Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts

Tuesday 20 March 2018

Intellectual Integrity and Dealing with Russia

The hysteria surrounding events in Salisbury - the attempted murder of two Russians and the collateral near manslaughter of a policeman, using a deadly nerve agent - reached epidemic proportions last weekend. What we knew for certain was that three people were close to death at one time (two still critical at the time of writing), that one of them was connected to the murky world of post-Cold War intelligence and that a tool not available to the ordinary murderer - not the mere deadly cyanide of an Agatha Christie novel - had been used.

There is no reason to cast aspersions on character of the main victim. As we will see, we simply do not know very much at all. In fact, as of today, he is not dead (and we hope he recovers) but critically ill alongside his daughter and this alone makes the Prime Minister's immediate shooting from the hip to point the finger at the Kremlin a little odd. Critically ill not only does not mean dead but it means the possibility of sufficient recovery to be able to give evidence against perpetrators - so why not wait a little longer?

It was, of course, reasonable to believe that it was highly likely (though not certain) that Russians were involved as perpetrators as much as victims but it was perhaps an enormous step too far to say with such certainty - as the Prime Minister and her Government did - that it was 'highly likely' that the Russian Government, the Kremlin no less, ordered the 'hit'. It was even more challenging for our Foreign Secretary to claim that President Putin was 'overwhelmingly likely' to have done so personally. What was the evidence for this? In the end, the Government was asking us to trust it and that too is very challenging as Jeremy Corbyn implied.

Early polling followed the usual trajectory in these cases (much like Iraq). Things started with a surge of support for the Government on limited information and instinctive trust for authority. Then the doubts started to set in. Lack of data raised awareness of the implications, the partisan agenda and the lack of a solid intellectual basis for the extravagance of the claims. People started to remember other cases where they were led down the garden path. This questioning started at the margins and then developed quickly amongst the more intelligent members of the establishment, those who place intellectual integrity ahead of tribal solidarity and who care about the evidential basis for allegations. 

The circle of questioning may expand but the mass tends to accept authority until it becomes clear that a policy is costly, ill-thought out and counter-productive. Eventually people in general may lose interest but the circle of criticism expands until some f**k-up or new data flips the population over to the other side of the game. Why go through this cycle of belief and distrust when a little delay might bring more certainty. This is what I am interested in here.

In this case, around a third of the population soon became thoroughly cynical about the Government's claims or were prepared to back Corbyn and his doubts - or simply had sufficient knowledge or intellectual integrity to ask their own questions. All that is sufficient to block any seriously radical act being contemplated by the Government - which helps to explain the rather weak response to such a 'highly likely' event: a few diplomats get thrown out which is matched by an exact number of ours thrown out by the Russians ... and then nothing! Perhaps as the evidence comes in we will see more considered actions but the whole thing looks like a hissy-fit instead of mature policy-making.

Does 'Highly Likely' Really Mean "We Don't Know?"

The 'highly likely' claim of Prime Minister seems to have been based on little more than that the nerve agent allegedly originated in Russia and not yet on direct evidence that the Russian Government was behind the crime. Again, why not wait a little for the recovery of the victims. The assumption is that a) the nerve agent could not be reproduced elsewhere and b) that the Russian Government is in total control of any stockpile. Sloppy thinking here. It was, of course, reported reasonably enough that "British officials had identified the substance as being part of the Novichok group of nerve agents which were developed by the Soviet military during the 1970s and 1980s"

But think about this for a moment. This is very old stockpile and 'part of'' suggests 'reproducibility' rather than a decisive identification with one single known agent that can be traced to a single known source. The criminals (for that is what they are, whether State-directed or not) have not used state of the art material. The assassination was clearly incompetent and not entirely professional. There are other agents for assassination tools to hand than left-over Soviet era nerve agent. 

If it is old Soviet stock pile, we know that a lot of such material fell into some dubious hands in the early 1990s before some rough sort of order was restored, that stock piles might have been in territory now inhabited by other States and that the early 1990s saw a Russia where everything had a price and where such material might be regarded as somebody's pension. Russian sources themselves say reasonably enough that if they want to kill someone, they have means more effective than this. Not a nice thought but plausible enough.

May would have done much better to say to the Russians that the evidence suggests that the Russian Government needs to explain how an old stockpiled Soviet nerve agent has been let loose on the world and then request British police access to Russian resources to uncover and bring to justice the perpetrators. As we say, it might have done better as well to give some time for the two main victims to recover or have a full murder investigation on their hands. But, no, it had to be confrontational and unsubtle in a relationship with a sensitive nuclear power where a final quarrel might result in the immolation of millions on both sides. .

It is certainly possible that a villainous Putin knew of and countenanced such an act even though it looks distinctly amateurish in conception. Yet this investigation had scarcely got under way before the accusations were made. Although the evidence was not available to make any claim stick in public (except on the basis of 'trust me'), by asserting Russian complicity with ultimatums and finger-pointing all possible attempts at dialogue to hear what the Russians had to say and gather further evidence was lost. Surely a more mature approach would have been to request Russian co-operation in the investigation and make your accusations when all avenues had been exhausted.

Needless to say, "Russia’s foreign ministry hit back immediately, saying May’s comments were a“circus show” and part of a political information campaign against Russia." Well, they were, regrettably probably right. The US had to posture in turn so that we then had three sets of idiots posturing at the expense of global peace. NATO had to jump in, of course, in any case nobody noticed it. The Europeans reluctantly complied with the demands of Western solidarity in a rather good statement that ambiguously took 'extremely seriously' the UK Government's intelligence assessment. I think we take it 'extremely seriously' too. 

Perhaps we are truly ruled by cynics, as are the Americans, Europeans and Russians. The Russians could just as easily have said that they were horrified by the incident, were disturbed at the presence of the nerve agent and would offer joint facilities to establish who was responsible and bring them to justice. They are no more to be trusted than the West but this does not mean they are guilty - yet!

