The REAL Steve Bannon — according to Social Identity Theory
Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief political strategist, has been called everything from Dr. Evil to a “great patriot” to a pig. It looked like his days were numbered a few weeks ago when he was removed from the National Security Council amid gossip he was feuding with Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But much to the chagrin of those who find his reading list terrifying, the White House recently called rumors of his impending demise “overblown” and Bannon remains.
Since his rise last fall during the presidential campaign, Bannon’s speeches, clothes, background and reading list have all been picked over to provide one insight or another into his “real” motivations. Just 100 days into the Trump administration, his influence has already been felt in the homeland security field though the ill-fated immigration ban. So, I thought it would be helpful to provide a different kind of analysis.
For years, security analysts have been using Social Identity Theory as an analytical framework to understand terrorists’ motivations. I’m not saying Steve Bannon is a terrorist per se, but he is certainly a powerful, influential figure with some fairly extreme views and key relationships that are worth understanding through a social science lens.
Why Social Identity Theory?
Social Identity Theory can help us understand how our individual identity or group membership influences our beliefs, behavior and interactions. Remember middle school? There is perhaps no place in American society where self-identified group membership so clearly determines one’s behavior and interactions. Jocks, popular kids, band geeks — each label gives (or takes) privileges and status beyond the merits of the individual and shapes the behavior of each group. While the stakes are arguably higher in middle school, the same dynamics can be found in politics, war and terrorism. Identity matters.
Scholars Anders Strindberg, David Brannon and Kristin Darken advocate for the use of four analytical markers rooted in Social Identity Theory to understand extremism: The patron-client relationship, the honor/shame paradigm, the challenge and response cycle, and “limited good” which is defined by the scholars as “a limited resource related to the honor of the group which can be either a physical resource like land or an intangible resource like status.” These markers can be used as a “fluid matrix within which terrorist groups and their actions can be explored by systematically unpacking events and relationships”. I plan to use it to understand Bannon.
Bannon’s Patron/Client relationship with Trump
When President Trump’s campaign was flailing in the summer of 2016, he asked Steve Bannon to serve as his campaign’s CEO. Bannon had been spinning pro-Trump stories for months as publisher of Breitbart news, giving the billionaire aristocrat unexpected legitimacy with the alt-right, a key extreme constituency. When Bannon became Trump’s campaign CEO and later chief strategist, the alt-right constituency Bannon had cultivated over the years came with him to the White House.
In return, Trump gave Bannon a platform for radical change he would not otherwise have. While theoretically Trump could revoke these privileges at any time, recently saying “I’m my own strategist” — Bannon still holds the keys to the alt-right. Trump and Bannon are locked in a symbiotic relationship that will be difficult to sever without a large loss of blood on one side or another. Their actions and words should both be considered in this context.
Bannon’s Honor and the humiliation of the working class
Bannon is the product of a blue collar family and worked on Wall Street before joining Breitbart.com. His experience in the upper echelons of American society were formative and firmly cemented his view of himself as an outsider determined to take the system down. Speaking to a conservatives in Washington in 2013, Bannon remarked, “When you have this kind of crony capitalism, you have a different set of rules for the people that make the rules … when you deal with the elites, you’re looked at as someone who is quite odd.”
Though Bannon now walks among the elites, his honor has been insulted by them. However, Bannon has transformed this personal shame and dishonor beyond mere personal slight. He has used it as a powerful rallying cry for his supporters which sets up a potentially dangerous cycle of challenge and response between Bannon and his opponents.
Bannon’s War
It’s important to understand that Bannon hasn’t accidentally transformed the working class’s dishonor into an angry movement, he’s intentionally stoked it. In 2013, he reportedly said about his success at Breitbart, “you can channel that anger, where before you were defenseless. You can take that anger. And by the way, I think anger is a good thing. This country is in a crisis. And if you’re fighting to save this country, if you’re fighting to take this country back, it’s not going to be sunshine and patriots. It’s going to be people who want to fight.” (emphasis mine)
And when he says fight, he doesn’t mean a skirmish where people shake hands and go back to their corners. He aims to eliminate the opponents all together. “This is going to be a very nasty, long, protracted fight. There is a permanent political class in this city that dominates it, and by that dominates the country. And there is a dedicated group of libertarians and grassroots conservatives and Tea Party conservatives and limited government conservatives that are here to destroy that.” (emphasis mine)
Bannon’s Pie
When Bannon spoke to a gathering of religious conservatives in 2013, his remarks revealed a worldview in which there are winners and losers, conquerors and the conquered. Speaking of Islam as a global threat to Judeo-Christian dominance, he positioned the West, “against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.” Nationally, he speaks of “a system of fat cats who say they’re conservative and say they back capitalist principles, but all they’re doing is binding with corporatists. Right? Corporatists, to garner all the benefits for themselves.” (emphasis mine)
In both these examples, Bannon speaks of status and its benefits as a limited good. This positioning provides critical motivation for Bannon and his followers to fight. They fight not just to restore their honor, but to claim their slice of rightful pie before someone else does.
So what does it all mean?
Because of their beliefs, Bannon and those who identify with him will make policies and decisions which advance their interests to the exclusion of others. Depending on your race, class, ethnicity and political persuasion, you’ll find yourself either a beneficiary of Bannon’s fight or in a struggle for existence against him.This was perhaps clearest in the widely criticized Bannon designed immigration ban which sought to restrict access to the limited good of United States residency (and American Identity, IMHO). In this conflict with elites, or Muslims, Bannon believes nothing short of the future of Western Judeo Christian identity and prosperity is in jeopardy — and we should believe him when he says he plans to fight to the end to maintain it.
