In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Steve Bannon –  career bigot and now chief strategist to Cheeto Jesus, asserted that:

“Darkness is good.  Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when “they” [liberals and the media] get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

and there’s more – a lot more.  Here’s another nice jewel from before the election:

“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist.  The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over.  [Sorry, Momma] If we deliver, we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

Bannon is at one time fascinating and terrifying.  He is playing the role to Cheeto Jesus that Rove played to GWB.  The difference?  Rove was a brilliant tactician and professional dirty trickster.  He got votes through vicious lies and simple dirty tricks like push polls, fake mailers, and simply misrepresenting of fact.  Bannon is more dangerous.  He addresses people who have been actually disaffected.  For decades, the GOP (aided and abetted by NeoLiberal Democrats) have pushed all of the wealth to the top 1%, stagnated wages, destroyed unions, offshored jobs, and crippled the public healthcare system.  Bannon (you’re going to hate this) has brilliantly used this disaffection to propel the Cheeto vote.

In the campaign, he targeted establishment Republicans, the Tea Party, the media, and of course, Neoliberals.  Because the Democratic Party was taken over by Neoliberal ideology in the late 80s and early 90s adopting GOP light policies, it has therefore been complicit in the decline of the middle class by not standing up to GOP slash and burn tactics.  Having ceded most of populism, the last bastion of liberal ideology has been on identity politics – pointing out how the “other guy” is bad for women and minorities.  While, especially in the case of Cheeto Jesus, that line of argument is certainly true, it is simply not enough for today’s politics.

Maslow’s Hierarchy

What Hillary didn’t get (and Cheeto Jesus and Bannon clearly understood) was that disaffected white working class voters were more concerned about eating, heating their homes, and were angry at a system that was taking security away from them.  Intentionally or not, they used Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs to appeal to potential voters.  Maslow developed the hierarchy in 1943 to describe people’s behavior based on needs. Essentially, the theory is that people’s physiological needs (eating and safety) take precedence before all other needs.  When those are satisfied, then people focus on loving and belonging, when that is satisfied, esteem becomes important, and finally, self-actualization.  Bannon and Cheeto brilliantly kept the entire campaign focused on the first two most basic needs, especially safety.  Hillary and the Dems focused on love/belonging and esteem (identity politics), pointing out how bad the other guy was.  And they missed.  Badly.  The result of Hillary and Co. being completely tone deaf to the mood of the electorate was that they were shocked when Cheeto took the battleground states that she had deemed as her own.  Bannon, I believe, is responsible for the success in the battleground states by focusing on fear, while Hillary relied on traditional identity politics.

The US, and indeed the planet, are in for dark days.  I don’t believe that Cheeto Jesus intends to (or even can) fulfill nearly all of his promises to those who voted for him.  He’s not going to resurrect the coal industry.  He’s not going to lower the deficit  increasing spending while slashing taxes.  He’s not going to deport millions of people and create better healthcare by destroying Obamacare.  At some point, the disaffected will begin to realize that they are still disaffected.  At that point, the Dems (if they get off their asses and get to work) will have a chance to take control of the national debate.

My concern is that the Dems keep doing the same goddam thing over and over, expecting a different result.  It’s time for the ruling class of the Dems to step aside, allow a younger, more energetic generation of true liberals rise to the top (if they exist).  If the Dems don’t do that, then Bannon’s assertion that they’ll “govern for 50 years” is more scary than Rove’s assertion he was going to develop a “permanent majority.”

Message to Hillary loyalists – stop mourning and get off your ass.  Message to DNC and state parties: stop mourning, get off your ass, and get out of the way.

Here endeth the rant, goddamit. (Sorry, Momma).