To some, he is an erudite voice in the wilderness not afraid to speak uncomfortable truths to an America enfeebled by ‘political correctness’. To others, he is like a dishevelled drunken stepfather using fear and manipulation to drag the US back into the sinister age of overt white racial domination. But there is no denying that as Donald Trump’s right-hand man, Bannon is now at the very centre of global power. He is widely held to be the intellectual force behind the rise of the Trump presidency and the white nationalist movement that underpins it.
Bannon has enjoyed a varied career, from naval officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker to anti-environment consultant, filmmaker and publisher. The subject of his films and the preoccupations of his former webzine, Breitbart News, give a clear sense of his political commitments. His filmography includes a lionization of Ronald Reagan, a defence of Sarah Palin, and an exposé of the ‘insidious’ Occupy movement. In Generation Zero he provides the standard rightwing boilerplate of recent US history, tracing the decline of the country back to the permissive and narcissistic 1960s generation, whose abandonment of ‘old-fashioned values’ has led to everything from weak-kneed multiculturalism to the 2008 banking crisis. The latter was nothing to do with Goldman Sachs. Go figure.
