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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBatshit Bannon was nattering to perplexed Alabamians about the "Fourth Turning" last night
Last edited Tue Dec 12, 2017, 01:26 PM - Edit history (1)
I caught only a few minutes of Bannon's speech last night, the part where he was claiming Trump should get sole credit for defeating Isis and improving the economy (no real experts would agree with him). It was so stupid and typical of deplorables that I switched it off.
I also missed his stupid misfire attacking Joe Scarborough and bragging about how he went to better schools than Joe -- Georgetown and Harvard. How dumb and inept politically do you have to be to go to Alabama and ridicule someone like Joe who went to the University of Alabama? (And as I'm seeing pointed out elsewhere, Bannon was apparently ashamed to admit he got his undergrad degree from Virginia Tech.)
But what I found most indicative of just how clueless Bannon was last night showed up in some tweets about Bannon from people on Twitter including the New Yorker's Ben Wallace-Wells:
Link to tweet
Perplexed was probably a great understatement. It's likely that few if any people in that pro-Moore crowd had any idea what Bannon was talking about.
And the fact that Bannon is so caught up in a loony theory of historical cycles that he'd bring it up to a crowd of Moore supporters shows just how out of touch with reality he is.
For people unfamiliar with the 1997 book The Fourth Turning that Bannon worships, here's an article on it -- "Bannons Worldview: Dissecting the Message of The Fourth Turning" --from the NYT's Jeremy Peters last April:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/bannon-fourth-turning.html
This prophecy, which is laid out in a 1997 book, The Fourth Turning, by two amateur historians, makes the case that world events unfold in predictable cycles of roughly 80 years each that can be divided into four chapters, or turnings: growth, maturation, entropy and destruction. Western societies have experienced the same patterns for centuries, the book argues, and they are as natural and necessary as spring, summer, fall and winter.
-snip-
But what does the book tell us about how Mr. Bannon is approaching his job as President Trumps chief strategist and what he sees in the countrys future? Here are some excerpts from the book, with explanations from The New York Times.
-snip-
History is seasonal, and winter is coming. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, one commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. The risk of catastrophe will be high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.
-snip-
The Fourth Turning will trigger a political upheaval beyond anything Americans could today imagine. New civic authority will have to take root, quickly and firmly which wont be easy if the discredited rules and rituals of the old regime remain fully in place. We should shed and simplify the federal government in advance of the Crisis by cutting back sharply on its size and scope but without imperiling its core infrastructure.
-snip-
In a Fourth Turning, the nations core will matter more than its diversity. Team, brand, and standard will be new catchwords. Anyone and anything not describable in those terms could be shunted aside or worse. Do not isolate yourself from community affairs . If you dont want to be misjudged, dont act in a way that might provoke Crisis-era authority to deem you guilty. If you belong to a racial or ethnic minority, brace for a nativist backlash from an assertive (and possibly authoritarian) majority.
Bannon's received a lot of attention for his crazy talk about wanting to "deconstruct the administrative state." Less attention has been paid to what he thinks should come after that. Most deplorables just seem to think this will "make America great again" with some sort of reversion to the 1950s or earlier, the "good ol' days" when women and minorities "knew their place."
As you can see from those three quotes from The Fourth Turning above, what the book is suggesting is more extreme.
And the word "authoritarian" is significant there.
Bannon likes to have people think he's some sort of rebel, some sort of revolutionary. In fact he's an authoritarian reactionary and has been since his school days. (He's also had a serious anger management problem since childhood -- one that he should have gotten treatment, counseling and maybe medication, for -- judging by all the reports of how often he'd get into fights, often throwing the first punch.)
His family rejected the changes in the Catholic Church in the 1960s and became Tridentine Catholics.
Bannon and his brothers were sent to a private Roman Catholic military academy. From Joshua Green's book about Bannon and Trump, Devil's Bargain (page 51):
-snip-
The Benedictine curriculum was traditional Western Civilization presented in a context of Catholicism. "We were all taught that Western civilization was saved five hundred years ago in Spain, when Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the Moors," said Pudner. "The lesson was, here's where Muslims could have taken over the world. And here was the great stand where they were stopped. We were taught a worldview."
Bannon was apparently very unusual for a kid growing up in the Sixities and Seventies in that he completely bought into that traditional, authoritarian, xenophobic worldview.
