find it off-putting—or straight-up absurd. (“Speak in the vernacular,” the radical historian Mike Davis once pleaded with young organizers. “The moral urgency of change acquires its greatest grandeur when expressed in shared language.”)
Moreover, when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled “privileged,” there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances that would make us stronger and more powerful. All of this is highly unstrategic, because whichever groups and individuals we kick to the curb, the Mirror World is there, waiting to catch them, praise their courage, and offer a sympathetic ear.
Bannon’s signature move is to reach out to anyone who has recently been exiled by the left or pilloried by The New York Times and offer them a platform. For instance, after one such takedown, he handed an entire episode over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to spread his anti-vaccination gospel. Bannon was solicitous to the point of mawkish, praising the Kennedy family’s long history of public service and devotion to the poor. This, of course, was a preview for RFK’s presidential primary run. Bannon was also making an unsubtle point. He was saying that, unlike those liberals, who regard the people who listen to War Room as “deplorables” and as subhumans, he can have polite—even generous—conversations across partisan divides, and his posse will never cancel him for it.
Bannon, who has done as much as anyone in contemporary times to unleash the floodgates of xenophobic hate in the United States, has even begun to adopt the language of “othering” to describe how liberals treat his listeners. This is key, he says, to why he has been forced to build the Mirror World, with its mirror social media and mirror currency and mirror book publishing. Because his people were being “othered.” But no more. “Never again will they be able to other you, disappear you … That’s what the Chinese Communist Party did, that’s what the Bolsheviks did, that’s what the Nazis did,” Bannon told his listeners right before Christmas 2021 (he was trying to sell them FJB coins). And he added, “Nobody in this audience will ever do that to anyone. You wouldn’t think of it. You would say ‘that’s not fair.’”
This is Bannon’s tone much of the time: warm, welcoming, protective of his “community,” constantly praising listeners for their kindness, intelligence, and courage. All of it is designed as a rebuke to the harshness, snobbishness, sectarianism, and identity absolutism on parts of the highly educated left. Of course, Bannon has another mode—the one in which he bares his teeth and threatens to put “heads on pikes.” But that mode is reserved exclusively for his enemies.
As part of building MAGA Plus, Bannon has made clear efforts to tone down the overt racism of his show. Opposition to what he calls “border warfare” is still a pillar of the project, but alongside it is a great deal of talk about what he now calls “inclusive nationalism.” Bannon claims (and polling supports this claim) that growing numbers of Black and Latino people, particularly men, are open to voting Republican, in part over frustrations with how Covid measures affected their jobs and small businesses, and also over discomfort with their kids coming home with unfamiliar ideas about the mutability of gender.
Similar attempts at diversifying the hard-right base can be seen in Australia and France. These movements are still built around hate and division—on scapegoating migrants; on pathologizing trans youth; on bashing teachers trying to support these students or tell a truer story of their nations’ past; and on scaremongering about communists and Islamists. “Inclusive nationalism” just means that they have found some new blocs of voters who are also looking for scapegoats, and not all of them are white, or male.
The endgame is not hidden. Bannon tells his posse that they are going to “run this country for one hundred years, [for] every ethnicity, every color, every race, every religion—that’s an inclusive nationalism.” Though it didn’t pan out in the 2022 midterms, it’s possible this approach will be enough to cobble together another presidential victory—but, if not, there are backup plans in the works. According to the results of a Public Religion Research Institute poll released in November 2021, among Republicans who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, almost four in ten say that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Sandwiched between segments alleging that the 2020 election was stolen, Bannon personally pitches an at-home target-practice system, which uses lasers instead of live ammunition in your automatic rifle and helps build “muscle memory” for the real thing.
Step 3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution … Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order.”
The person who wrote that (back in 2007) is Naomi Wolf, now found regularly on the War Room, hosted by a man trying to make sure that, next election day, the thugs will be at every polling station.
Rebrand Complete
In the early months, when I would hear Wolf on War Room: Pandemic describing some straightforward plan to encourage vaccination as one step away from concentration camps, I sometimes thought I could detect a suppressed giggle in Bannon’s voice, as if he was thinking, I cannot believe this feminist chick actually went further than I ever would. Do go on … He keeps his composure, however. Just as he knew in 2016 that Trump could not win without pissed-off, mostly white union guys, he is sure now that pissed-off, mostly white suburban moms—nerves frayed from those years of yo-yo remote schooling and closed gyms; still revved up about vaccine mandates and getting shadow banned on Instagram; genuinely worried about the well-being of their kids and their small businesses; done being dismissed and mocked as “Karens” by mean liberals—are the path to the next right-wing resurgence. Last time, Bannon railed against Wall Street and the globalists who had fleeced the Everyman; now he rails against that plus Big Pharma, Big Tech, and “woke capitalism,” all of which are tormenting the Everymom by poisoning the minds and bodies of her kids.
