Keeping One Eye on Steve Bannon and the Other on History, Part 3

Ernst Cassirer’s Warnings on Fascism and Political Myth

By Kirsten Ellen Johnsen

Part 3. Steve Bannon’s Fascist Political Myth

Packaging of time is a journalistic device that they use

to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that.

— Utah Phillips, “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”

The Paradox of Deconstructive Nationalism

“Look at these cabinet appointments,” proclaimed Steve Bannon as White House Chief Strategist at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2017. “They were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction of the administrative state” (Bannon’s War). In an article entitled “Stephen K. Bannon’s CPAC Comments, Annotated and Explained,” New York Times columnist Max Fisher observed how this statement reveals Bannon’s ideology. “The state, in this view, is not an instrument of the American electorate, nor even a hurdle to be overcome as mainline conservatives often see it, but rather an adversary innately hostile to the people” (Fisher, para. 13). Fisher examines the ideological concepts behind Bannon’s use of the terms ‘economic nationalism’, ‘our sovereignty’, and ‘Corporatist, Globalist Media’ in terms of defining what Bannon himself described as “ ’the center core of what we believe’ ” (Bannon, qtd in Fisher, para. 28). For this Fisher refers to the analysis of Daniel Kreiss, “a University of North Carolina professor who studies political language” (para. 3). Kreiss studied Bannon’s media organization Breitbart News and “said Mr. Bannon’s phrases,” as expressed at CPAC, convey a “ ‘very coherent story about what America is’ ” (para. 4). This narrative articulates a perception of the nation-state as a “fundamental building block of humanity, with each nation defined by a fixed cultural identity” (para. 29).

This is the definition of nationalism, which is borne from the “idea that the world’s natural state is of clashing civilizations” (para. 18). Bannon’s espouses an ideological conception of the nation as having “ ‘a culture and a reason for being’ ” (Bannon, qtd in Fisher, para. 28). Threats to it strike at the “ ‘symbolic core of the nation’ ” which Kreiss identifies as “being defined as white and Christian and seen [sic] itself as ‘under threat by cosmopolitanism and globalism’ ” (para. 22). This idea that America must protect a culturally narrow central identity from “any international integration” (para. 30) is part of “ ‘a very defined cultural and ideological movement that’s giving voice to this and creating a framework for this,’ ” Fisher reports from Kreiss’ linguistic analysis. “ ‘It’s powerful for a lot of people’ ” (para. 32).

There is a curious paradox to Bannon’s concept of the ‘administrative state’ being in opposition to the populist nationalism that he engages with and gives voice to. His intention to deconstruct it seems to contradict the necessity that a nation-state would have, under a nationalistic philosophy, to preserve, protect, and reinforce its coherence. As President Trump’s White House Chief Strategist, Bannon’s ideology has been under public scrutiny. Examining the language and symbolic imagery of Bannon and his ideological influences offers insight into the political myths that seem to drive him.

According to Bannon’s War — a recently published PBS documentary on Bannon’s political history and influence — he does not readily publicize his political philosophy. PBS Frontline’s analysis is made by inference based upon Bannon’s biography, political alliances, film productions, and literary influences. Prominent among these influences is Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy. In February 2017, Time Magazine featured a cover photo of Bannon entitled ‘The Great Manipulator.’ The accompanying article “revealed that Bannon deeply believes in …[the] theory about America’s future” described in this book (Lopez, para. 1). Bannon was so impressed with The Fourth Turning that he wrote and directed a documentary on it called Generation Zero.

The Price of A New Golden Age

Neil Howe admitted to Bannon’s adherence to his theory of history in an article published by The Washington Post, but claimed that he had “never attempted to write a political manifesto” (Howe, para. 4). Howe’s premise is that “social time” is not linear or chaotic but “a recurring cycle in which events become meaningful only to the extent that they are what philosopher Mircea Eliade calls ‘reenactments’ ” (para. 5). Howe and Strauss are credited with coining the term Millennial Generation and use this demographic moniker, as well as others such as Boomer and Gen X, to characterize their theory of generational “turnings … as recurring seasons, starting with spring and ending with winter” (para. 6). They describe the overarching 80–100 year cycle as a ‘saeculum.’ It follows an arc of development through four stages culminating in crisis at the “Fourth Turning … when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival” (para. 10). Howe holds (and Bannon, apparently, as well) that we currently live in such a time period. He describes it as “volatile and primal” and warns people to “get ready for the creative destruction of public institutions, something every society periodically requires to clear out what is obsolete, ossified and dysfunctional” (para. 16).

