There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other. We who complied with the public health measures judged those who did not for their refusal to put the well-being of the immunocompromised ahead of their own convenience, and for their indifference to the huge sacrifices made by health-care workers as unvaccinated people filled up the Covid wards. How could they be so heartless? So willing to rank human life as more or less worthy of protection and care? And yet when unvaccinated people became ill with Covid, many of the people who claimed to have been appalled by their callousness talked about how maybe they didn't deserve health care, or told bad jokes (which were not always jokes) about how perhaps Covid would rid the world of stupid people, or went as far as French president Emmanuel Macron, who said that unvaccinated people were not full citizens. We defined ourselves against each other and yet were somehow becoming ever more alike, willing to declare each other non-people.
How did we cede so much territory?
Become so reactive?
After months of listening to Bannon, I can say this with great certainty: While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are aban-doning, the debates we aren't having, the people we are insulting and discard-ing. He is watching all of it, and he is stitching together a political agenda out of it….
Steve Bannon, regardless of whatever else he may be, is first and foremost a strategist. And he has a knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away. This is what he helped Trump do in 2016. He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton.
Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats-most of it white, but not all of it. Bannon crafted a campaign message out of the betrayals of his rivals: Trump would be a new kind of Republican, one who would stand up to Wall Street, shred corporate trade deals, close the border to supposedly job-steal-ing immigrants, and end foreign wars— moreover, unlike Republicans before, he pledged to protect social programs like Medicare and Social Security. This was the original MAGA promise.
Of course, it was a bait and switch— Trump filled his administration with former Wall Street executives, made mostly minor changes to trade policy, escalated tensions abroad, and lavished the rich with tax cuts. Of his populist campaign rhetoric, all that really survived was the race baiting-against im-migrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and anything having to do with China. It was enough to hold on to his base, but not enough to win reelection, certainly not after his murderous mismanagement of Covid-19.