What Is Going On?

This is really about nation states saying to their own peoples - 'trust me, I am your ruler" - and, of course, in all these countries there will be people, naive people, who take things on trust and assertion just as there will be conspiracy loons who decide that it was all down to the Jews. 

On Monday, May said the latest poisoning [actually the poisoning of Litvinenko is not proven as a state-sanctioned act either although the Russian Government appears to have done little to permit proper investigation and is also somewhere on the 'possible through highly likely' continuum] took place“against a backdrop of a well-established pattern of Russian state aggression”.

The attempted murder of a rogue agent in an English country town is suddenly to be linked not even to some mindless bit of institutional revenge against a man of limited or no importance but to some grand strategy of Russian expansion (never mind that it is NATO and the EU that have expanded continuously against the Russia since the fall of the Soviet Empire). 

These nasty little attempted murders by persons unknown soon became expanded into a grand narrative involving Syria and chemical weapons, Crimea and alleged human rights violations in Russia itself and very quickly too! This seemed to be about strengthening NATO and screwing over the idea of a European Army as much as it was about saving the good burghers of Salisbury from mass death by poisoning.

What was worth listening to carefully was the carefully constructed narrative of the expert being wheeled on to the BBC who has a double-barrelled name and a military style in leisure wear. It was flawed intellectually from beginning to end, based on not asking questions but telling a story and it ended with ... chemical weapons in Syria and Russia as a potential existential threat. 

Chemical Weapons

The fair point of the Government was that this was the first use of a nerve agent on the soil of Western democracy since the 1970s and that in itself is deadly serious, especially in the context of the threat of terrorism and the probable return of Islamist warriors from a country, Syria, where chemical weapons are part of the stockpiles of many villains.  

Yet this was not stated so clearly at first - all eyes were directed at Russia which is actually aiding the anti-Islamist forces and one cannot but believe that the storm was as much directed at warning the Russian-backed Syrian Government not to use all possible means to end its vicious civil war as it was to draw attention to the weaponry itself. 

Perhaps Russia is being warned that a terrorist act using chemical weapons in the UK will somehow be linked with them in the public mind so they had better police things at their end - who knows what goes on in the mind of Government strategists? 

Perhaps this is reasonable but, if so, it would tell us something about just how out-of-control our Government may be in handling the dire consequences of its own dabblings in the region under Prime Minister Blair. A debate on this would not be welcome. 

Perhaps horror at chemical weapons use becomes the 'casus belli' for getting Parliamentary approval for deeper British operations in Syria to please President Trump's Pentagon where enough Blairites are likely to back the Government against thinking High Tories to deliver yet another damnable intervention that leads nowhere but back to our small towns and cities.

But let us not go down the rabbit hole of political conspiracy theory ...

Behind The Grand Narrative
 
Behind any 'grand narrative', more short term prosaic concerns can be discerned. The amount of political and police resource thrown at the 'solving' of these attempted murders looked ridiculous when compared to the inaction of media, political class and police in dealing with the equally and most possibly more heinous crimes of Asian grooming gangs in towns like Telford. 

Yes, this needed to be investigated and with full resources because of the chemical weapons aspect but troops on the streets and irate speeches by leading politicians were not to be found in the case of the Asian grooming gangs and urban organised crime which are probably far more of a threat to most ordinary Britons even than 'terrorism'. But it is terrorist acts that result in the fall of Governments, not the sustained rape of vulnerable young women.

This was the attempted murder of one of their own under state protection - although this level of concern clearly did not apply to the poor girls allegedly under state protection in the care homes of the North! The State chooses what to care about and its priorities remains the same as it did in the days of Edward III -  the expansion of the Realm and the retention of power rather than the people within that Realm and their day-to-day welfare. It was why we chose to invest in nuclear weapons rather than national resilience in the 1950s and nothing has changed.

Regardless of 'who actually did it' (I say again that it remains possible that this was an act ordered by the Kremlin so don't accuse me of not recognising that possibility) , the exploitation of the incident to build a cohesive NATO narrative, among a population quietly questioning why we bother with such things as Trident in an age of austerity, is the most striking aspect of this 'spin'. 

This was a play, We were the audience, The actors were in place. All that was needed was the willing suspension of disbelief.  But something was very wrong with this story. As someone in the 'narrative game' I could see the joins and the leaps and tropes because that is my trade even if most people could not.  The sheer desperation of it all suggested a very frightened and insecure elite - frightened of things other than a nerve agent in Salisbury.

Of course, we all knew what was going on - it was political. It was a chance for the Prime Minister to play a card, well used as a technique since the Zinoviev Letter, to bind her own Party together against common enemies, distract the population from a Brexit which was reaching its rather embarrassing point of final sell-out negotiations and dish the Leader of the Opposition by associating him with a dimly recalled 'Red Menace' simply because he asked some pertinent questions about the basis for the Prime Minister's claims. 

The Deeper Level

Yet, at a deeper level, another agenda was in play. There is a brutal struggle going on for control of the security of Europe - that is, which system will stand against invaders from the East or the South? Will it be the Anglo-Saxon broad-based NATO or a Franco-German European Army that might threaten the UK one day more than it may threaten Moscow? Security is the Prime Minister's personal obsession. Defence of the Realm is certainly far more important than the Welfare of the People to a Tory tied to the interest of the Crown.

The targeting of Russia as villain was a golden opportunity to bind the tabloids and Parliament, which both purport to represent the people, around a forward defence of NATO's existential justification for itself - the demonic Russian East.

So, what we had here was a whole concatenation of interests and fears - the Russian bear, loss of power, terrorism in a Syrian context, the US alliance, Brexit and so much more - creating a general need to let rip and fix all attention on this one event in one place at one time and direct attention away from the Government and (bluntly) its lack of intelligence on the threat and towards an enemy and a threat, Russia, that could be easily understood by the editors and country Tories.