Although Howe presents his thesis as a social scientist, historian, and demographer and decries “the reporting on the book” as “absurdly apocalyptic” (para. 2), his symbolic imagery describes regenerative principles common to religious ‘End Times’ eschatology. Societies, he claims, are bound to organic processes, so that just as “forests need periodic fires; rivers need periodic floods, Societies, too. That’s the price we must pay for a new golden age” (para. 16). The metaphors of sacrifice and renewal invoked in this final sentence are clearly soteriological.

Archetype and Persona at the Mercy of Generational Theory

At the core of Strauss and Howe’s mytho-historical, psychosocial theory is the concept of the archetype. Without providing a theoretical basis for their conclusions, they simply state that generations, by virtue of being populations born between specific dates, share a “common collective persona” (Strauss, 16). Their theoretical basis of persona remains undefined, as well as what they mean by collective. The culture to which they address their premise is “Anglo-American,” (Strauss, 46) in a history traced back to Europe to the 1400’s. The relevance of his predictive models for a multicultural America is simply assumed. Perhaps, at least for Bannon and the Neo-Nazis, it is simply irrelevant?

The term ‘archetype’ has been in parlance for millennia, used by Plato to describe primary patterns of existence. With the development of depth psychology in the twentieth century, Carl Jung brought a broader understanding of the concept. He describes the concept of archetype in great variance over his lifetime of work. Essentially, he spoke of an archetype as a potentiality, which only comes into symbolic form through the unconscious influences of natural, cultural, familial and individual experiences. James Hillman developed Jung’s ideas further to eschew the identification of specific archetypes, instead preferring to refer to archetypal images. Seen in contrast to depth psychology’s recognition of the power of the collective unconscious to continually give rise to totally new forms, Howe’s use of the term archetype is limited and shallow.

The term archetype, for Strauss and Howe, refers to four specific “temperaments — and life-cycle myths — of mankind” (19). This is not the Jungian conception of the archetype. Jung’s refuses specificity, as for him, the function of the archetype in the psyche “designates only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience” (CGJ, CW 9, para. 6). Since the depth psychological approach to the mysterium tremendum of the collective unconscious is demographically incalculable, it would seem to undermine their theory. The teachings of depth psychology regarding the psyche and the unconscious, to which popular reception of the concept of the ‘archetype’ is indebted, seem to be studiously ignored by Strauss and Howe. The nod to Mircea Eliade in the title of their last chapter, “The Eternal Return” is not referenced or explained.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Demographic Marketing

However, Howe’s demographic ‘generational theory’ is not only based upon a socially repetitive and psychologically shallow interpretation of cyclical time. It is also based, essentially, on identity. A generation is by definition a group of people who co-identify. Whether and to what extent this identification is a natural occurrence, as Howe claims, or can itself be traced to social engineering, must remain unanswered. His philosophy, just as Gobineau’s, amounts to a tautology. His prophetic conception of history coupled with his demographical marketing program is dangerous. Howe has already monikered the upcoming generation, still in nurseries and as yet unborn, as the “Homeland Generation” (Lifecourse Associates, Research — Historical Generations and Turnings, Homelanders) and has designed marketing strategies for this group of individuals based upon his historically predictive, ‘archetypal’ model.

There can be no way of arguing against Howe’s philosophy while he makes money hand over fist dealing in the futures markets of “forecast intelligence.” Since the as-yet-unborn ‘Homeland Generation’ is already being predictively marketed to, who can say whether their future behaviors will result from the soundness of his predictive model or from the efficacy of demographic strategies that niche-markets our babes-in-arms from their first digital developmental imprints in ‘cradle-to-grave’ brand development.

Forecast Intelligence is Political Prophecy

Neil Howe’s generational theories are utilized across many disciplines. His company, Lifecourse Associates, provides demographic and marketing services to a broad array of clients in such disparate industries as insurance, education, investment planning, and the military. Using what he calls “forecast intelligence,” Lifecourse Associates assists “clients [to] navigate the future by using a proprietary, multi-disciplinary approach to strategic planning. Our models are based on four primary disciplines: demography, economics, technology, and generational theory” (Lifecourse, Services — Forecast Intelligence, para. 1). Howe’s biographical statement describes as “the nation’s leading thinker on who today’s generations are, what motivates them, and how they will shape America’s future” (Lifecourse, Leadership Team — Neil Howe, Founding Partner and President, Short Biography PDF, para. 1).

