Steve Bannon came to the attention of most Americans when he became the leading ideologue of the Trump campaign, and briefly the president’s chief strategist. Prior to that he turned an obscure website, “Breitbart News,” into the propaganda arm of the alt-right.
Bannon left the White House when his brand of nativist, isolationist, populism proved too toxic for elements of the Republican Party that he and Trump hoped to hijack. Now, to use a pungent expression of Lyndon Johnson, Bannon is outside the tent pissing in. He successfully backed disgraced former Judge Roy Moore over Trump’s safer choice in a primary to replace Jeff Sessions as senator from Alabama. And he has announced his intention to target many sitting Republican Senators for elimination in 2018, since they are not extreme enough for his taste.
To be fair, Bannon is a high profile face of the alt-right insurrectionists, but he is not alone. He represents a larger, shadowy cabal that includes the billionaire Mercer and Koch families, Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel and many others. The oddity of this revolt is that its leaders are among America’s biggest winners. Like Trump, far from being aggrieved, they should be celebrating a system that has allowed them to grow rich beyond the dreams of avarice. But they appear to loath the America they inhabit.
In their fever dream, liberals regulate their businesses and tax their wealth mercilessly, all to help undeserving layabouts. The country is increasing mongrelized by people of color, unwelcome aliens, empowered women who don’t know their place. Blood and treasure are expended abroad, our borders are porous and foreign competitors steal our jobs and compete with our businesses. This must end. We must protect our blood and soil, our purity of essence, as Gen. Jack D. Ripper demanded.
Much of this is a familiar far-right strain in American politics from the Know-Nothings to Father Coughlin to Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Bannon and his ilk think Utopia will be ushered in when they demolish the administrative state, the Deep State, the swamp, that is the Wall Street-Washington axis that has ruled the country for a century of more.
Bannon has described himself as a Leninist, not in ideology but in intention — the complete overthrow of the existing order. He might as well have said he hopes to emulate Robespierre and his reign of terror. But, thinking about his willingness to embrace chaos if it upsets a hated status quo, another historical character came to mind.
I recalled a wonderful little book of 1929, now largely forgotten, William Bolitho’s “Twelve Against the Gods.” It describes a dozen figures who dared to step outside the accepted norms — Charles XII of Sweden, Mohammed, Lola Montez, Casanova, Columbus and our proto-Bannon, Lucius Sergius Catiline.
Of him, Bolitho remarks that, “instead of appearing archaic,” some characters from the ancient world “are astonishingly, even alarmingly modern.” He even suggests that if a Catiline were to appear again it might be in America, which in his day he thought was becoming an echo of Rome before the Caesars.
In the waning days of the Republic, ownership was concentrated in a few families, the ruling class was “immensely rich, and had begun to be immensely dissolute.” Corruption was rife with the Senate trading favors for bribes and violating treaties while officeholders helped themselves to public funds. Foreign products undersold local produce, Italian farmers were ruined, debt was endemic, a proletarian underclass composed of landless soldiers, peasant serfs, the descendants of slaves and criminals had no hope of upward mobility. The place was ripe for revolt.
Into this void stepped the upper class Catiline who himself had been ruined by debt and who proposed to speak for the disenfranchised as the head of a people’s party. His chief platform plank was the self-serving elimination of all debts, but his actual goal was change for its own sake, even destructive change, even the burning and sacking of Rome.
As Bolitho says, “The aristocrat has become an anarchist.” And such extreme remedies were only a bit more radical than his followers hoped for. “It was a time of grumbling; no one was satisfied with the government of the patrician Senate, and practically everyone contemplated the mere idea of a change with pleasure.”
Catiline’s pitch was seductive. The state was under the control of a few powerful men with rank, wealth and influence. “All the rest of us, however brave and worthy, are looked upon by them as a mere mob…For us they reserve only snubs, threats, persecutions and poverty.” Rather than live lives of danger, defeat and poverty, wouldn’t it be better to fight these oppressors than to suffer their insolence and live wretched, dishonored lives?
Sound familiar? It ought to. Bolitho argued it could happen again if a few “simple factors” were to recur, “a disorganized political situation, a large underworld [or underclass], and a group of aristocrats who have lost all beliefs, all sense of responsibility, and all fear of consequences.” Catiline’s conspiracy was scotched largely through the efforts of one man, Cicero, whose informers discovered the true shape of the plot, and whose oratory in the Senate exposed Catiline for what he was to the pitiless light of day.
Can this old, troubled Republic be saved from a present-day Catiline conspiracy? Perhaps. It is mildly heartening that in the last week one former Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, one former Republican president, George W. Bush, a few other members of their party, and the most recent Democratic President and Vice President all chose to call for an end to the destruction of institutions, a condemnation of bigotry, and a return to civility and regular order. But it will take a lot more than that little band to keep the reckless incineration of our traditions and civilization from proceeding.