But what was the truth of the matter? What is actually likely, as opposed to what is politically convenient to be regarded as 'highly likely' regardless of the evidence actually presented to the people, was not under discussion. 

For, be in no doubt, this was a crime on British soil and a crime, moreover, that appears to have offered some threat to other ordinary citizens and which seems more than coincidental with a number of other killings of prominent Russians whose connections were somewhat rum to say the least (or at least compared to the average British subject to the Crown). The matter certainly deserved serious investigation alongside such crimes as those in Telford and Rotherham regardless even of the nerve agent aspects of the case. The police seem to be making little progress in cases to date and need a breakthrough.

But an analysis that pointed to the chaotic state of post-Soviet Russian politics was far less convenient than one that directed the public to the contribution of the West to that chaotic state or which might point to other actors than the Kremlin itself being responsible for crimes because of that state of chaos. A simple story was required. May referred dismissively to Russia being a mafia state rather than as a state in formation out of anarchic conditions created by the West with some deliberation a quarter of a century ago (I was there and I saw it).

The Chaotics of Russia

The bottom line here is that, while jumping to conclusions derived from ignorance, most of the media simply do not understand the chaotics of Russian governance. There is a history to this and journalists are not good at history. 

History is a serious problem for journalists. It requires them to drop simple narratives (their beloved half-truths they call 'stories') and deal with the real world of complex relationships between real facts while analysing the gaps in the record from experience. Journalism is not truth, it is literature. The news is written by people who have never done a deal, run a campaign or made a difficult executive decision. The political class' skill lies in manipulating data to provide the narratives (or 'stories) to these inexperienced people that can serve their purposes.

Yes, it is possible that Putin personally ordered an assassination but very unlikely. The fate of a minor traitor really is not top of mind for him in the middle of an election campaign. running a country of vast extent with a population nearly three times that of the UK which is still coping with the economic fall-out of the collapse of its empire and dealing with far more important issues such as the dispute with Ukraine, the war in Syria, Islamic terrorism, relations with President Trump, national defence and an economy which is far from out of the query basket. 

Our friend Valery Morozov was almost certainly correct on Channel 4 News (and this was accepted by the spokesperson for the chemical weapons establishment in that same segment) that Putin really has no interest in a minor intelligence figure from the past.

Yes, it is certainly possible that an arm of the Russian security apparat is engaged in a political war of its own involving violence. In such a case Putin can be blamed for not being in control of his own system and May may be right to condemn this - when she knows that this is so and on those terms rather than Boris' assertion of personal culpability.

This is more likely and would be justifiable cause for complaint but then the complaint should be cast in just those terms. We should be able to show Russian state complicity and Kremlin failure to control its own security operations and demand with evidence that Putin explain himself (although, I suppose, we might have to explain extraordinary rendition and drone murders on our side but let that pass). This might be more effective in embarrassing Russia's Great Leader than blind assertions for the camera.

What Is More Likely?

But it is still more likely that this is a factional struggle between oligarchical elements linked to the security apparat historically and over which the Government has no formal control in which our main victim got caught up. If so, we should perhaps be co-operating with the higher levels of the Russian State to bring these elements to book and end their links and access to the security state instead of throwing out accusations and trying to destabilise the country by backing people like Navalny. 

As Putin himself drew attention, in the cut sections of a recent NBC American TV interview (the fact of the cuts is more interesting here than what Putin said because he has said this before), while the West whines about alleged Russian villainy in trying to manipulate public opinion this was a game long ago started in the West - against not only in Russia but against half the world. 

To have intellectual integrity in making claims against someone, one should not be engaged in the similar acts oneself. There is no evidence, of course, that the West is bumping off people in Russia but it had been kidnapping or bumping off people it disapproves of elsewhere without due process for quite some time. It is in alliance with countries that have a very weak sense of due process and which execute people for dissident thoughts so that export order books may be filled.

Her Majesty's Government has not yet provided the smoking gun that shows the Russian Government to have been guilty of these murders directly or through negligence. It is acquiring 'opinions' from allies. For that reason, we should remain cautious until that evidence is produced and is more than, say, the surmise of a Coroners' Court based on evidence provided by state-directed intelligence agencies behind closed doors or an analysis of intelligence agents who may know the square root of f**k-all about the actual workings of the higher levels of the Russian state security system. 

The Childishness of the Response

Forget Iraq, think back to the complete ignorance of Soviet reality right up to the Fall of the Soviet Union now evidenced by post-Soviet academic researchers and the startling ignorance of Arab Islamism and its funding that caused so much embarrassment to American intelligence agencies in the wake of 9/11. There is no reason to think that anything has really changed since then. In general, we know very little about the minds of our enemies.'Highly likely' really should have been downgraded to 'possible' and taken seriously as 'possible'.

We are, in the UK, behaving a little like Austria-Hungary in July 1914 treating Russia like Serbia - making ultimatums that no sovereign Government can reasonably accept (though this may not be so clear to a Government that finds it so ridiculously difficult to recovery its own sovereignty from its nearer Empire, the European Union).

Despite the tabloids, the Tories won't be able to carry the whole country with it for long if the squabble ever turned into something more than a tit-for-tat diplomat expulsion. War is not on the agenda if economic sanctions are relatively trivial. A surge of support for Prime Minister has already begun to drift away as people start to question the basis for the claims and share qualms about throwing around mud on a surmise. 

The Russian State are frankly thumbing their noses at the UK with good reason. They are a proud sovereign people faced with no more than allegations and political warfare, not with investigative querying and requests for collaboration to find out the truth. Prime Minister May has shot herself in the foot for mere short term propaganda advantage.

Childishly, the Russian Foreign Minister has now been banned from the UK - as if he f**king cared. And that is an insult without anything more than a 'highly likely' behind it. The UK refuses to pass over the evidence for study against international treaty. Why? What is it afraid of? Should it not have asked the Russian Foreign Minister to come to London to discuss and resolve the situation.

