Ireland is not immune to the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment. Could there be shadowy anti-EU political actors fanning these flames? I recommend examining the photos carefully to see if Steve Bannon is lurking somewhere in the background, wearing an Emperor Palpatine hood with the ghost of Joseph Goebbels whispering in his ear.
“Red Caesarism” is the idea that some right-wing white Christian nationalist type will swoop in and save the United States by establishing himself as a dictator. Sounds crazy, but some people out there are quite serious about it. Among them Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, Steve Bannon, and quite possibly Donald J. Trump.
Sure, who wouldn’t want a benevolent dictator, as long as they agree with you. Of course, one group’s benevolent dictator will be another’s tyrant. Just give Handmaid’s Tale a quick reread and see if you want that to come true. Which is why we have a system of government that, despite its many faults, has remained relatively stable and allowed for a peaceful transition of power longer than any other one on Earth at the moment (I think this is true…somebody feel free to provide a counterexample.)
I can still envision a scenario where Red Caesar tries to do his thing, ends up with his head on a pike, and we get a military governor instead. At least for awhile. And then the whole cycle could repeat. Let’s hope not. Let’s try to restore some faith in our election system instead.
From Fresh Air, here’s some insight into how Steve Bannon manipulates people:
Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump’s White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources to target users for disinformation campaigns.
“They targeted people who were more prone to conspiratorial thinking,” Wylie says. “They used that data, and they used social media more broadly, to first identify those people, and then engage those people, and really begin to craft what, in my view, was an insurgency in the United States.”
The interview describes how they would identify people prone to conspiratorial thinking, target them with online ads, then convince them to attend real world events with other people who had been targeted by the same ads. They would choose small gathering places to give people a sense of crowding and that there were a lot of people attending the events. Then at the events, they would talk to other people with similar views and reinforce each other. Then they would get the sense that a lot of people believed whatever the conspiracy was and that it was a conspiracy that they didn’t see it in the mainstream media.
Maybe if more people understand how they are being manipulated, fewer will be manipulated. One can hope.
Below is the trailer. The full video is here.
Supposedly Steve Bannon is influenced by a book called The Fourth Turning that hypothesizes a cyclical view of history. Wikipedia refers to its primary author, Neil Howe, as an “amateur historian”, although he actually does have a history degree from Yale. Here is Howe talking about his own book in the Washington Post.
Along this cycle, we can identify four “turnings” that each last about 20 years — the length of a generation. Think of these as recurring seasons, starting with spring and ending with winter. In every turning, a new generation is born and each older generation ages into its next phase of life.
The cycle begins with the First Turning, a “High” which comes after a crisis era. In a High, institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if many feel stifled by the prevailing conformity. Many Americans alive today can recall the post-World War II American High (historian William O’Neill’s term), coinciding with the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies. Earlier examples are the post-Civil War Victorian High of industrial growth and stable families, and the post-Constitution High of Democratic Republicanism and Era of Good Feelings…
Finally, the Fourth Turning is a “Crisis” period. This is when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. If history does not produce such an urgent threat, Fourth Turning leaders will invariably find one — and may even fabricate one — to mobilize collective action. Civic authority revives, and people and groups begin to pitch in as participants in a larger community. As these Promethean bursts of civic effort reach their resolution, Fourth Turnings refresh and redefine our national identity. The years 1945, 1865 and 1794 all capped eras constituting new “founding moments” in American history.
Supposedly, Bannon’s theory is that the 2008 financial crisis is the latest “fourth turning”. There are lots of critical takedowns of these ideas online, calling them “pop history” or “pseudoscience”. For example, here is the original New York Times review of the book in 1997, and here are recent articles in Huffington Post, Business Insider, and The Nation.