{"id":41542,"date":"2017-08-19T05:29:40","date_gmt":"2017-08-19T05:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=41542"},"modified":"2017-08-19T13:31:35","modified_gmt":"2017-08-19T13:31:35","slug":"why-stephen-k-bannon-was-such-a-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/why-stephen-k-bannon-was-such-a-failure.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Stephen K. Bannon was such a failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Stephen K. Bannon was such a failure<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Stephen K. Bannon, the recently deposed architect of President Trump\u2019s nonexistent populist agenda, wishes it was the 1930s.<\/span><\/p>\n

That, of course, is what he promised to do: to make things as \u201cexciting\u201d now as they were back then. Now, he might not have been talking about the war or the depression or the fascists in other countries, but what he did mean was a politics where racial resentment and economic populism could once again exist side-by-side. Where Republicans could target Muslims for special restrictions and raise the top marginal tax rate to 44 percent; could cut legal immigration in half and undo free trade deals; could stick up for white supremacists and spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. In other words, where the ideological heirs of the Dixiecrats were the ones calling the shots.<\/span><\/p>\n

They haven\u2019t been for a long time now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why not? Well, because our parties have sorted themselves based on race first and economics second. The political history of the past 100 years, you see, has really been the story of the rise and fall of the New Deal coalition. Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s response to the Great Depression brought blacks, liberals, Northern ethnics and Southern whites all together until the civil rights movement drove them apart. It\u2019s true that the Dixiecrats \u2014 the Jim Crow-supporting Southerners who left the Democratic Party to form their own, before eventually migrating over to the Republican one \u2014 weren\u2019t all in favor of big government, but a lot of them were. Forced to choose between that and racial backlash, however, they chose racial backlash, whether that was calls for \u201claw and order\u201d or denunciations of \u201cwelfare queens\u201d or, in the past few years, chants of \u201cbuild the wall.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bannon didn\u2019t want them to choose anymore. He understood that a lot of Republicans don\u2019t care about Ayn Rand-inspired odes to heroic entrepreneurs, or paeans to the Schumpeterian beauty of creative destruction, or how much capital gains are taxed. They want their Social Security and their Medicare. They\u2019re called Trump voters, and they aren\u2019t really represented in Washington. That\u2019s because the money men and interest groups that members of Congress rely on ensure complete ideological conformity on the issue nearest and dearest to the hearts \u2014 or rather the wallets \u2014 of the donor class: how much they\u2019re taxed. Bannon wanted to change that so people could get Democratic economic policies together with a Republican brand of racial pandering.<\/span><\/p>\n

The only problem is you can\u2019t. Just look at Bannon\u2019s proposal to increase the top tax rate to 44 percent. Who was ever going to vote for that? Republicans never would when their party\u2019s entire raison d\u2019etre for the past 40 years has been keeping taxes as low as possible on the rich. And neither would Democrats when Bannon had alienated them about as much as possible with his barely disguised attempt to ban Muslims. The same was true of infrastructure. Republicans didn\u2019t really want to do it, and Democrats didn\u2019t want to with Trump. It reduced Bannon to being able to do little more than alternately insist that he wanted to build a rainbow coalition of populists \u2014 \u201cwe’ll get 60 percent of the white vote and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote, and we\u2019ll govern for 50 years,\u201d he rather modestly claimed \u2014 and cheer, for example, when Trump said last Friday\u2019s neo-Nazi rally was full of \u201cvery fine people.\u201d Bannon never understood that one made the other impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/wonk\/wp\/2017\/08\/18\/why-steve-bannon-was-such-a-failure\/?utm_term=.03a8a996e39e<\/span><\/p>\n

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