The marketing value of Howe’s generational theory is obvious. As a measurable device, generational demographics may be easily isolated and accessed in computer algorithms. The strategy he proposes for use in all kinds of corporate and governmental strategic planning follows a philosophy of history which he created with Strauss (now deceased) in which social time periods are typified as falling under one of four ‘generational archetypes.’ Nowhere on this website (that I have found) does Howe explicate his interpretation of to the concept of archetype as either a psychological or a social framework based on any theoretical formulation. Howe simply states that he and Strauss “identified a sequence of four generational archetypes — which they call Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist — that have recurred in that order throughout American history.” The archetypal patterns he formulates seem to arise from a generation’s “similar early-life experiences” which develop into “similar collective personas, and follow similar life-trajectories.” The four generational archetypes each comprise a persona, based on an “underlying identity” which “undergoes profound and characteristic changes” over its life cycle. The characteristics of the four generational persona types can be predicted as a repetitive pattern “that endures over the centuries” (Lifecourse, Generational Archetypes, Para. 1). Lifecourse Associates describes their service: “Using a visionary blend of social science and history, we interpret the qualitative nature of a generation’s collective personality to help managers and marketers leverage quantitative data in new and remarkable ways — and to lend order, meaning, and predictability to national trends [my italics]” (Lifecourse, Home, para. 1).

Predicting Political Heroes (A Redemption Myth)

Howe blends selective history with a mythic conception of archetypal forces working through time in order to predict individual and social behavior. This mytho-historical and psychosocial approach provides Howe with a marketable technique to forecast and manage generational demographics. It is the basis of his definition of the ‘saeculum,’ a predetermined 80–100 year time period that leads to the critical ‘Fourth Turning’ that he claims we face today. This contemporary time period is marked by institutional and social breakdown, descending further into chaos until, in the darkest hour, a champion arises to lead the world to renewal. In each of these “great gates of history . . . a similar generational drama unfolded. . . Each time the Grey Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of ‘darkness, and adversity, and peril,’ the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum” (Strauss and Howe, p 141).

The opportunity this new “paradigm for understanding history” that Howe offers to political and corporate strategists is to understand, anticipate, and make use of these “rhythms of history.” Howe directs his marketing to those “in business and investment as in government, marketing, HR, strategic planning, education, and many other areas,” who he exhorts as being potential drivers for social change. These are “the people who succeed in a Fourth Turning mood . . . those who understand how history creates generations, and generations create history” (Lifecourse, Where We Are Today, para. 8). The current Fourth Turning, as a particularly dangerous, cataclysmic, but regenerative event, is Howe’s framework for political and investment gambits. This is the aspect of his theory that has seemingly captured the imagination of Bannon, ex-Chief White House Strategist for President Trump.

A Mythic Ideology of Societal Collapse

The essential element to their predictions, which makes their book one that “turns history into prophecy” (Strauss, 21), is the association of four specific, repetitive generational archetypes within a rubric of sequential historical seasons of birth, life, death, and regeneration. In order to learn a new approach to history and become “active participants in a destiny,” it is necessary to “unlearn” (20) certain assumptions and beliefs about time, progress, death, and change. They offer this advice to individuals and governments: to “explore what you and your nation can do to prepare for the coming Crisis” (21). To be “forewarned is [to be] forearmed” (22) they proclaim.

The preparations Strauss and Howe identify involve adapting to their conceptions of the ‘seasons’ they have identified through history. “The proper plan … is to move with, not against, the seasons” (306). The idea is to take advantage of the current “turning” (306), avoid behavior that they have identified as outdated by virtue of belonging to the previous season, and prepare for the next season by “trying to anticipate the needs and opportunities of the next turning” (306). For instance, “to avoid being postseasonal, America should stop Awakening-era behavior” (306) because “postseasonality is dysfunctional” (308). Here is where Howe’s demographic expertise comes in handy: to predict rising value systems in emerging generations in order for markets and national policy to make the best use of trends. Based on their predictions, Strauss and Howe prophesy that “come the Fourth Turning, America will need both personal sacrifice and public authority” and claim that “the saeculum will favor whichever party moves more quickly and decisively towards a paradigm that accommodates both” (312).