Other Possibilities

This all looks like dodgy politics rather than a sincere investigation. The British police, left to their own devices, are generally rather good at this sort of thing (Telford, Hillsborough and Orgreave notwithstanding ... oops, have I sown a doubt? I apologise). But let us move on from the Russian Government and look at other possibilities without descending into conspiracy theory. 

It is possible that the Russian security apparat's only role is that a rogue element has sold a nerve agent under the counter to organised crime or to oligarchs (some of whom are often no better than organised crime evenwhen they are favoured sons of Western security) in which case, again, we should be co-operating with Russia to find the villains and not cutting off investigatory collaboration. 

It is, of course, possible that the nerve agent has been constructed in a Western or ex-Soviet Republican lab and then used for black ops purposes for whatever motive but possibly one related to destroying any possible Anglo-Russian or US-Russian rapprochement. 

This cannot just be ruled out of court as conspiracy theory, given the sociopathic nature of the darker side of the security company - after all, security operations attract types like Angleton and Beria as jam attracts wasps. 

This dark side agenda would fit with other narratives related to Syria and Iraq. We have discussed this already, Chemical weapons in Syria somewhat unaccountably popped up early in public intelligence briefings that appeared on camera within hours of the incident. It is always instructive to note carefully what is said in the first 24 hours by 'justification agents' in any political warfare operation because this is the raw preferred narrative before the political experts get to adjust the message away from the intelligence bods. 
  
The Least Likely Possibilities

It is certainly unlikely but the rogue element could come from our own security apparat or, more precisely, that we have a rogue ideologue or criminal coming out of Porton Down which just happens to be around the corner from Salisbury. Elements in our own security apparat have shown rogue status in the past but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

Rogue agents on any side with dark revenge, personal or ideological or political motivations are another possibility. This should be considered by any policeman worth his salt but how inconvenient might this be if proved to be true and how likely might it be that it would be covered up? I leave you to your own level of trust of our politicians, our own security apparat and our own police forces. The track record is not great.

As we go through the likelihoods, we can say with reasonable confidence that it is highly unlikely that the British Government did this itself (even our most sociopathic politicians are not quite that stupid and would not get it past their own civil service). 

The least likely is suicide, of course. But the point here is that one should not jump to conclusions and that include either that Putin personally ordered the acts or that a rogue Western cell decided to trigger anti-Russian sentiment out of frustration at any one of a number of policies - Ukraine, Syria, defence spending, threats to NATO, risks to Trident . 

Unfortunately the 'evidence' has now become so politicised that nothing can be trusted any more than it could be in the Syrian or Iraqi chemical weapons cases. The Prime Minister's rapid highly politicised jump to judgement has ensured that!

 Criticising 'Highly Likely'

The truth is that all security services are mostly making it up as they go along on weak intelligence. Did any of you actually read that embarrassingly trite and poorly evidenced Trump dossier which was so embarrassing and yet came from someone who had been be a leading past MI6 analyst!? Mentioning Iraqi WMD at this point would simply be a low blow so I won't. 

'Highly likely' is just not good enough when there are so many alternative analytical possibilities and before the investigation has got very far at all. Add to this the convenience for the battered Government in frightening the population into traditional Tory patriotism and distracting it from Brexit and you see a process riddled with its own lack of intellectual integrity.

The Government is taking an uneducated population for a ride and adopting the easy way out rather than a measured and sensible review of the evidence and investigation before coming to a conclusion.

The worst of it is that, thanks to the political play by a cynical Government, if Putin is guilty and it appears to be proven, one third of the population will be minded not to believe it on the precedent of the Iraqi WMD and the untrustworthiness of our own side. The country will then be more divided than ever and the relationship between a left-wing Labour Government and the security services will be one of de facto political warfare - a very dangerous situation since no one can win that struggle. 

And if evidence emerges (and some interesting evidence is emerging) that things may be a little more complicated than we are led to believe, a third of the country will stick with their ignorant cod Cold War attitudes regardless while the bulk of the population will be confirmed in their distrust of their rulers when what we badly need is a restoration of that trust. 

So Cui Bono?

Never has trust in Government been more needed and yet this weak administration once again risks throwing what trust exists away for short term advantage. The fish rots from his head and that is now what is happening to the West. But let us close by summarising, in no particular order, the 'cui bono' candidates (since it is hard to see what Putin himself gains from such an act):-

  1. Operations involved in organised crime where revenge or dark dealings around massive funds at stake in oligarchal political warfare drive actions; 
  2. Rogue members of the Russian security apparat seeking revenge without concern or understanding for Russia's higher level national interest;
  3. Cold War Western security apparat operatives in the US and Europe seeking to damage Western-Russian relations (Ukraine is a sub-set of this category but another sub-set would be Western strategists seeking to bind Europe into NATO rather than the European Army or seek rapprochement with Russia and a further sub-set is those political warfare operatives seeking to undermine Trump's general move towards rapprochement); 
  4. The Conservative government (or more accurately the Conservative-led security state) seeking to mobilise public opinion in a 'patriotic' stance against the Left and to distract attention from Brexit (as well as ensure control over NATO-led European strategic direction); and
  5. Private revenge or insanity (whether from a rogue security operative from any apparat or within the Russian community in London).

In other words, if 'cui bono' alone is taken into account and assuming (except for e)) rational actors, there are at least four sets of actor who can reasonably be considered as more likely to be culpable than the Kremlin itself represented personally by Putin and Lavrov. And this applies equally to the murder of Litvinenko insofar as a) b) and c) and not d) and only at a stretch e) might also apply in that case and in the Berezhovsky cases. 

For balance, I would add that if it is true that the Russian security apparat is itself fully criminalised and intent on revenge or implicated in organised crime (and this has some plausibility) then, while it is less plausible perhaps that Putin was directly and personally involved in the crime, then he is responsible simply as Head of State and the wheel turns back somewhat in the direction of Prime Minister May's assessment. We simply need more evidence rather than prejudiced surmise.

