Loose Bannon

Steve Bannon is out.  Fired.

The dark knight of the Trump White House may be gone, but Donald Trump's Presidency could be in even greater trouble.  Because Bannon has long since indicated that he could be more of a problem spitting into the tent than spitting out of it.  And he demonstrated that by, in the style of Anthony Scaramucci, talking to a reporter when he thought he was speaking off the record.

At one point in his talk with  Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal American Prospect magazine, Bannon said tht white supremacists were a "collection of clowns" whose anger could be harnessed to help Trump, thus producing a double-edged sword that he ended up falling on - both edges.  Bannon dismissed Trump's tough talk on North Korea as just that - talk.  Bannon says that the White House knows that any attempt by Trump to make good on his threats against North Korea will lead to a war that no one really wants. 

"Forget it," Bannon said about the North Korea crisis, calling it a sideshow. "Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 20 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us."

Gee, thanks, Steve.  I suddenly feel a whole lot better. :-p

But here's something else Bannon said that Democrats should take note of about the Democratic Party's pre-occupation with identity politics - the idea that a racial, ethnic or other sort of group's unique concerns are more important than the concerns of the general population.

"The longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em," Bannon said.  "I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

I want the Democrats to talk about racism every day, too.  But that's not all I want them to talk about.  I want them to talk about the economy, infrastructure, income equality - everything Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have talked about.  Bannon is no longer there to help Trump crush the opposition, but he was right in saying what others had said in the past - that if the Democrats keep focusing on ethnic or cultural identity to the point where they disregard issues that affect everyone, they're never going to work their way back to anything resembling real power.  I was flabbergasted when Hillary Clinton's supporters bashed Bernie Sanders and his supporters for focusing too much on income inequality and called it an issue that white men were "privileged" to focus on because they didn't have to worry about being oppressed.  I explained back in May 2016 what an asinine argument that was, but it was an argument that the Hillary Clinton campaign evidently embraced at her own peril in the general election.  Democrats are already hoping to nominate another non-white and non-male presidential candidate in 2020, though that could easily put a non-white centrist like Cory Booker ahead of a white liberal like Sherrod Brown for the Presidency at at time when the Democratic Party has to return to its progressive origins and not care about the race or sex of the presidential candidate who could lead the party back there.  Just remember . . . it was a privileged white male - Franklin Roosevelt - who initiated the New Deal, and it was a white male Southerner - Lyndon Johnson - who initiated the Great Society, the centerpiece of which was civil rights legislation.

And what was it I pointed out in discussing Martin O'Malley's presidential prospects for 2020, back in March 2017?  "If the Democrats are so obsessed with identity politics that O'Malley has even less of a chance for the party's presidential nomination in 2020 than he had in 2016, then they deserve to go the way of the Whigs."  Bannon knows that.  And, more importantly, he's let on that he knows that.

And now that he's left the Trump administration. he could let on a lot more that Trump doesn't want you to know.

Spitting into the tent . . .

So good riddance  But in some respects, it's too late; he did the worst damage he could ever do when he stoked racial animosity and also when he convinced Trump to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement, thus restoring America's place as the world's toxic idiot.