Martin Lukacs, managing editor, The Breach:

Let’s talk about Bannon. 

In this book, you take a deep dive into his world: former Trump advisor, guru to an emergent international far right. It sounds like you listened to a lot of episodes of Bannon’s War Room, I feel like you really took one for the team. I found this to be one of the most valuable parts of the book. You write that not enough people on the left, as you mentioned earlier, have actually tried to understand the agenda. He’s crafting what he calls “MAGA Plus.” Tell us about that.

Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger:

If we think about what he did as Trump’s campaign manager and chief strategist in the run up to Trump’s victory in 2016, I think Bannon played an absolutely critical role in turning Trump into a certain kind of working-class hero. Certainly not for everyone, but for particularly guys in the Rust Belt, who were really disaffected. They’d voted Democrat many times, back to Bill Clinton promising to renegotiate the trade deals, and just got more [trade deals]. Trump was not somebody who used to talk about free trade very much, but suddenly this became a centrepiece of his platform, that he was going to bring the jobs back, that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA, that he was going to get us a great deal, right? 

This is an important dynamic to understand, because this is only available to Trump because the Democrats have betrayed voters, ceded this territory. This used to be an issue for the left. I came up in the alter-globalization movement. It didn’t used to be reactionary to talk about these trade deals, but it does point to the fact that this has not been an issue on the left for a long time and it’s dangerous to create that kind of political vacuum.

I think the reason why Bannon and Wolf have teamed up—in what I described as one of the strangest buddy movies of all time—is that Bannon can read an electoral map, and he knows why Republicans have lost the last few [elections], and a lot of it has to do with women voters. 

He’s trying to figure out how to appeal to more women voters—mostly white women, but not exclusively white women. He saw a huge amount of potential and energy in—he calls them the “warrior moms”—the moms who were very upset about prolonged school closures, very upset about mask mandates in schools, very upset about vaccine mandates. The people wearing those “I can’t breathe” T-shirts about masks and so on.  

This is what he means by MAGA Plus. It’s basically MAGA, plus all that my doppelganger represents to him. He says, “all these people out there listening to Naomi Wolf,” he says that she “should be nominated for woman of the year.” What’s interesting, too, and really chilling to watch, is how he pivots these COVID complaints to territory that we would see as more recognizable as a MAGA agenda. Transphobia, book banning, and obviously, what he calls the border war, all of it is cast as grooming. All of it is cast as attacks on our kids, and all of it is about controlling what you can control, which is the family, the child. 

That’s where much of the COVID energy is pivoting. It’s pivoting to transphobia. It’s also pivoting to opposing climate action—that’s something else we need to pay attention to. It’s been interesting to watch, since the mandates have been lifted, like where is this energy going to go? We’ve just seen these huge protests in Canada attacking LGBTQIA+ rights.

It’s also going into these weird sort of paranoid narratives around like the 15-minute city. Really bureaucratic, benign urban planning around parking suddenly becomes a fulcrum of paranoia and this idea that it’s going to be used to lock you in your house and never let you go anywhere that isn’t 15 minutes away. That’s important to be aware of if we hope to get sane climate policies through.

Lukacs:

You’ve pointed out that this kind of warped mirror agenda is being picked up elsewhere outside of the United States. I see elements of it surfacing in Canada, in Conservative leader Pierre Poilievere’s agenda. 

He’s got expressions of sympathy for the “left behind,” people who are struggling thanks to decades of neoliberalism with cost of housing, cost of living, with attacks on the elite, including the global Davos elite, and then mixes in the transphobia and opposition to climate action. So it’s very, very familiar.

Klein:

It also shows what a disadvantage liberals and leftists, pseudo-leftists are, who are aligned with [neoliberals]. Because if you’re out there saying everything is broken, and you’re speaking to the fact that people can’t afford their grocery bill, and they can’t imagine being able to afford a home, you may have an agenda that’s actually going to make it worse, which I think is true of Poilievre, but at least you are saying something that feels a little bit close to reality for a lot of people.

All the promises of capitalism: work hard, meritocracy, you’ll have a better life than your parents. It’s all crashing. It’s not working. It’s broken. You have all these figures who are selling a counterfeit response. They’re speaking to the rage, the disappointment, the pain. They’re not offering anything real, but if the people running against them are running on, “everything’s great, the economy is booming, haven’t you noticed?” Then, that is its own kind of lie, its own kind of counterfeit.

I think that the centre-right and centre-left parties that have traded power over the last half century have set the table for a situation in which it’s going to be one kind of radicalism or another. I’m not “both sides-ing” it. I’m not saying “Oh, we’re twinsies! We’re the same! Horseshoe theory!” No—I believe that only a robust left that is actually offering tangible improvements to people’s lives and taking on elite power in a real way has any chance of standing up to this right. 

Since I’ve been on tour, I get questions like, “What should we do about the conspiracy theorists? Do we need more fact checkers? Do we need more content moderators? Do we de-platform them?” I don’t think we can fact check our way out of it. But when I heard Shawn Fain, the new president of the United Auto Workers, pounding the table about the greedy bosses not sharing their record profits with working people and leading this very innovative strike action, I thought, “You know, he’s probably doing more to counter this conspiracy culture then an army of fact checkers, because he’s showing what actual left-populism looks like.” When you have that in the public domain, this Poilievre nonsense looks like the counterfeit that it is.

The power of transformative journalism

When I went to journalism school 10 years ago, my parents thought that they would eventually read my articles in The Montreal Gazette. Today, that newspaper is a husk of its former self. But I get to explain that I’m working towards critical, independent, and sustainable journalism.

Want to be a part of the future of journalism? Support our work with a monthly contribution. Sign up here.

– Amanda Siino, Development Director, The Breach

Become a Sustainer
Related

1 comment

What a strange, disjointed interview. It seems to me that an American woman discussing her beef with another American woman and complaining about “conspiracy theorists”….who if fact-checked in an unbiased fashion could be seen as prophetic at this point…is not very relevant to Canadian politics, which is where this ended up.

If it’s an ad for her book, it didn’t work

Comments are closed.