Steve Bannon: A Dangerous Man and a “Leninist” Helping the Russians to Subvert Our Democracy

Steve Bannon at Breitbart was an early supporter of Don the Con, and he was rewarded for his effective propaganda work with an “adviser” position to the President.  He has publicly stated that he wants to destroy the government, just like Lenin did in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.  Here’s a quote from a recent Smithsonian magazine article about Russia:

Unlike Marxism-Leninism, Lenin’s tactics enjoy excellent health today.  In a capitalist Russia, Putin favors his friends [nepotism], holds power closely [autocracy] and doesn’t compromise with rivals [partisanism].  In America, too, we’ve reached a point in our politics where the strictest partisanship rules.  Steve Bannon, the head of the right-wing media organization Breitbart News, who went on to be an adviser to the president [he has left government, but continues to agitate on Don’s behalf], told a reporter in 2013, “I’m a Leninist. . . I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy today’s establishment.”  Of course he didn’t mean he admired Lenin’s ideology– far from it– but Lenin’s methods have  powerfully modern appeal.  Lenin showed the world how well not compromising can work.  A response to that revolutionary innovation of his has yet to be figured out.

Bannon’s technique, extreme partisanship, in which one’s critics become demons and devils, has fractured the American body politic and induced a third of the public to support a completely incompetent and charming, attractive self-declared billionaire to the bitter end despite his admitted sexual predation, adultery, and extreme pettiness to his critics– with negative propaganda against his critics and lies about Don’s “policies” (Don’s main positive technique is to appoint destructive, extreme right-wing and white supremacist figures who are his partisans, like Sessions and Pruitt, to positions of power and allow them free rein to reverse Obama’s policies and bring government under the control of financiers, industrialists, and religious fanatic millionaires.)  Millionaires are, of course, better people than those who are not wealthy– simply because they have money.  There is no room for people who have no interest in being rich and never made a pile of money nor inherited wealth– Don the Con has explicitly denigrated the non-wealthy as “unsuccessful”, ignoring the fact that some principled people are not interested in accumulating wealth for its own sake.

Extreme partisanship does not stop at criticizing one’s opponent’s policies and tactics, but proceeds to name-calling and demonizing anyone who dares to criticize one’s own policies.  It ends in intimidating, silencing, imprisoning or assassinating one’s opponents, even those who are insufficiently enthusiastic about the policies one wishes to institute, especially those who expose one’s secret, illegal tactics.

Extreme partisanship leads to resentment and ignites internecine strife, weakening the structure of society (the “establishment”); the eventual outcome is civil war, which under Lenin consumed Russia for ten years and wiped out what was left of polite society.  This would be an undesirable outcome in the United States despite Bannon’s ardent wishes for destruction: civil liberties and human rights would suffer, gross domestic product and our standard of living would decline precipitously, and there would be more poverty, more imbalance of wealth, and more suffering and death.

Speaking of Russia, here’s another quote from the article that should be very disturbing to advocates of free democracy:

But if Russia no longer exports international Socialism, it has not stopped involving itself in other countries’ internal affairs. Which is not to suggest that other countries, including us, don’t sometimes do the same. But by turning the state’s secret and coercive forces actively outward, the Bolsheviks invented something new under the sun for Russia. It has found exporting mischief to be a great relief—and, evidently, a point of strategy, and of pride. On the street in Yekaterinburg, an older woman, recognizing Thomas and me as Americans, cackled with great glee. “Americans!” she called out. “Trump won! We chose him!” In June, James Comey, the former director of the FBI, testifying before Congress, said, “We’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal.” The habit of Russian intrusion that Comey is talking about began at the revolution.