Collective Wish Fulfillment

The wording used in The Fourth Turning is nothing short of alarming. Considering the actions of the Trump Administration in the first half of the first year of his term, it reads as a playbook for Bannon’s program for administrative deconstruction. While on the one hand, Strauss and Howe assure “America’s culture warriors” that “values will return to public life … with a vengeance”, they warn that it is a matter of “which values will reign and whether America’s cultural consensus will be broad and imaginative enough to avoid a destructive polarization as the nation fights for its survival” (313). In a coming “political upheaval beyond anything America could imagine” the advice to is to “shed and simplify the federal government . . . turn state and local governments into competitive policy labs . . . [and] prune the legal, regulatory, and professional thickets that stymie institutional change,” because there will be a necessity to take “swift national action” (313). Strauss and Howe provide scripts for each current ‘generational archetype’ in facing these challenges as well as a comprehensive national plan outlining actions in broad categories from institutions, government, defense, and the economy in terms of values, politics, and social welfare.

The program provided is sweeping. Examining it for the symbolic representations that it conveys helps to clarify the origins of the inherent contradictions in Bannon’s populist nationalism, which nonetheless seeks deconstruction of the administrative state. Howe’s idealization of a ‘Grey Champion’ type of leader is the type of personified collective wish Cassirer describes that arises when “the former social bonds — law, justice, and constitutions — are declared to be without any value” (Cassirer, 280). The surge in nationalism in America is harnessed towards the goal of destruction of the rule of law in a mythic ideology of social collapse leading to the rebirth of the ‘Homeland.’ Examining Howe’s conceptual framework for the symbolic representations that it conveys helps to clarify the contradictions inherent in Bannon’s deconstructionist nationalism. It is also edifying to examine the political philosophy that it renders against Cassirer’s history of thought in the Myth of the State. What philosophic assumptions of state power are being conveyed? Hegel? Gobineau? Machiavelli?

When the Hoods Come Off

Because Bannon is reticent to publicize his political ideology, in Bannon’s War PBS analyzes Bannon’s films In the Face of Evil and Generation Zero to ascertain his aesthetic vision of the world. Ann Hornaday, film critic for The Washington Post describes his work as “alarmist” and “apocalyptic,” with a “febrile” tone and a “lurid” visual style. In his documentary about Ronald Reagan In the Face of Evil the narrator describes a social threat, monikered “The Beast.” It “embodied Nietzsche’s will to power, stopping at nothing to achieve its ends.” The Beast is portrayed as living on past the Iranian hostage crisis of the Reagan Era, evidenced in images of Muslims praying and the collapsing World Trade Center in 2001, with a voiceover proclaiming it as “reaching out, first to convert, then turning in to destroy, that was the nature of the Beast”. According to the co-writer of this film Julia Jones, Bannon took the Beast to heart as a metaphysical reality. “His belief in the Beast was so real, it was very real, you’re either for the Beast or you’re against the Beast, there’s no in-between”. In viewing Generation Zero, Hornaday was impressed by what she saw as “a fetishistic desire to see everything blow up . . . inviting a cleansing fire to raze the edifice, raze the institutions. I think it’s that dramatic” (Bannon’s War). While Bannon may publicly keep his philosophical cards to his chest, the imagery in his films, coupled with the metaphors in Trump’s speeches that he is credited with devising, serve to illustrate his worldview.

Bannon’s War is replete with nationalist, fascist, and apocalyptic metaphors used by the interviewees in describing Bannon’s attitude, creative works, and political philosophy. He is described as seeing himself as a “combatant” in a “civilizational war” who “sees disruption as power” and the necessity of using a “shock and awe approach” to “throw everybody off balance.” According to this documentary, Bannon was looking for a “new political warrior to save the country” and “protect the homeland” and felt that he had finally found one in Donald Trump. In his role as campaign advisor, Bannon is credited with encouraging Trump to “reach out to what he called the forgotten, the angry, and disaffected.” PBS interviews Mark Fisher, columnist for The Washington Post, regarding Bannon’s political rise. In Trump, he claims, Bannon “sees a vehicle for his perspectives. He understands Trump is not one who studies policy and so he’s able to insert into Trump’s basic message and language a lot of the core messages that Bannon has been working on for years” (Bannon’s War). Bannon is seen as the one responsible for key metaphors of Trump’s language, such as the ‘American carnage’ that Trump expounded in his inaugural address.

