In fairness, Steve Bannon has never really pretended to be a conservative.
“I’m a Leninist,” Steve Bannon told Ronald Radosh, back in 2013. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
That included, of course, such antiquated ideas as free markets, fiscal conservatism, and small government. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he boasted to Michael Wolff back in November 2016. “The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. …. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
In retrospect, the reference to the 1930s—not an especially great decade for conservative policy—ought to have been a tip-off. So it probably should not come as a great shock to hear that Trump’s chief ideologist’s grand new vision includes incorporating a socialist as a part of the future of his movement, while flirting with the far right European parties.
Of course, it’s tempting to brush this off as Bannonite grandiloquence, but the crossover between Trumpism and Bernie-ism has always been an undercurrent of Bannon’s vision and Trump’s campaign.
Whether they fully grasp it or not, many Republicans seem to be embracing that post-conservative vision, especially as Trump flirts with trade wars and his administration openly contemplates forcing the use of coal and nuclear power on the nation’s grid operators.
Bernie would be proud.
Bloomberg notes that Trump’s proposal to use national security powers to override market decisions in the energy sector, comes as the administration uses similar arguments “to justify market interventions aimed at protecting other treasured political constituencies—steelworkers and automakers—at the expense of U.S. allies.”
John Shelk, who runs the Electric Power Supply Association noted the irony: “National security is being invoked by people who once favored markets.”
As both Bannon knows, many former free-market conservatives are likely to fall in line with such Bernie-esque policies, given what Axios’s Jim VandeHei aptly calls Trump’s “mind control super powers.”
This also seems to be true on issues involving free markets, state intervention, and his attacks on private industry. Case in point, Trump’s attempt to use government power to punish Amazon.
Of course, this all has less to do with Trump’s super powers than it does with the fecklessness and malleability of a movement that once knew what it stood for.
