Here's what happened the last time America had a Steve Bannon

[babylonsister]

Here's what happened the last time America had a Steve Bannon
Linette Lopez
Nov. 20, 2017, 12:55 PM

Breitbart News head Steve Bannon's ideology is a mix of paranoia, racism, populism, and fascism, and it has shocked many Americans.
But this isn't the first time the US has seen this particular mix of politics propelled by media. Before there was Bannon there was Father Coughlin, a radio host in the 1930s.
Coughlin had an epic rise and epic fall, having been veritably banished from the national discourse.
Bannon has backed himself into a corner where he must show America that he's bigger than loyalty to Trump, the Republican Party, and American decency.

Since former White House adviser Steve Bannon and his Breitbart News leapt from the bowels of the internet to the forefront of America's national political discourse, things have become darker, more racist, and more violent.

Breitbart made its name by using the internet to distribute a worldview that combines fear-induced manias and prejudices of the far right with spurious echoes of populism. In a country where many feel like they've been forgotten by those in power, it's a heady combination. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the US has seen this before.

We have already had a Bannon, a man who mastered the medium of mass communication of his day to tote a particularly American breed of nationalism that manipulates by preying on the fear that power from above and encroachment from below will squeeze hardworking Americans in the middle. It divides and it intoxicates.

The last Bannon was a man named Father Charles Coughlin. He was a Catholic priest who led the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church in Royal Oak, Michigan. He was also a radio-show host who, at his show's peak in the early 1930s, captivated a quarter of the country with his Sunday-afternoon broadcasts.

Coughlin's America was much darker than ours. At the beginning and end of the 1930s, almost 25% of the country was unemployed. War was brewing in Europe. Hitler was rising. And Coughlin's authoritative air and mastery of what was then a new, relatively unregulated form of communication made him a political force. In 1932 he told his as many as 30 million listeners that it was "Roosevelt or ruin," according to historian Don Warren, who wrote the book "Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio."

That power led to wealth and status. He built a megachurch. He was friends with Joe Kennedy, the bootlegger father of JFK, Bobby, and Ted. He hid his wealth through a tangled web of charities and bank accounts. He staged massive rallies that sometimes turned violent. He published the widely circulated weekly Social Justice Magazine.

But in 1936 Coughlin overstepped his bounds in his quest for political power. "Roosevelt or ruin" turned into "Roosevelt and ruin," as he turned against the president, embraced Hitler and Mussolini, and became ever more shrill about the Jewish international banker conspiracy that he claimed threatened America. Coughlin, after a spellbinding rise, was ultimately muzzled by the Catholic Church shortly after the US entered WWII. He was essentially a prisoner of his own parish until he died in the 1970s.

But his legacy remained. There is a direct line between Coughlin's rhetoric and what you'll hear on the polarizing conservative talk-radio shows Bannon and Trump's team mined to build a political platform — between those radios shows and what Breitbart distributes on the internet. Seemingly coming from nowhere, both Bannon and Coughlin fed the country a toxic mess of conspiracy theories, bigotry, and lies, and we swallowed it.

But then we spit it back up.

more...

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-bannon-father-charles-coughlin-2017-11

[Rollo]

1. I'm thinking of another populist demogogue of the 1930's....

Huey P. Long, former governor of Louisiana and that state's Senator until his assassination in 1935.

[oberliner]

2. What about Rush Limbaugh attacking the Clintons?

Or Beck, Hannity, et al?

[Initech]

3. When we decide to banish Infowars and Breitbart to the fiery pit from hell from which they came...

It's not going to be pretty, and it will get ugly, but it must be done. Fox News can join them.

[standingtall]

4. Steve Bannon would never have a social justice magazine

the only thing he would have in common with Coughlin is nationalism as well as a bit of antisemitism, but Coughlin was an economic populist Bannon is nothing of the sort. Bannon is a cultural populist.