Far-Right Intellectuals Are Offering Workers a Rotten Deal
Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and more power at the workplace.
Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons)
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Steve Bannon was widely credited as the “mastermind” behind Donald Trump’s win. Glowing profiles in mainstream outlets followed — a fact that was apparently on Trump’s mind when he removed the Breitbart propagandist from his White House perch as chief strategist. It was perhaps not surprising that a man as fundamentally driven by vainglory and lucre as Trump would eventually come to cross-purposes with Bannon, who, for all his credentials as a showbiz pundit, often aspired to be something like the intellectual (indeed, spiritual) sage of right-wing populism.
This remarkable tension between hyperreal sensationalism and spiritualist sensationalism are brought to the fore in Benjamin Teitelbaum’s excellent new book War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers. Part ethnography, part biography of Bannon, and part political analysis, War for Eternity draws on extensive interviews with Bannon and other intellectual scions on the far right to unpack the “ultraconservative ideology” of traditionalism that animates their transnational efforts.
The Reactionary War for Eternity
One of the key things that comes away from Teitelbaum’s ethnography is the idiosyncrasy, and indeed conceptual irreconcilability, of the different strands on the far right.
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