The truth is we do not know and we should admit we do not know, instead of throwing around accusations and relying on prejudice and rumour, at least until the investigation has ended. The British security apparat is itself not to be wholly trusted any more than the Russian and we should never forget that. 

Last Thoughts

To be clear, just because it is 'ours' does not mean that our government's intelligence and analyses are sound or that it is not driven by ideology or not manipulable by political considerations. If there is one thing that we have learned in recent history, it is the truth of that assessment. Anything else would mean little more than a tribal belief that Arsenal must always be in the right in any penalty against Spurs. Anything else would be naive.

It is hard to see how or why such an obscure event as the murder of a treacherous agent might be more useful than some dramatic act in Syria or Ukraine if it was needed to get Putin through the last few days before the vote. Perhaps Boris has the smoking gun - in which case, we must accept it if it is the gun and it is smoking but accusations should have come after the smoking gun had appeared and not before

Although the 'mass' appears at first sight to have accepted this nonsense at face value, you can tell that doubts are creeping in already. The Twitter feeds were far more doubtful than the tabloids and that doubt began to grow after a surge of early Cold War tweets that all looked suspiciously as if they were cued to persuade us. 

Both the Spectator and Peter Hitchens then showed that a substantial 'High Tory' element thought Jeremy Corbyn got it right in asking some awkward questions - it takes a lot for Tories to do that. He was right. That does not mean he is right on other things. But he was right to ask those questions. He was not saying and we are not saying that Putin is innocent but only that assertions are not proof.

The real reasons for the killing are probably obscure oligarchal struggles or revenge for past slights which may lead back to the Russian security apparat. However, the reason for its exploitation is largely about party political advantage in the UK and an attempt to dish the advocates of the European Army in favour of NATO. All this is set in an ideologically-driven High Tory and State neurosis about Russia that seems to go back to the days of Lord Palmerston.

It is all rather ridiculous - if only because it shows how defensive and anxious a weak British Government has become. So, let us now maintain an open mind, trust no one and wait on such facts as can be presented that are more than intelligence analysts' surmise and the arrival of something in our country from a stockpile over thirty years old. 

In the meantime, let us wish a swift recovery to all three victims of this heinous political act and be prepared for the possibility that it is proven or evidenced as highly likely, instead of asserted as highly likely, that the Kremlin ordered a crime on British soil and that this should result therefore in more serious sanctions than actually offered by the Prime Minister, regardless of the interests of big business and the City of London.

Sunday 20 November 2016

Critiquing Steve Bannon

A great deal of attention is being paid to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's new head of strategy. I suspect there is some misunderstanding about the amount of power that an ideologue like Bannon can have in Trump's administration and an exaggeration of the link that can be made between the past views of Bannon and the opinions of the President-Elect, let alone the views of those to be found expressed on Bannon's vehicle, Breitbart.

The liberal cultural wing of the 'American oligarchy' are having a bit of a hissy-fit at the moment and any straw is being grasped at to demonstrate that Trump is a 'fascist' or worse. Eventually cooler heads will prevail. In the meantime here are three things to note before we look at what Bannon may actually think.

Bannon as Employee and Populist

The first is that his job as chief strategist is a 'corporate' one - he no longer speaks for himself and now loans his talents to the President. He has been bought. If he fails to deliver or blunders, he will be disposed of. His job is now to support the President not because he believes in him but because he is paid to perform a function and that function is political. He has to think about practical outcomes - increasing the President's rating sufficiently to get him re-elected in 2020, assisting in building a coalition that will get the President's programme through Congress and maintaining the momentum of the movement that put Trump into power.

Instead of shouting agit-prop aimed at the slightly over half the population required to get into White House, he is now dealing with the structures of power and with a struggle for control of information flow and interpretation against a mainstream media ['MSM'] that must, out of class interest, aim to destroy him. His ownership of Breitbart represents a direct challenge to MSM authority and revenues, especially if Breitbart becomes the main means by which the Trump administration communicates to the mass of the population.

The second is that he comes into office not as part of the closed competing network of networks that makes up late liberal democratic representative democracy but because he controls a means of communicating with and maintaining contact with a populist movement. This is his strength but also his weakness. The strength is obvious - he can reach millions of Americans with a policy line faster than any political rival and he can help form their opinion and actions in a way that may be unprecedented.

Perhaps only Father Coughlan's radio broadcasts in the 1930s come close to this but Breitbart is providing data in real time and continuously. Of course, Bannon will be delegating control of this medium but it would be naive not to see this as part of his armoury even if indirectly. He has a reserve power that, if he is dismissed, lies in the possibility that this machinery may become a thorn in the side of the President that it has helped to elect.

The Paradox of Bannon's Populism

The third thing to note is that the claims of 'fascism' miss some very central non-fascist aspects of American populism. The confusion of populism and fascism is sending liberal critics down a blind alley, stopping them from developing an appropriate critique and strategy for countering it. By propagandistically using inappropriate terms, liberals are creating the very culture of resentment that partly led to their defeat in the first place, opening up territory for Bannon's Alt Right to conquer. One key difference from fascism, a difference also to be found in European right-wing populisms, is the approach to democracy and free speech.

Both are viewed as positive and dynamic forces whereas liberals are being caught out being anti-democratic (questioning the 'deplorables', intellectuals questioning democracy itself and, in the UK, maintaining a resistance against the majority vote in the Brexit vote) and opposed to free speech (promoting increasingly onerous anti-hate laws, limiting freedoms on the campus and often downright bullying of non-liberal dissidents). This is a complete detournement of conventional thinking about what it means to be right and left. It is central to the drift of many social libertarians from one side to the other despite the conservatism underpinning Alt Right culture.