Bannon’s political myth seems to have taken hold of a social imagination that thrives on prophecy and metaphors of sacrifice and regeneration. During Trump’s campaign and first months in office, the populist fervor of nationalism sweeping the country, which Kreiss points out is indicative of a powerful, motivating ideological force, evoked memories of the rise of Nazism in pre-WWII Germany. After the hoods came off in Charlottesville, Virginia, now we know why. The warnings of Cassirer in the Myth of the State are particularly salient when examining the mythic forces playing out in American politics today.

Prophetic Myth as a Weapon of the State

Cassirer’s perspective is that “in primitive societies … myth pervades and governs the whole of man’s social feeling … [which] reaches its full force when man has to face an unusual and dangerous situation” (Cassirer, 278). Cassirer adheres to the prejudice of his day in Western philosophy that sees human cultural development as a linear progression. “Later on,” he states, “the mythical organization of society seems to be superseded by a rational organization;” yet the power of primitive magical thought “applies equally well to highly advanced stages of man’s political life. In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means — and our present-day political myths have been such desperate means” (279). Here is where Cassirer hammers home his thesis and describes the shock that Nazi Germany occasioned upon the modern world. The preciously safeguarded supremacy of reason as a guardian of social order was swept away with the ashes rising to the sky from Auschwitz.

After careful preparation of the history of Western political philosophy, the final chapter of The Myth of the State hits a strident tone as Cassirer describes the rise of totalitarianism. He warns of the “volcanic soil” from which myth arises in politics, never “vanquished and subjugated … [but] always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity” (280). He characterizes myth as having “demonic” powers, latent in the primitive mind of man. It shows up as “the personifications of collective wishes” that become “embodied in the leader” whose will is “supreme law” (280). The difference between a “civilized man” from a “savage tribe” he claims, is that, even though irrational impulses enforce man’s passions, rationality still plays a role in his psyche so that “he must form a ‘theory’ to justify his creeds. And this theory, at least, is not primitive; it is, on the contrary, highly sophisticated” (280–81). Here Cassirer makes an important point about the power of ideology and how a national identity may become swept up political myth. There is danger in credal alliance that employs symbolic processes to garner support, establish perceptual boundaries, interpret history, and prophesy future meaning. The savagery that can result does not need to find its origin in a prejudicial concept of primitive society to constitute a dire threat to national and international relations.

Abdication of Personal Responsibility

It is savagery, for Cassirer, which informs modern man’s “belief in a sort of ‘social magic.’ If a collective wish is felt in its whole strength and intensity, people can easily be persuaded that it only needs the right man to satisfy it” (281). The diabolical technique of the twentieth century is that these “new political myths do not grow up freely; they are not wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things fabricated by very skillful and cunning artisans. . . .Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon — as machine guns or airplanes. That is a new thing — and a thing of crucial importance” (282). Cassirer is not kidding around. He implores us to wake up to a newly politicized mythic world. The rearmament of Germany began many years before 1933, he claims, but had begun many years before, unnoticed, “with the origin and rise of the political myths” (282).

In order to resist the corrosive, numbing effect that political myth can have, “it is necessary to begin with an analysis of the term ‘freedom’ ” (287), says Cassirer. Towards this end he relies upon Kant. Ethical freedom is “not a gift with which human nature is endowed; it is rather a task… no datum, but a demand; an ethical imperative. To fulfill this demand becomes especially hard in times of a severe and dangerous social crisis when the breakdown of the whole public life seems to be imminent… Freedom is not a natural inheritance of man. In order to possess it we have to create it” (288). The difficulty of this task is burdensome, and people seek to avoid personal responsibility for it. “Here the totalitarian state and the political myths step in… [to] promise an escape from the dilemma” (288).

