Bannon Wants to Destroy Our Democracy. He Must Be Prosecuted
For those who study authoritarianism, Steve Bannon's refusal to respond to the subpoena issued by the Congressional committee tasked with investigating Jan. 6 is hardly a surprise. Bannon's aim is to destroy our democracy, and responding to a subpoena issued by a democratic judiciary would affirm the legitimacy of a system he seeks to overthrow.
Bannon had big dreams to become a little Duce in Italy, training Europe's next right-wing "gladiators" in an Italian monastery, but that project failed. Now he's back in America, which in his mind is the new frontier of autocracy. He already feels empowered to discard the rule of law and respect for judicial process. "We control the country. We've got to start acting like it," he said recently on his War Room podcast about his plan to prepare tens of thousands of "shock troops" for an anti-democratic takeover of government once the Republicans return to the White House by legal or other means.
Of course, had Jan. 6 gone Bannon's way, the Biden administration would have been killed "in its crib," or rather, never been born at all. His overheated rhetoric reflects his frustration. Bannon likely thrived in the feverish conspiratorial atmosphere of November 2020-January 2021, when defeated President Donald Trump tried everything to remain in office, settling finally on a violent assault on the Capitol meant to interrupt certification of Biden's victory. "All hell will break loose tomorrow. It will be quite extraordinarily different," Bannon told his podcast audience on Jan. 5. "All I can say is strap in."
All hell did break loose, but Biden was inaugurated anyway. So Bannon and his cronies have a new plan, which draws on old right-wing knowledge of how to destabilize a sitting democratic government. It goes like this: You create a sense of crisis and impending Socialist tyranny so that the climactic authoritarian action, whatever it looks like, is accepted as restoring "order," and "freedom." That's likely what Bannon means when he claims that the Biden administration's own "incompetence and illegitimacy" will bring about its demise.
It's worth noting that Bannon is defying the subpoena at Trump's request. He is indebted to Trump, who pardoned Bannon in the last hours of his presidency. He's most valuable to Trump as a propagandist, and when he strings along Trump devotees by claiming that their leader could be reinstated in "2022 or maybe before," he's doing exactly what Trump pardoned him to do.
For the creators of the Trumpcult have a problem. 2024 is too far away to satisfy the angry demands of Trump's base for action. Even the 2022 midterms are a year out. Without a catalyzing event, it can be hard to keep up momentum. That's why many authoritarian leaders, including Mussolini, who Bannon admires, have made "permanent revolution" a propaganda point.
And that's why our political situation will become more volatile over the next year, and all bets are off after the midterms, whichever way the votes land. Bannon has already floated a scheme that hinges on making Trump Speaker of the House, and then president once Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris are impeached — a prospect sufficiently alarming to prompt Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) to introduce a bill to restrict the speakership to House members.
The gravity of these possibilities, and Bannon's openness about his seditious aims, make concerns that an eventual Department of Justice prosecution of him might look "partisan" misplaced, to say the least. So are fears that pursuing Trump and his inner circle could lead to civil unrest. We've already experienced unrest, on Jan. 6, and the only way to avoid an even bigger calamity is to hold the organizers and perpetrators of the deadly coup attempt accountable.
The Biden administration must use the coming months to act vigorously and communicate that it will punish those who seek to overthrow the government -- starting with Bannon. Holding him in contempt of Congress, and prosecuting him to the fullest extent the law allows, is the only option to protect our democracy.
Now that the House investigative committee has in fact recommended a contempt charge against Bannon, the implementation of the recommendation is up to the Department of Justice. Those of you who wonder about Merrick Garland’s seemingly inexplicable passivity in the face of the obvious threat of the impending destruction of American democracy should look at his record in office (an account of his first half-year is quoted at the end of this comment). As Dennis Kucinich says, if you want to understand a politician, you have to look at the scorecard.
The Establishment defense of Garland is that he is an “institutionalist.“ From the point of view of a defender of democracy, this defense is obviously absurd. The institution he is defending has been corrupted: therefore what he is defending is a corrupt institution. He is not a stupid man, so he must know this.
The logical interpretation of this situation is that the people who control the government, including Biden, Garland, Schumer, and Pelosi, are not actually defending democracy. They know they could not do so if they wanted to, because the United States is not a democracy. That it is not a democracy has been definitively demonstrated by academic studies that show that over the last forty years, the desires of 70% of the United States population have never been enacted in legislation by the Congress that allegedly represents them, whereas those of the upper .1% have invariably been enacted. Most US senators and representatives are merely hired hands. The reason the Democrats cherish democratic process, even to the detriment of democratic functioning, is that democratic process is the form of the charade that makes their careers possible. We are currently seeing this pattern being repeated in real time as congressional Democrats day after day are being forced to abandon (or choose to abandon through self-negotiation) legislation supported by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, such as legislation directed against ultra-wealthy text cheats, because the Republicans oppose it on behalf of their employers, the .1%. These taxes, if duly paid, would shave a tiny bit off the fortunes of billionaires, while making life-transforming investments possible for millions. What could more clearly demonstrate the fact that America is not a democracy?