Bannon's robust and aggressive populism might be framed as 'hate speech' amongst liberals but it is framed as 'free speech' amongst conservatives with some plausibility. The liberal MSM has tried to counter with the framing device of 'fake news' (extended from genuine abuses to cover political opponents who are often merely  providing information that would be pre-censored as inappropriate or inconvenient by the MSM). The MSM's somewhat sinister interest in trying to place rival social platforms under pressure is obvious. Twitter has taken the bait (aware of the sympathy for liberalism of large consumer-driven corporations with products aimed at urban liberals and minorities) by removing 'hate' accounts although many of these accounts equally class themselves as 'free speech' opportunities.

In the pre-Trump world, the control of the total system under a liberal hegemony would have instantly marginalised the critics of liberalism but Bannon has contributed to the creation of an entire alternative information and communications political ecology whose success can be seen in the election of a President despite the massive post-nomination assault on his candidacy by every element within the hegemonic system. The cultural power of this parallel system has thrown the dominant structure into something close to panic. Almost every idea emanating from it stands against the assumptions and values of oligarchical liberalism.

What Liberals Might Like To Do

This is where it gets interesting. In any other period of history or under any other hegemonic system, the solution would be simple - authoritarian repression. When faced with an existential threat, the system forgets any 'rules of war' and suppresses free speech, jails opponents, if necessary tortures and kills. But the West no longer has these tools at its command - not only because of its own claimed values (though we wonder if this would be restraint enough) but because the rule of law cannot be deployed in this way (certainly not after January 20th and as Woodrow wilson deployed it) and because the infrastructure of the State cannot be relied upon to comply with such orders.

Trump is faced with his own problem in that it is clear state level law enforcement in some key states may resist some of his policy measures. Any push to survival by the hegemonic regime through repression would probably mean civil war and certainly extensive political violence. In other words, the liberal hegemony of the US has fallen into the same position as the communist hegemony did in the Soviet Union in 1991 without even the tools at the disposal of the reactionaries. Anti-liberal forces have seized control of the State using liberal methods and are now in command of Presidential power for at least four years and possibly eight or twelve.

Bannon, who has cited Lenin, appears to understand his position and that of Trump. Through sheer energy and exploitation of the undoubted failures of liberalism (which are not the subject of this posting), they have surged forward in under nine months from nowhere to capture control of supreme executive power with reluctant and nervous allies controlling the legislature and a real opportunity to set a conservative tone within the judiciary. This cannot be called a political revolution because the forms and substance of the American 'regime' remain the same. There are also many points of resistance from centres of power still controlled by the liberals (in the very broadest sense) which can slow down the Presidency and destroy his credibility with the centre-ground.

However what Bannon, Trump and others have achieved is the possibility of a cultural revolution in which they set the tone for American politics and society on terms to which liberals have to adjust to survive. It cannot be Leninist - in other words, it cannot be the imposition of one ideology on the rest of society by a minority - but it can be significant if it forces conservatives to take on the concerns of the population at large and if it forces the liberals to begin a self-critical appraisal of how they lost power (which they currently seem reluctant to do) and if they transform themselves to include the concerns of the voters who switched sides out of frustration with their neglect. How liberalism might transform itself post-Trump is for another time.

So, with these caveats and comments, that Bannon is not the President but the servant of the President, that he is only part of a movement which he guides but to which he does not dictate terms and that his room for manouevre is limited in any path to replacing liberal hegemony, what is it that Bannon believes? We don't have timer for an exhaustive analysis of his views or trying to work out what what views on Breitbart are his and what are those of his contributors. 

We will take an analysis of his opinions to just one audience (a conservative religious group) in the summer of 2014 and see what it reveals. Of course, being a politician, Bannon is tailoring his opinions to the audience - the Human Dignity Institute at the Vatican - and that has to be taken into account. Yet we can see what values underlie his views and so what beliefs are going to be influential in advising the President (whose views may be different) and in squaring various political circles - appointments, deals with Congress, speeches and policies.

The Problem of Capitalism

Bannon's world view is fundamentally communitarian. This creates the space for a critique of capitalism that is not socialist but belongs to a parallel right-wing tradition. This originated with petit-bourgeois anarchism but became central to the corporatism of fascism and national socialism as ideologies. But it is also an ideological position held widely within the Catholic Church as a critique of the dehumanising aspects of treating persons as not souls but mere units of production within large-scale combines that are disruptive of social bonds, duties and obligations. It is this critique that matters to Bannon in his Vatican talk. This critique is not interested in liberal capitalism's undoubted achievements in driving progress and innovation because progress and innovation are not seen as good things in themselves - as they tend to be seen by most liberals (though not increasingly by the eco-conservatives within the ranks of liberalism).

Where capitalism is criticised from the Left (as it used to be until the 1990s), it is as an anti-progressive force that fails to make best use of human talents and is wasteful. Innovation is seen as something just as easily and better done by the collective. Marx had his own critique of the de-humanisation involved in capitalism but, unlike Heidegger whose critique is of technology, science and so technology are positive factors which socialists will be better able to understand and make use of. If Bannon quotes Marx it is to point up the dehumanising aspects (in his view) of capitalism and not to share his socialism. No more than the Vatican and the Proudhonists, Bannon is not remotely a national socialist, a very different hybrid of socialism and communitarianism presented as anti-Marxism, nor a fascist, a corporatism without a moral base.

Naturally, I do not share this view of Bannon's since I see all human development as being broadly enhanced by scientific understanding and technology. I would go further and say that the objectification and allegedly dehumanising aspects of capitalism are positive rather than negative precisely because they break apart social binds that are repressive (indeed oppressive) and permit new social forms to emerge in their place, forms that are more suited to individual freedom and to human progress as technology develops.

The criticism I would have late capitalist liberalism is that it has compromised far too much with conservative forces - historically-based identity politics, regressive environmentalism (rather than sustainability as strategy) and faith-based approaches to values - and that, while communism as a political system became sclerotic and inefficient as well as cruel, some form of scientific materialism is central to the forward-looking Left Project. In other words, the rise of the Alt Right has been partly predicated on liberalism's compromises with conservative forces because ground had already been conceded by Clinton and Blair for short term electoral reasons in favour of identity, sentiment and faith.