Bannon did reportedly spend some time in the Seventies doing the typical baby-boomer study of other religions. I did it. Almost everyone I knew did it. But where that kind of examination of other faiths led most people to a greater appreciation of and tolerance for other faiths. Bannon looked at other faiths and circled back to a very backward-looking view of religion and history.
Look at those quotes from The Fourth Turning again, especially the third one, with its reference to "a nativist backlash from an assertive (and possibly authoritarian) majority."
That's Bannon's view of the future he's working to create.
And it couldn't be farther from America's ideals and Constitution.
samnsara
(17,622 posts)....waaaaaait a minute.....this aint sounding too good.....
HopeAgain
(4,407 posts)These people want to see a war in Israel bring about the end of the world, so...
hatrack
(59,587 posts). . . . and I read this book this one time."
Besides, the Alabamans in the crowd have their Magic Book, and Crust-Face has his.
Nitram
(22,803 posts)historical cycles that became prevalent during the Nazi regime. Bannon and Trump are clearly lower-case nazis.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)Hitler's speeches, and Bannon has made no secret of wanting to copy Nazi propagandists. He liked Andrew Breitbart calling him the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party.
Nitram
(22,803 posts)highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)marybourg
(12,631 posts)highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)Achilleaze
(15,543 posts)The republican Xristofascists & their evil empire russian white supremecist totalitarian wanker BFFs are profoundly anti-American, anti-liberty, anti-democracy. Make no mistake.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)meow2u3
(24,764 posts)and I want this country to fall into the hands of the Antichrist.
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)C_U_L8R
(45,003 posts)just like the racist hate-theory Charles Manson subscribed too.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)C_U_L8R
(45,003 posts)anneboleyn
(5,611 posts)C_U_L8R
(45,003 posts)woodsprite
(11,916 posts)highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)bdamomma
(63,868 posts)he is another sick fuck who I would like to see gone.
Why is the media giving this POS so much airtime??? He looks like he came out from under a rock.
Initech
(100,079 posts)And cult mentality never ends well. Just ask Charles Manson about that.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)HAB911
(8,904 posts)In Midland City, Alabama, Steve Bannon goes after @JoeNBC, saying he got into better schools than Joe could haveGeorgetown and Harvard. This might be the wrong place for that attack: Joe went to the University of Alabama.
Link to tweet
Baitball Blogger
(46,725 posts)muriel_volestrangler
(101,321 posts)It just gets worse when a white supremacist like Bannon gets hold of it.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)the book is bollocks.
As the article I quoted in the OP here says, the book was written by amateur historians. It's provocative, and meant to be. It's the kind of loony theorizing that typically appeals to sophomoric wannabe intellectuals (or, to be more charitable, to people who don't know much about the subject and think the book seems profound). Harmless enough when those are college kids sitting around talking about it. Very dangerous in the warped mind of a reactionary authoritarian like Bannon. He knows he's out of sync with his time. This book gives him an excuse to view his reactionary beliefs as visionary.
workinclasszero
(28,270 posts)After Hitler's 3rd??
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I was watching a film the other night called "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" starring Robert Carlisle and it was shocking to see how this total loser with nothing more than a single-minded conviction in his own rightness could rise from obscurity to dominate a nation, and then a continent. It was eerie to see alongside what is now going on in this country.
workinclasszero
(28,270 posts)Its happening right before our eyes.
My dad and his generation defeated nazism/fascism and now I watch as it engulfs this country with a coup lead by Russia, aided and abetted by Fox news and hate radio and the traitors in the republican party.
It seems WW2 just held the evil in check for 70 years or so.
This is the end game I suppose. The 1%er Randians like the Koch's and Mercer's have decided they want it all and by God they are gonna get their way!
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)under its kaisers, had a paltry 15 years or so of experiment with democracy during a desperately poor, hopeless period between wars, and naturally enough looked to a return to the good ol' days of a strong authority that would restore the relatively advanced, somewhat progressive state most still remembered.
Russia was even more intensely authoritarian, governed by paired secular emperors and religious patriarchs who controlled absolutely in both this world and the next, and had an even shorter experiment in democracy.
