Within the part of the country where they’re at least a non-trivial minority they’ll certainly be able to frame at least part of the agenda for state level legislation and for local-level enforcement. That is very powerful. All the more so if they can keep it up for 2, 4, or 10 years.
As well, IMO the US contains a lot of people who are closet fellow travelers. In the privacy of their own mind they’re thinking along the lines of “Those ultra-racists are crudely overdoing it, but thank goodness somebody is finally standing up for us fundies / whiteys.”
To the degree the fellow travelers can be coaxed into making even vaguely approving noises in public, suddenly the tide of white supremacy could blossom from WAG 2% rabid adherents to – big WAG – 30% rabid + semi-adherents.
There are lots of ways the “unthinkable” is actually the “unsayable-in-public”. Once those things do become sayable in public the zeitgeist can shift a very long way in a very short time.
IMO the big news with this will be the vastly lopsided geographical distribution. This will throw into very stark focus the reality that we have 2 USAs with very different ideas of how to run the country: the non-deep South urban/suburban, and the rural and/or Deep South.
The fact the former demographic is a hefty majority of the people but the latter is a hefty majority of the land area and statehouses and federal legislators will lead to lots of controversy about voting arrangements, just as it did in 2016.
A thought that occurred to me: what if Bannon wants to do more than just bark at the republican establishment from the sidelines and establish his own tea party type political movement?
I wouldn’t bet anything of value on that; Bannon might like the idea of being head of his own party, but he just doesn’t have the energy. (Let alone the charisma.) Years of heavy drinking will do that to a guy.
As for being kingmaker behind some figurehead: who? Richard Spencer? Sure, they’d get their hardcore 20% or so–the willing-to-accept-the-name white supremacists–but that’s not enough to win any useful offices.
And the additional 10-15% of voters who are ‘okay’ with white supremacy but shrink at owning it, wouldn’t go for an outright W.S. unless they thought he had a chance of winning. And Richard Spencer and his ilk have no chance of winning.
Trump was an anomaly. His inherited wealth gave shy-white-supremacists a ready and plausible excuse for voting for him (“he’s a great businessman!”) And his years on TV gave him a ‘harmless’ aura that no reclusive wealthy right-wing extremist can boast.
So I’m not seeing how Bannon could form a successful party; there’s no potential candidate to serve as standard-bearer who combines Trump’s racism with his ‘plausible reason for voting for him’ status.
I’m still curious how Bannon is going to war for Trump’s White house, when his acknowledged enemies are Trump’s administration. Almost all the only people left are big military projectionists, and elite Jewish businessmen. I know the cognitive dissonance is strong with the Trump supporters, and there is still Sessions I guess.
I suppose Bannon could go 100% on anti-immigration, hitting the overlap with the white supremacists, But I can’t figure out how exactly you make the president in general look like the poor put-upon victim of his own staff, and have it come out positive.
Not white supremacists, just white nationalists! Just like economic nationalism doesn’t really mean breaking trade treaties, just doing them so we get the jobs. Pretty simple, really.
I think what Bannon means is he’s going to use Breitbart and right wing media to put pressure on the president, and the president would do best to heel. Whether the president himself survives or not is not Bannon’s concern; the right wing white nationalist agenda is what matters most, and he’s going to ramp up pressure on those whom he believes are standing in the way. Basically, the people who pushed Bannon out of the White House are now going to face his wrath. And what is the president going to do about it - fire him?
Trump could do Bannon a fair amount of harm with a (hypothetical) relentless Twitter campaign about The Failing Breitbart and how Breitbart has become a tool of the Alt-Left and how Bannon was seen taking money from globalists who are working to bury America. And also Bannon is secretly working for Hillary Clinton–and was, all along.
Wouldn’t matter if it’s all invented. If Trump works relentlessly enough at it, it could hurt pageviews at Breitbart, and that would hit Bannon hard.
I think I see it, as through a glass, dorkly. It has been noted often that Trump will express a sternly extreme position on something, and then sometimes directly contradict that position. Frequently. Almost always.
Maybe that’s the telling pattern. Compare any given Trump declaration on, say, immigration. And compare it with other such policy statements to find the direct contradiction. Let’s say those positions mutually nullify, thus, there is no position. Hence, there is no fake position because there is no true one. Schrodinger’s Catch-22, if you will. I’m going to anyway, so you might just as well.
After this procedure of elimination, there may be a residue of things said that he did not contradict! And they must be the core of adamant opinion, what Il Douche actually thinks! Perhaps we need a volunteer to pursue the question, someone who thrives on the tedious, tiresome and pedantic. (I would offer myself but am hampered by laziness.)
True, he could do Bannon harm. But Trump will have to actually, for once, appear to be more of a conventional president and start making the kinds of decisions that conventional presidents do. He’s been very, very fortunate that he came in riding a very strong economy - one of the strongest in terms of sustained GDP and jobs growth over the past 100 years. He’s been fortunate in that no major new crises have broken out on his watch. In both cases, however, it’s a matter of not yet. When bad things happen - and they will - and when the average person starts looking for blame, he’ll be at the top of everyone - and I do mean everyone’s - list. And we’re not even talking about his growing legal jeopardy. At that point, he’ll need a base to run to. If he moderates, if he pivots away from Bannon, he’ll have a hard time regaining the trust of a voting base that believes in Alex Jones more than it does anyone who resides within the Beltway. Bannon is in a much better position to hurt Trump than the other way around.
Breitbart’s motivations just got laid bare. The editor in chief responded to someone pretending to be Bannon where they discuss colluding to destroy Ivanka and Kushner suggesting he can get them out of the White House by the end of the year. CNN reported that the Breitbart guy “shared a personal smear about their private lives, perhaps an indication of how low the website is willing to go to achieve its agenda.” but CNN did not divulge it.
(On edit, the Vox link shows the actual emails insinuating that Kushner is an “actual cuckold”.)
Breitbart’s motives, like those of the far right, are to tap into white rage. They want a revolution. The problem as Bannon found out is that most revolutions fail - and they fail because most rebels are good at tearing people down, tearing reputations, tearing ideas down, and perhaps, if they’re successful, tearing entire systems down. But once you tear it down, you actually have to fucking govern. You have to know how things work. All revolutions eventually run int a “Now what?” moment. The scary thing isn’t that Bannon had all these nutty ideas; it’s that he actually had his hands on the steering wheel and throttles of power, as did others like Mike Flynn. That such bozos could get a taste of this sort of power without having any idea of how to use other than to destroy…is kinda scary when you think about it.