The correct model for this spectacle appears to be America Inc., a neo-liberal capitalist corporation whose owners are the .1%, and whose legal department consists of Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Supreme Court. That is why the government is acting like a corporation in damage control mode, rather than a government of representatives of the people who are actually trying to repair the damage and defend democracy. Biden told his plutocratic sponsors before he was elected that nothing would fundamentally change. Thus his Administration is merely trying to offer enough concessions, and enough of an appearance of concessions, to neutralize a revolt of the population that would interfere with business as usual in America Inc.
The problem with the Biden-Garland appeasement model of governance is that the .1% as a whole have shown, through their failure to discipline the proto-fascists—which they could easily do if they wanted to—that having a fascist era in America is acceptable to them. (Could they even tell the difference?) And a significant part of the .1% are actively promoting the advent of this era. Most of the plutocracy’s employees in Congress imagine that during the first fascist era in America they would be able to continue their careers, if in an uncomfortable political environment, and then move through the revolving door into lucrative private sector jobs. Of course, this entire scenario is insane. (Don’t they remember hiding in fear of their lives on January 6?) But our current rulers are merely a motley collection of billionaires and politicians, either sociopathic or contaminated by the prevailing sociopathic ethos of their alternative universe, and cannot be expected to behave sanely.
The following quote will make an already long comment even longer, but it is essential to look at Garland’s scorecard. His determination to act as Trump’s private attorney defending Trump against E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit for rape is only the dismal beginning.
This quote comprises five paragraphs from a New Republic article of June 8, 2021 by Jeff Hauser and Max Moran, in which they conclude that “At this point, Garland himself is beyond saving,” and that “Every day Biden keeps Garland in charge of his legal agenda is a day Trumpism is normalized”:
“On several key matters, Garland’s DOJ has concealed the full extent of Trump’s wrongdoing; it has kept thousands of immigrants from obtaining green cards, while flooding the immigration system with Trump-selected judges; expanded the scope of police power; ensured oil and gas profits for decades to come; and explicitly protected one of Trump’s most hated Cabinet secretaries from accountability. Indeed, Garland has quietly emerged as Donald Trump’s unwitting hatchet man, doing almost everything in his power to protect the lawless former president’s legacy.
“On May 24, Garland committed the DOJ to keep much of the so-called “Barr memo”—through which Garland’s predecessor almost unilaterally decided that no part of the Mueller probe would result in criminal charges—secret. Even Trump enemies who scoffed at the Russia probe should be disturbed by Garland’s other decisions, though. He has committed the DOJ to defending a Trump-era policy slashing the number of legal immigrants who qualify for green cards. He’s hiring dozens of new immigration court judges who received their initial offers during the Trump era, and codified Trump-era rules restricting immigrants’ options to prevent their own deportations. Garland’s Civil Rights Division also remains perilously understaffed, enormously hampering its ability to conduct oversight of municipal police departments. It also pursued private chat logs between government employees and reporters, a censorious case that began in the last 15 days of the Trump administration.
“Late last month, the Justice Department urged a federal judge to dismiss lawsuits against Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr over their decision to tear-gas Black Lives Matter protesters near the White House last summer so that the president would be able to take a photo near a church, holding the Bible upside-down. While Garland repeated throughout his confirmation process that he’d prioritize tackling white supremacy, almost six months into the administration, no part of the federal government has a plan for rooting out white supremacists who serve in federal law enforcement roles.
“Meanwhile, Garland’s DOJ is actively defending a new oil project in Alaska that was cleared under Trump’s shams of environmental tests and may generate new oil for 30 years. In its filing, the DOJ explicitly said that the Trump administration adequately considered the new site’s effect on wildlife and greenhouse gas emissions. Garland is also maintaining support for a new oil pipeline in New Jersey and isn’t rescinding Trump-era briefs that made it harder for states to sue Big Oil over downplaying the risks of climate change.
“And some of Garland’s lieutenants are almost as hackish and corporate as any Trump appointee. His acting assistant attorney general for the civil division, Brian Boynton, represented Google, Eli Lilly, and the notorious for-profit University of Phoenix just one year before entering the department—where Boynton wrote a legal brief protecting Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from testifying about for-profit schools defrauding indebted students. (The courts, thankfully, ruled against Boynton’s position.) Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar likewise represented Big Tech (Facebook, Uber, Snap, Twitter) and Big Pharma (Amgen, Lumos, Syneos) just months before revolving into the department.”
We need to be tweeting and retweeting excerpts of this article. Only a ground swell will get our legislators’ attention.