Steve Bannon

  • Herder Office Hours

    Q: I think I kind of get it, but could you clarify why you’re spending so much time talking about two ancient Germans that hardly anybody has heard of? A: There are several reasons. First, I thought that all my talk about Aristotle and Neoplatonism needed to be balanced by something more down to earth

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  • Enlightenment v. Counter-Enlightenment: Hamann’s Particularism

    I’ve started Hazony’s most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and find it a better book than the one on nationalism. There is much in it I agree with because when push comes to shove, I am a small ‘c’ conservative. The problem for me is that in the condition of Postmodernity, there’s nothing left to

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  • The Bannon-Brooks Interview

    Monday was consequential for being the day the Trump Immunity ruling came down and Steve Bannon went to jail. Again. His interview with David Brooks published on Monday is pretty disturbing, but clarifying in light of the SCOTUS ruling. Bannon even references Project 2025: Project 2025 and others are working on it — to immediately

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  • Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism

    “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” —Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980.  The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th

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  • Radicalized Elites on the Right 1

    And I think this is why it is now the case that the Right finds it easier to move left on economic issues than the Left finds it to move right on social issues. And this is why, whether you like it or not — and this is not going to result from our conversation,

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  • Imagining a Positive Human Future

    The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment,

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  • Edsall on the Big Lie

    Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic: In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused

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  • America in 2025

    The historical irony is rich. Democracy has a better than even chance of being permanently subverted by those who in their delusions believe it already has been. They aim to turn the country in fact into a far worse version of what in their fevered imaginations they already believe it has become.

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  • Some Random Thoughts on Afghanistan

    Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess

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  • What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

    [I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable

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