Cronyism & Fairness

Many Leftists will share Bannon's views on 'crony capitalism', the capitalism of the few creating wealth and value for themselves and not for the people. This is classic populism but it not only represents an ideal shared with the Left but liberals are now on the defensive because, whether under Blair or Clinton, they have bought into the spurious global trickle-down theory of development and have allied themselves with corporations and oligarchs on terms that seem to enrich leading liberal politicians more than those who elect them.

This is where Bannon, appealing to the moralism of faith-based communities, has probably scored his greatest political victories in the last year - in the comparison of the insecurity and anxieties of struggling families with the wealth and comfort of a liberal elite who seemed to care more about people in faraway places than their 'ain folk'. Framed as 'racism' or 'white nationalism', it was nothing of the kind. It was merely filling the yawning chasm left by liberal abandonment of the respectable working classes and lower middle classes who had failed to fall into a pre-set liberal identity category and who did not give a stuff about liberalism's cultural politics.

There is a 'fairness' in Bannon's critique both that is it is a fair criticism but also that fairness (a very ordinary sentiment) is a value. He sees liberals as being at the apex of an unfair system and this clearly makes him angry. In another age and time perhaps he would have been a socialist. Perhaps not. American liberals have not made generalised fairness an existential value but have particularised it within identity politics. Perhaps this is why they are now licking their wounds.

Fairness is important as a social value. It is something imbued in children during their own battle to be recognised when power lies elsewhere. They do not object to power so long as it is fairly applied. The child-like resentment at unfairness may be at the very heart of the Trump 'revolution' - it is not resentment at people with darker skins or who like the same sex but resentment at the unfair privileging of other people at their expense. And, yes, this is what liberals have done, often without realising they have been doing it.  They have been 'unfair' at multiple levels towards many Americans in the political home and the political playground. Some of Bannon's anger is justified.

Securitisation & Moral Value

Bannon's attack on securitisation is perhaps the most interesting aspect of his critique of liberal capitalism. Let us take the ideological base in Judaeo-Christianity for granted (more of that in a moment). His analysis is questionable - almost sub-Tawney - but let it stand. When he complains about securitisation, he is doing two things. The first is to give us a theory of commoditisation that could have come straight out of the late Marxist Frankfurt School - another of many detournements of left-wing thinking to meet right-wing objectives.

But it is the moral underpinning of the critique that matters. The Frankfort School (though their arguments were often specious) were claiming to describe reality and moral responses only emerged out of the hysteria of the liberal Academy - you might call this a displaced morality or valuation in which belief uses intellect cover up its own sentiment. Bannon will have none of that. He goes straight to valuation. He observes what he thinks is a fact on the ground and then sees it through the prism of morality from the very beginning.

Jump back to the causes of 2008 and you see securitisation at the very heart of the crisis. Bannon takes something that is intrinsically immoral from his perspective - the commodification of humans, their deepest needs and attributes - and shows, in a religious morality tale, to people who can put two and two together that the collapsing nature of capitalism is essentially a problem of moral failure. It means that if we change our morals (or rather imbue a certain morality in the State and economic system), prosperity and order will return.

This is a classically populist argument. It is, of course, nonsense but it sentimentally works for many working and middle class Americans who have no alternative 'scientific' narrative, who are accustomed to framing difficult questions in terms of good and evil and who desperately want change. This attack on Wall Street is definitely not a progressive or socialist one but, since progressives are ineffective and socialists marginalised, the liberal acceptance of Wall Street and liberal lack of interest in commodification in economics (oh, the irony! - the interest seems only to be in persecuting sex workers and getting better jobs for urban middle class women), it is the most effective one, the last interpretation left standing for relatively poorly educated people under real pressure who liberals refuse to accept or help.

'The World Burns' & Freedom

Bannon adopts one aspect of fascism that is really no more than an emotional stance - the desire to tear things down and destroy the Establishment. I have some sympathy with this since this so-called Establishment (a system of interconnecting networks with its own shared ideology) has failed to solve so many real world problems, indeed compounded them. Such an emotional stance can be a productive one in creating the motivation for change under conditions of sclerosis. But do we take this seriously? I don't take seriously my own emotional impulses in this direction which I express more as approval for 'shocks to the system'. Only 'shocks' seem to capable of forcing liberals to change their ways and they may remove the older generation of failed liberals and put in a new generation with a better understanding of the situation. In Bannon's case, yes, I think we must take him seriously.

Whereas for a Leftist like me, the liberal project simply took a wrong turning just as the Russian Revolution was a wrong turning, things are not black and white. Our failed liberalism has still produced a more tolerant and open society which the best efforts of Bannon and the Alt Right cannot reverse, just as Sovietism provided some genuine advances for the Russian people and offered a valuable experiment in the achievements and limitations of socialism. In other words, I can attack late liberal capitalist democracy on its failures because I see it as blocking the forward advance of humanity but I would want to reform and control it rather than want to destroy it completely. It irritates the hell out of me but it is still part of the human condition that has to be accommodated. Bannon on the other hand wants, like Lenin, to replace one system entirely with another - he wants to reverse progress and re-stabilise humanity on conservative-communitarian lines.

And will he achieve this? Of course he will not. It is rhetoric. The resilience of the American Constitution, the resistance of 50% of the American population, the fact that there is no means for enforcing a 'gleichshaltung' on the many different centres of power within modern liberal democracies and the reality that most people actually want more freedom rather than less work against his revolutionary romanticism. Furthermore, he may have to come to terms with the fact that his President is an instinctive social libertarian and he is only a part of a mass movement whose key word is Freedom just as that of the liberals is Justice (when perhaps it should be Peace, Justice & Freedom).