Neither are us. Our traditions and our expectations, including what even conservatives look back on as "the American Way," are extremely different.
workinclasszero
(28,270 posts)The rule of law will stand or fall in America on that day and it's coming soon.
brush
(53,784 posts)anneboleyn
(5,611 posts)shit to run for office on his own since his fantasy version of himself is that hes so influential and so powerful and everybody loves his nutcase theories and hes some kind of wizard. In reality hes a fat, sweaty, hysterical blowhard with childish ideas gleaned from a throughly schlock Dan Brown conspiratorial vision/version of historical cycles and not much else. Hed confront reality if he ran for office as hed have to answer hoi polloi questions and find out to his shock that hes actually boring and that voters dont love with his fourth turning Dan Brown shit.
brush
(53,784 posts)read as atrophy because that's what we're watching everyday with trump's policies for the country and his mind.
DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)and they will dispose of him when they see fit., Bannon forgets that the KKK and Nazis hated Irish Catholics like himself.
CanonRay
(14,104 posts)but it didn't permanently warp my brain.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)especially in the late '60s and early '70s when Bannon was in high school. A student would have to be authoritarian and xenophobic to buy into the worldview Bannon's friend describes.
LongTomH
(8,636 posts)Last edited Tue Dec 12, 2017, 01:04 PM - Edit history (1)
..........at slinging the bullshit!!!
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)because they think he's intellectually beneath them, even though they're attracted to that sort of worldview.
NastyRiffraff
(12,448 posts)I've never heard of the "Fourth Turning" and I highly doubt that a large majority of Alabamans had. I'd be puzzled too.
moriah
(8,311 posts)I know they've always been around. I remember when our circumstances made it necessary for me to take the city bus to and from school (5th/6th grade), and getting handed circulars warning how bar codes had the Number of the Beast as part of their code.
But normally they either run around proselytizing until the predicted Armageddon doesn't come, and then disperse or create a new denomination.
Eastern Christians, too, at least of the Orthodox variety, also have a long-standing issues with Islam. My ex was originally from an Eastern Bloc country but escaped, and had been raised Eastern Orthodox. He was also taught that Vlad the Impaler saved Romania from the Islamic invasion, and that the only thing they understood was utter brutality. Then there's the grudge over losing Constantinople. Oh, the Eastern Orthodox are still pissed about that.
But this whole push starting near the time the Left Behind series became popular... and even before... there are so many people who feel there's no hope except for Jesus to come and save them all. And instead of just listening to people who ignore the idea that "No one shall know the day or the hour", they're deciding to take it into their own hands, through the strange interpretation of Revelation encouraged by the people who believe that interpretation and detailed in Left Behind, to make it possible for Armageddon to happen faster.
I honestly like Orson Scott Card's rejection in his futuristic fiction that a war in the Middle East will lead to anything other than both Jerusalem and Mecca being nuked. He's pretty preachy about religion and is a homophobe you can tell in later novels, but even if he is saying that's not going to make Jesus come any faster, but there are enough people saying they want the whole area to be glass....
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)MFM008
(19,814 posts)Blithering drunk I'm sure gonna stick closer to home.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)tblue37
(65,393 posts)authoritarian! nt
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)to create.
Orsino
(37,428 posts)He's sniffing different chemtrails.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)scheming daemons
(25,487 posts)And each chunk began/ended with a seismic change in the country:
~1620ish - First settlements
~1700ish - Mass immigration, and economic growth
~1780ish - Revolution
~1860ish - Civil War
~1940ish - World War
~2020ish - Now
Each of those "chunks" has four 20-year segments... growth, maturity, entropy, destruction.
The Bannons of the world say we're at the "destruction" phase of the current "turning" which will usher in the next age and its "growth" period.
It's utter nonsense, but there it is.
highplainsdem
(48,993 posts)history, are never that tidy.
Kirk Lover
(3,608 posts)MontanaMama
(23,319 posts)Would cease giving Batshit Bannon any air time at all. He doesnt deserve it and does the viewing public a great disservice. They learned nothing from the free air time they gave Dotard apparently. Beyond frustrating.
KT2000
(20,581 posts)and now considers himself an intellectual. He is just a windbag.
Comatose Sphagetti
(836 posts)After I got sober, I worked with drunks for many years trying to help them recover.
I know a drunk when I see one.
Bannon is a drunk.