This abdication of personal responsibility leaves an individual, and a nation, open to manipulation taking many forms. Cassirer begins his analysis of a few methods of this manipulation with the acknowledgment that Gobineau’s “myth of the race worked like a strong corrosive and succeeded in dissolving and disintegrating all other values” (287), notably, the Kantian conception of the moral autonomy of the individual. The fatalistic idea of a predetermined outcome, such as articulated in Spengler’s Decline of the West, (or Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning) particularly prepares the populace for a prophetic political figure. Our modern fortune telling methods claim “to be scientific and philosophical” Cassirer explains, decades before the advent of the discipline of demographics and computer modeling. In these “much more refined and elaborate methods of divination” than ancient observations of bird flight or inspection of entrails, “the most improbable or even impossible promises are made; the millennium is predicted over and over again” (289).

The Social Contagion of Collective Crime

In man, claims Cassirer, the power of magic still holds sway over political thought and action in the hopes that the course of nature may be altered to one’s benefit. It is in the power of “magic formulae and rites” (295) that mankind seeks a controlling logic. The use of language to “produce certain effects” is an ancient magical art that can “stir up certain emotions… charged with meanings … feelings and violent passions” (283). Hatred, contempt and disdain, evoked by the magical use of the word in Nazi Germany, was accompanied “by the introduction of new rites” introduced “very thoroughly, methodically, and successfully. Every political action has its special ritual” (284). The serious impact this has in a totalitarian regime is both subtle and insidious, for the repetition of even the smallest political ritual, even as innocuous as a private greeting, has the cumulative effect of lulling to sleep “all our active forces, our power of judgment and critical discernment” and to subsume individual responsibility to the collective. By this “sort of miasma or social contagion, the crime spreads over the whole group” (285). These methods of compulsion, he contends, are new to the political stage, working to subdue resistance by eroding intellectual autonomy.

In Cassirer’s worldview and experience, the threat of the power of myth to overwhelm social identity and compel a nation to commit heinous acts against other peoples was real and contemporaneous. It could only be countered by increased awareness, rational thought and critical analysis. He implored his readers to use the power of philosophy not to destroy political myths, for he says that “myth is in a sense invulnerable” (296), but instead to recognize it. “Our science, our poetry, our art and our religion are only the upper layer of a much older stratum that reaches down to a great depth. We must always be prepared” Cassirer warns, “for violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations” (297).

Psychometrics: Catering to Fear

The fact that Steve Bannon, our recent Chief White House Strategist ascribes to the ‘not a political manifesto’ of The Fourth Turning is concerning, to say the least. That demographic marketing policies based upon Strauss and Howe’s work are taken seriously at all demands response from political philosophers, religious scholars, social psychologists, and mythologists. “Strauss and Howe, you see, didn’t just help invent Steve Bannon” critiques Tim Fernholz. “They invented millennials. And society’s obsession with that kind of generational pseudoscience has actually made it easier for Americans to believe in Bannon’s prophecies of doom” (Fernholz, para. 10). Yet, on the Lifecourse website, accessed 27 May 2017, the “Latest LifeCourse News” announces: “Congressional Institute Releases New Study on Millennials’ Political Values: Conducted on behalf of Congressional Institute, this report by LifeCourse Associates is a thorough look at the characteristics that define Millennials as a political generation and what they mean for the GOP” (Lifecourse, Home). It seems to come as no surprise nor concern, in our economized political world, that the mythology of Howe’s history-cum-prophecy is being engaged with as a political tool, perhaps even a weaponized technique, just as Cassirer warned.

There is no doubt that Cassirer, were he alive today, would consider the ideas of Strauss and Howe to be an example of modern political myth. The fact that demographic policies based upon Strauss and Howe’s work are taken quite seriously by national and even international institutions demands analytic response from political philosophers, religious scholars, social psychologists and cultural mythologists. It is even more alarming to recognize the extent to which demographic marketing techniques, also known as psychometrics, are used for political manipulation.

