Steve Bannons Intellectual Reputation Is a Charade

[applegrove]

By Jamelle Bouie at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/09/steve_bannon_s_reputation_as_an_intellectual_and_strategic_genius_is_unearned.html

"SNIP............

America’s built on our sys—on our citizens. Look at the 19th century. What built America’s called the American system, from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers, OK, and the control of our borders. Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system. Right? We go back to that. We look after our own. We look after our citizen, we look after our manufacturing base, and guess what? This country’s gonna be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been.

On the surface, this is almost interesting—the kind of reference that makes its wielder seem erudite. The “American system” was a program for the development of the nation’s infrastructure (financed by high tariffs for selected industries and sustained by a national bank), a project of the Whig Party and its leaders, like Kentucky’s Henry Clay. Abraham Lincoln was an admirer of this system and promoted key elements as president. And one could say that the Roosevelts, or at least Franklin Roosevelt, were pioneers of a second American system, whose ideas were contiguous with the first. But that’s where the actual history ends.

Far from being a mastermind, Bannon is simply a provocateur.

Bannon’s opening declaration that America was “built on our citizens” is pure ideology, with little relationship to the facts of the matter. It ignores the critical role enslaved Africans played in building—and through the trade in their bodies, financing—the nation’s infrastructure. It ignores the labor of Chinese immigrants who performed backbreaking labor to help build the transcontinental railroad. It ignores those immigrants, none of them “citizens,” who fought to preserve the union in the face of secession. And to say that this America was built on the control of borders is to imagine a regime of immigration control where none actually existed.


..............SNIP"

[Warpy]

1. He's pretty stupid but smart enough to say things rich men like to hear

The real fraud in the administration was "Doctor" Gorka.

[Major Nikon]

2. The GOP has been cornering the anti-intellectual market for some time

At least when Saint Ronnie's administration put a fresh coat of paint on the horse-and-sparrow theory, there was the attempt at creating the facade of rationality to their failed ideas. Now they don't even have to go that far.

[bitterross]

3. Bannon has an Intellectual Reputation?

No, seriously.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. It was remarked of Newt Gingrich that he's "a dumb person's idea of what a smart person sounds like"

Bannon is a bigot's idea of what a smart person sounds like. All the bigotry they cling to so ardently is given a "rationalization" by the pseudo-intellectual claptrap from Bannon and Breitbart.

[Expecting Rain]

5. You took the words out of my mouth.

Got my eye on you