The reader just has to wonder at Ms. Tett’s thinking that Americans aren’t completely familiar with ‘Breitbart News’ ! We did witness the scurrilous attack on the person and career of Shirley Sherrod by Andrew Breitbart in July 2010. Breitbart demonstrated that the twin pillars of the ‘altright’ were/are racism and cowardice! Aided by incompetent propagandizing, and an American Press that failed to do their job of exposing this hack!
Steve Bannon is just the natural successor to the notorious Breitbart, but don’t forget the respectable Republican racists: Nixon of The Southern Strategy, or Reagan of Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs, and his notorious Neshoba County Fair Speech that opened his 1980 campaign: I believe in States Rights, the coded racism of the Dixiecrat. Just miles from where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered! Or recall the Willie Horton ads of Bush The Elder and the unmourned Lee Atwater?
What remains outside the acceptable rhetorical parameters of Ms. Tett’s attempt to ‘understand‘ the racist politics of ‘altright’ Bannon, is a complete want of honesty or candor of the why of Bannon and Trump! Because this is The Financial Times, the complete collapse of politically codified Neo-Liberalism in 2008 is avoided at all costs. And the fact that Americans are hurting financially because of that collapse, and the failure of the dogma of The Self-Correcting Market: at least two reasons for the rise of Trump and Bannon.
Robber Capital is doing just fine, but most Americans are struggling, not to speak of a whole generation of young people working at Starbucks, Walmart or Target. Where I shop the age demographic is from the very young to the elderly.
Call Ms. Tett’s ruminations on Mr. Bannon near sycophantic, after all, practicing journalism today its all about maintaining access to powerful political figures. The wise gambit is to adopt the attitude of the courtier!
What can the ‘Left’ learn from Bannon? That ‘Left’ can be defined, in FT terms, as the New Democrats, who, if they want to get elected, need to return to their New Deal roots. The utterly corrupt Clinton/Obama coterie must go and make way for the Warren/Sanders New Dealers. The only real question is how long that might take: 2018, 2020, 2024?
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/c2272b5e-8794-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45787