Idola Fori: The Dangerous Idols of the Marketplace

The reality that demographic metadata is being targeted for political effect is evidenced in the work of Cambridge Analytica, a “privately held company that combines data mining and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process” (Wikipedia). On their website they baldly state, “We are the global leader in data-driven campaigning with over 25 years of experience, supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents. Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections” (Cambridge Analytica, Political — The CA Advantage). The company uses “psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics,” which “focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality.” (Grassegger, para 9) to potentially influence “psychographically categorized voters” (para 26). The Director of Program Development at Cambridge Analytica, Brittany Kaiser, perfectly describes the use of political myth to access and manipulate irrational social responses when she excuses their work. “You’re really catering to the fears they already had… It’s not really making them more scared or insecure than they already were” (Kaiser, qtd in Swan, para. 8). Steve Bannon has “ties to Cambridge Analytica, where he was vice president of the board” (Goldstein, para. 7). “Sources familiar with the investigations say” both Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart News are currently “being probed” for possible ties to Russia during the 2016 Trump campaign, Time Magazine reports (Calabresi, para 21). Cambridge Analytica was the focus of an in-depth British Broadcasting Company journalistic investigation, which opens with a quote, “This is not a normal company, it’s using psychological techniques to change people’s thoughts and behavior” (Gatehouse).

According to Bloomberg news, immediately after leaving the White House, Bannon had a strategy meeting with Robert Mercer, his longtime friend, funder and the primary financier for Cambridge Analytica. “The two mapped out a path ahead for Bannon’s post-White House career and discussed how Trump could get his agenda back on track. The following evening, Mercer and several other major Republican donors had dinner with Trump to share their thinking, and Mercer also had a private meeting with Trump to pledge to redouble his efforts to support Bannon and advance Trump’s agenda” (Green, para. 4–5).

Cassirer’s warnings about myth and totalitarianism, left to us seventy years ago in his final work, The Myth of the State, are crucially important to remember in this day and age.

Let Us Not Repeat the Same Error

The courageous words of Holocaust survivors recall to us the extremity of the political situation we face today. Thankfully, Bannon’s nationalistic anti-immigration policies have met with popular resistance. In March of 2017, Bernard Marks, age 87, spoke at a public forum on immigration in Sacramento, California, to thunderous applause. He condemned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan by saying “ ‘History is not on your side.’ ” His memories of childhood are a warning he meant for us all to hear. “ ‘When I was a little boy in Poland, for no other reason but for being Jewish, I was hauled off by the Nazis,’ Marks said. ‘And for no other reason I was picked up and separated from my family, who was exterminated in Auschwitz. And I am a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau’ ” (Mazza, para. 3).

May we listen to his words and use the “full strength” of all our “forces, intellectual, ethical, and artistic” as Cassirer urged, to see through and resist manipulative political myths sweeping the country, be they manifest in politics, economics, culture, or demographics (Cassirer, 298). As Cassirer concluded, “We should not commit the same error a second time. We should carefully study the origin, the structure, the methods, and the technique of the political myths” (296).

Bernard Marks’ had the courage to speak up in March of 2017, because he fully understood the stakes involved. A mere six months after his warning speech, the reality of his message is still hitting us as a nation. Racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and homophobia are nothing new in America, but the emboldening of fascist white supremacists on a national scale is a clear and dangerous amplification of this deeply rooted malignance. Popular political expressions of apocalyptic ideologies are becoming common. Eruptions of irrational violence and xenophobia are daily news. This is the fruit reaped by prophetic philosophies such as The Fourth Turning, which planted seeds of psychometric compliance into a generation spoon-fed on predictive marketing models, and harvested them by the gargantuan reaping machine of metadata mining. When Steve Bannon, disgruntled by the entrenchment of state power at the White House, turns back to his weapons, don’t be fooled. He is armed with far more than a mere editorial position, and has gained just the kind of deconstructive nationalist populist loyalty he wanted. Is it merely the Administrative State he wishes to dismantle, or is it also the principles of pluralist democracy at the heart of this multicultural society?

Whatever it is, the essential lesson we can take from the past is to be willing to deeply examine your own truth, do not be swayed by fear, listen to others’ truths, and show up in solidarity for all those in harm’s way. Remember history: learn from those who have come through this before. As Cassirer wrote, “We should see the adversary face to face in order to combat him” (296). It is time to take his advice to use every “intellectual, ethical and artistic” means available to resist this new technique of political myth: psychographic manipulation. These are the new weapons of fascism.

~End.

Works Cited

Bannon’s War. Dir. Michael Kirk. 23 May 2017. PBS Frontline. Web. Accessed 27 May 2017.

Cambridge Analytica. Website. Accessed 29 May 2017.

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Kirsten Ellen Johnsen

Written by

Mythology Mom, Archetypal Activist, Investigative Philosopher

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