deconstruction in the service of totalitarianism is a contradiction It’s rare that we see the mediocrity of the RW on display but the annual CPAC tearoom party gave the world a glimpse of what passes for a theoretical base for what has been a Ganzfeld of rightist hallucination interrupted by golf vacations. A recent CPAC panel with Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon sketched the latter's theoretical strategy for Lord Dampnut's White House.
More interesting will be the first RW “conservative purity” pundit to denounce Bannon as a “Cultural Marxist” precisely because he has adopted a “deconstructive” position on the administrative state that cops a cue from the Frankfurt School, but with a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of political communication.
Assuming the primacy of the political and administrative state apparatus over the economy, Bannon references indirectly a Frankfurt School theory about the overthrow of the bureaucratic imperatives of the administrative state. Unfortunately, much like his misreading of Evola and the interwar fascist literature, his approach suffers much like the ad libs of POTUS45* speeches.
What Lord Dampnut tried in the first month of the regime was a “military” yet “bloodless” coup, supported by a Russian alliance which seems now to have failed, as long as the cover-up continues to unravel the connections to crony capitalism and the kleptocracy of multiple polities.
Goldman Sachs ex-banker and the RW media industries’ best prop
Bannon has been trying to disrupt the quasi-deep state of permanent administrative agencies, especially the security apparatus which has now defensively used the same communicative means to constrain that action.
Unlike Habermasian democratization, there is the RW authoritarian need for Bannonism’s use of anti-democratic legal means which now still cannot reliably count on mass appeals to racist reaction. That said, more people will die in racist attacks, and even more will suffer the constancy of micro-aggressions.
This does not minimize the continuing months of repression ahead, executed by US paramilitary agencies and supported by a host of reactionaries, not a recent development considering the repression instituted and nurtured since 9/11.
dismantling administrative agencies does not constitute deconstruction of an administrative stateBannon’s critique such as it is is not unlike most of his rationalizations that parrot more specifically how “the systems-world is comprised of the economy and the administrative state” where destroying one reciprocally benefits the inequality of the other. His understanding of agency and structure failed in trying to leverage existing criminal connections into a profit-seeking scheme that is still evolving with the potential of lifted Russian sanctions among other possibilities including another diversionary war.
President Bannon’s racist minarchy aims to forward an American 4th Turning version of the “End of Times” in Alexandr Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory. Crony capitalism and kleptocracy will benefit from the chaos and catastrophies that result from implementing those theories.
Bannonism is more about deregulation rather than deconstruction
Bannonist nationalism privileges one ethnicity over all others and is based on an anti-scientific ignorance based on primitive supremacy of the sort promulgated by neo-fascist political parties. It specifies a permanent war between Dominionist and Islamic caliphates.
Bannonism projects a similar economic model of racial conflict onto nationalist trade wars which oversimplifies bilateralism in order to benefit ruling class wealth. It does so at the cost of social welfare that would be more optimal under multilateralism. Advantage is never comparative.
The result of destroying rather than deconstructing the administrative state is designed to profit from its destruction while advancing the goals of (ad)venture capitalist warlords. It is Malthusianism complete with prepper bunkers.
This is less creative destruction than a misanthropic chaos designed to return the global economy to some infomercialized feudalism. Bannonism’s fatal flaw lies in misunderstanding the political goals of deconstruction and enslaving it to a totalized discourse of racial superiority, resembling some defeated historical models, making his prescriptions in their reified form, crypto-fascist.
Since his goal is short-term capitalist profit and economic insecurity based on inequality, Bitcoin or another casino economy mechanism would be even more of a deconstructive economic program than what Bannon wants to achieve.
It’s not deconstruction as much as it is appropriating institutions, aided by demolishing (via deregulation) their income-distributional mechanisms for greater class wealth resulting in greater inequality. Corporations in one form or another and with their bankers, will survive the chaos.
With undeconstructed profit it’s like starting a riot to disguise a bank robbery. Corporations will survive the deconstruction, so it’s no deconstruction as it is re-centralizing the administrative state for totalitarian control. Unlike the de-centering that deconstruction promises, more underpants will be stolen.
BANNON: I think the — I think the same thing; I think if you look at the lines of work, I kind of break it up into three verticals of three buckets.
The first is kind of national security and sovereignty and that’s your intelligence, the Defense Department, Homeland Security.
The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism and that is Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steven Mnuchin at Treasury, Lighthizer at — at Trade, Peter Navarro, Stephen Miller, these people that are rethinking how we’re gonna reconstruct the — our trade arrangements around the world.
The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state. And if you…
(APPLAUSE)
So I think — I think the three most important things, I think one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history was his immediate withdraw from TPP. That got us out of a…
(APPLAUSE)
… got us out of a trade deal and let our sovereignty come back to ourselves, the people, the mainstream media don’t get this, but we’re already working in consultation with the Hill. People are starting to think through a whole raft of amazing and innovative, bilateral relationships — bilateral trading relationships with people that will reposition America in the world as a — as a fair trading nation and start to bring jobs. High value added, manufacturing jobs, back to the United States of America.
