Batshit Bannon was nattering to perplexed Alabamians about the "Fourth Turning" last night [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Last edited Tue Dec 12, 2017, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

I caught only a few minutes of Bannon's speech last night, the part where he was claiming Trump should get sole credit for defeating Isis and improving the economy (no real experts would agree with him). It was so stupid and typical of deplorables that I switched it off.

I also missed his stupid misfire attacking Joe Scarborough and bragging about how he went to better schools than Joe -- Georgetown and Harvard. How dumb and inept politically do you have to be to go to Alabama and ridicule someone like Joe who went to the University of Alabama? (And as I'm seeing pointed out elsewhere, Bannon was apparently ashamed to admit he got his undergrad degree from Virginia Tech.)

But what I found most indicative of just how clueless Bannon was last night showed up in some tweets about Bannon from people on Twitter including the New Yorker's Ben Wallace-Wells:

Link to tweet

"We're in the great fourth turning here" - Bannon, to a somewhat perplexed sounding crowd.

Perplexed was probably a great understatement. It's likely that few if any people in that pro-Moore crowd had any idea what Bannon was talking about.

And the fact that Bannon is so caught up in a loony theory of historical cycles that he'd bring it up to a crowd of Moore supporters shows just how out of touch with reality he is.

For people unfamiliar with the 1997 book The Fourth Turning that Bannon worships, here's an article on it -- "Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of ‘The Fourth Turning’" --from the NYT's Jeremy Peters last April:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/bannon-fourth-turning.html

WASHINGTON — Stephen K. Bannon has great admiration for a provocative but disputed theory of history that argues that the United States is nearing a crisis that could be just as disruptive and catastrophic as the most seminal global turning points of the last 250 years.

This prophecy, which is laid out in a 1997 book, “The Fourth Turning,” by two amateur historians, makes the case that world events unfold in predictable cycles of roughly 80 years each that can be divided into four chapters, or turnings: growth, maturation, entropy and destruction. Western societies have experienced the same patterns for centuries, the book argues, and they are as natural and necessary as spring, summer, fall and winter.

-snip-

But what does the book tell us about how Mr. Bannon is approaching his job as President Trump’s chief strategist and what he sees in the country’s future? Here are some excerpts from the book, with explanations from The New York Times.

-snip-

History is seasonal, and winter is coming. … The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, one commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. The risk of catastrophe will be high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.

-snip-

The Fourth Turning will trigger a political upheaval beyond anything Americans could today imagine. New civic authority will have to take root, quickly and firmly — which won’t be easy if the discredited rules and rituals of the old regime remain fully in place. We should shed and simplify the federal government in advance of the Crisis by cutting back sharply on its size and scope but without imperiling its core infrastructure.

-snip-

In a Fourth Turning, the nation’s core will matter more than its diversity. Team, brand, and standard will be new catchwords. Anyone and anything not describable in those terms could be shunted aside — or worse. Do not isolate yourself from community affairs …. If you don’t want to be misjudged, don’t act in a way that might provoke Crisis-era authority to deem you guilty. If you belong to a racial or ethnic minority, brace for a nativist backlash from an assertive (and possibly authoritarian) majority.

Bannon's received a lot of attention for his crazy talk about wanting to "deconstruct the administrative state." Less attention has been paid to what he thinks should come after that. Most deplorables just seem to think this will "make America great again" with some sort of reversion to the 1950s or earlier, the "good ol' days" when women and minorities "knew their place."

As you can see from those three quotes from The Fourth Turning above, what the book is suggesting is more extreme.

And the word "authoritarian" is significant there.

Bannon likes to have people think he's some sort of rebel, some sort of revolutionary. In fact he's an authoritarian reactionary and has been since his school days. (He's also had a serious anger management problem since childhood -- one that he should have gotten treatment, counseling and maybe medication, for -- judging by all the reports of how often he'd get into fights, often throwing the first punch.)

His family rejected the changes in the Catholic Church in the 1960s and became Tridentine Catholics.

Bannon and his brothers were sent to a private Roman Catholic military academy. From Joshua Green's book about Bannon and Trump, Devil's Bargain (page 51):

"We were a right-wing military Catholic high school," said John Pudner, a childhood friend of the Bannons who grew up two blocks away and attended Benedictine.

-snip-

The Benedictine curriculum was traditional Western Civilization presented in a context of Catholicism. "We were all taught that Western civilization was saved five hundred years ago in Spain, when Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the Moors," said Pudner. "The lesson was, here's where Muslims could have taken over the world. And here was the great stand where they were stopped. We were taught a worldview."

Bannon was apparently very unusual for a kid growing up in the Sixities and Seventies in that he completely bought into that traditional, authoritarian, xenophobic worldview.

Bannon did reportedly spend some time in the Seventies doing the typical baby-boomer study of other religions. I did it. Almost everyone I knew did it. But where that kind of examination of other faiths led most people to a greater appreciation of and tolerance for other faiths. Bannon looked at other faiths and circled back to a very backward-looking view of religion and history.

Look at those quotes from The Fourth Turning again, especially the third one, with its reference to "a nativist backlash from an assertive (and possibly authoritarian) majority."

That's Bannon's view of the future he's working to create.

And it couldn't be farther from America's ideals and Constitution.