On the — on the national security part, it was certainly the first — I think the first two E.O.s that you start to see implemented here of the last couple of days under General Kelly. And that is, do rule of law is going to exist when you talk about our sovereignty and you talk about immigration. General Kelly…
(APPLAUSE)
… and Attorney General Sessions are adamant — you know, that and you’re gonna start to see I think with the defense budget we’re going to talk about next week when we bring the budget out and also with certain things about the plan on ISIS and what General Mattis and these guys think I think you’ll start to see the other part of that.
But the third, this regulation…
SCHLAPP: Yeah.
BANNON: … every business leader we’ve had in is saying not just taxes, but it is — it is also the regulation. I think the consistent, if you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction, the way the progressive left runs, is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just gonna put in some sort of regulation in — in an agency.
That’s all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.
So if there were a way to get to why Bannon appropriated some of the structure of a Frankfurt School-type argument, however misguided, one needs to look at some related developments that are thought-out rather than buskered.
First, he brings categories of meaning and agency back into critical social theory, both of which were absent in the macro-sociological and depth psychological approaches that were favored in the post war period. This brings democratic potentials back into view, since democracy makes sense only within specific forms of interaction and association, from the public forum to various political institutions.
Indeed, Habermas's first and perhaps most enduring work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989/1961), traced the historical emergence of new forms of public interaction from the intimate sphere of the family, to coffee houses, salons, and finally to parliamentary debates. While linked ultimately to a narrative of its decline through the market and the administrative state, the core of such interaction and the critical and egalitarian potential of being part of a public whose members address one another as equals had for Habermas a nonideological, even “utopian” core (Habermas 1989, 88).
This approach to law has important consequences for a critical theory, since it changes how we appeal to democratic norms in criticizing current institutions: it is not clear exactly what the difference is between a radical and a liberal democracy, since some of the limitations on participation are due to the constraints of social facts and not to power asymmetries. By insisting upon popular sovereignty as the outcome of the generation of “communicative power” in the public sphere, Habermas tries to save the substance of radical democracy.
The unresolved difficulty is that in a complex society, as Habermas asserts, “public opinion does not rule” but rather points administrative power in particular directions; or, as he puts it, it does not “steer” but “countersteers” institutional complexity (Habermas 1996, chapter 8).
That is, members of the public do not control social processes; qua members of a public, they may exercise influence through particular institutionalized mechanisms and channels of communication...
A critical theory of globalization is a practical or praxeologically oriented theory that sees the “fact of globalization” in relation to the goal of realizing the norms of human emancipation and democracy.
The central and still open questions for such a practically oriented social science are the following:
what available forms of praxis are able to promote the transformations that could lead to new forms of democracy?
What sort of practical knowledge is needed to make this possible and how might this knowledge be stabilised in institutionalised forms of democratic inquiry?
What are the possibilities and opportunities for democracy at a higher level of aggregation that globalization makes possible?
How might the public sphere be realized at the global level?
The argument here suggests that such inquiry and institutions must go beyond single perspective understandings of democracy that dominate national political life as well as the various administrative techne that are common in the international sphere.
A critical praxeology of realizing norms in multiperspectival institutions might add that it is also a reflexive question of putting such organization in the larger context of a project of human emancipation.
Such an interactive account of publics and institutions gives a plausible practical meaning to the extending of the project of democracy to the global level. It also models in its own form of social science the mode of inquiry that this and other publics may employ in creating and assessing the possibilities for realizing democracy.
A critical theory of globalization does not only point out the deficits of current practices, but shows the potential for properly organized publics to create new ones. Since the new practices need not be modeled on the old ones, it is not a theory of democracy as such, but of democratization.
I wish your essays were more widely read and discussed. I find them both, intriguingly presented and challenging to consider, as well as humorous and dedicated to democratic thought. I appreciate the opportunity you provide to become better informed. Thank you.
Although I have to admit that I thought that Bannon was simply trying to disguise trashing the world for corporate/billionaire profit by re-labeling and obfuscation for us ignorant disposables. If so, it certainly won't work.
Also makes me wonder whether the various corporate coup 'trade deals' have simply been/are to be passed in Top Secrecy or whether they've simply promised the corporate death-wish-list to whoever gives the 'best deal' to those involved...
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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
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HEY!!
... you are disparaging most of the species in your post (except, maybe, the "vampire squid") --
When Cicero had finished speaking, the people said “How well he spoke”.
When Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said “Let us march”.
Hi annieli.
I wish your essays were more widely read and discussed. I find them both, intriguingly presented and challenging to consider, as well as humorous and dedicated to democratic thought. I appreciate the opportunity you provide to become better informed. Thank you.
Thanks so much for this,
Thanks so much for this, annieli.
Although I have to admit that I thought that Bannon was simply trying to disguise trashing the world for corporate/billionaire profit by re-labeling and obfuscation for us ignorant disposables. If so, it certainly won't work.
Also makes me wonder whether the various corporate coup 'trade deals' have simply been/are to be passed in Top Secrecy or whether they've simply promised the corporate death-wish-list to whoever gives the 'best deal' to those involved...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.