For the leading edge of European populism and, we believe, for Trump, Freedom means economic freedom as conservatives view it but only more so. It is not just that - 'freedom populists'  have determinative concepts of national or state freedom and individual freedom presented as private rights over public claims. This is not the ideology of Judaeo-Christian communitarianism which we will see is central to Bannon's position. We have here internal contradictions within populism - between communitarianism and libertarianism where the former is actually on the defensive. The unhappiness of Christian Evangelical conservatives at Trump's lack of enthusiasm for some of their views as he gets closer to the Oval Office is an expression that this is not a Christian conservative regime.

Bannon & Communitarianism

Bannon regards libertarianism (in the US this is nearly always seen in economic terms) as an ally within populism but contrasts it with his brand of Judaeo-Christian 'enlightened capitalism', creating the core of that primary internal contradiction within American populism between Freedom and Fairness. It is an internal contradiction that creates a point of potential conflict with Trump himself who is clearly not a man of faith and who equally clearly rather gets on very well with a typical European proponent of the Freedom agenda like Nigel Farage. Although we might suspect Bannon playing up to his audience at this point since he clearly likes and admires Farage, I think Bannon is serious and not playing to the crowd here. His belief in Fairness draws him to a particular view of economic relations that is not scientific but comes from Biblical revelation (ultimately).

This does not require some deep-seated faith in God but only a belief that the code of values created in Judaea in the Iron Age and adapted by Christianity provides a template for an economic and social order that sees integrity in a community as something to be preserved. For the West, Judaeo-Christian ideology is what Confucianism is for the East (though he does not mention China) - a text-based wisdom ideology that is fair but tough-minded, constraining human desire and ensuring the weak are protected by moral leadership. He is far from alone in this - there is an extensive network of Judaeo-Christian (and, interestingly, Islamic) conservative critiques of liberal capitalism that seek to preserve the market but on terms that permit the community to dictate the conditions under which it operates in the community interest.

Needless to say, as an atheist existentialist, the idea that some Iron Age text, let alone some Eighteenth Century constitutionalist text, is an adequate guide to the maintenance of justice, freedom and security in an age of rapid technological change, strikes me as absurd. The reality is that such texts simply become, and have done so since Constantine in the public sphere, cover for the political hegemony of whatever class happens to hold the levers of power at any one time. However, he is right that contemporary neo-liberalism, whose ideology of unfair and untrammelled power relies ultimately on economic libertarianism, does not protect the weak and vulnerable.

Neo-liberalism does destabilise societies. American liberals seem to have been unable to develop strategies adequate to the task of creating a strong society in which the weak and vulnerable are protected and in which the ordinary man or woman is not threatened with insecurity and anxiety. Naturally my answer is different from his - the radical democrat control of capitalism through reason and science - but I can understand why, having been failed by the Left and with historical cultures that emphasise the Bible, millions of anxious and insecure people have looked backwards to the past rather than forward to the future. If there is a failure in American liberalism, it is its constant living in its own present, denying the identities of those clinging to past forms but also unable to offer any grand vision of the future.

Racism?

The idea that Bannon is a racist or white nationalist is convenient for liberal critics but not merely is it unproven, it is clear that Bannon has no interest in such ideologies. This would fit with his mainstream Judaeo-Christian ideology. What he is accepting is the fellow-travelling of such ideologies within the broad populist movement. Liberals can neither understand not forgive this. But the response implicit from Bannon is two-fold - everyone has a right to a voice ('Freedom') and these people don't really matter in the long run.

Both are actually cogent positions. The first points up the authoritarian instincts of liberals who like to ban things they do not like under the banner of 'Right Conduct, Right Speech, Right Thought'. There is yet another irony in this. The Left has adopted Iron Age Judaeo-Christian attitudes and it is Bannon who is offering Voltairean freedom. This really is beyond the mental capacity of many liberals to comprehend.

Whether these extremists matter is another story. We tend to agree with Bannon. Their existence boxes him in a bit and allows liberals some easy propaganda wins in the less sophisticated centreground but it could equally be argued that free speech is a value and that the minorities have now sufficient political force to defend themselves. The weeping hysteria over the rise of fascism has been over done.

Nevertheless, the fact that Trump has such fellow travellers (though there is no evidence of racism on his part) is as potentially damaging to him as having Communists as fellow travellers were to candidates of the Centre-Left in earlier periods. On the other hand, the cultural war on the Confederate flag was probably, in retrospect, a major blunder by liberals, mobilising a legitimate and not necessarily racist 'white identity' that had scarcely existed before. The rise of Trump can be told as a succession of own goals by arrogant and presumptuous liberals.

Islamic Fascism

All this perhaps helps to explain one of the more absurd psychological turns of the New Right, its obsession with Islam. To the 'real' Leftist, Radical Islam is easily explained. I think rightly so. It is the partial creation of a long period of self-serving Western imperialism and is, in itself, obscurantist and has become dangerous: however, it is powerful in our lives only because we have panicked and made it powerful through our continuous interventions and the ease with which its atrocities trigger our own insecurity and anxiety.

Liberals have both indulged it by trying to accommodate faith-based views into their own political strategy and been panicked into illiberal measures by fear and special interests. The Alt Right fear and distaste for Islam, meanwhile, operates at many levels - in Europe, a xenophobia which has its roots in the reality of growing ghettos of poor people with a completely alien culture, amongst European intellectuals as a feared threat to free speech and the accommodation with that threat of liberals and, more in the US, an exaggerated fear of political violence (admittedly in an always potentially violent country where gun ownership is normal) from an enemy within.

These are all simplistic responses that reify Islam and often fail to pinpoint the real policy failures - in the handling of colonialism (by France in particular), the absurd early adoption for ideological reasons of free movement of peoples in Europe and the interventionism of liberal internationalists in the Middle East (although many liberals have become vociferous in their own right against this last) - but Bannon is going deeper, seeing Islam in almost medieval terms as a cultural rival to Judaeo-Christianity instead of (as we would see it) the third arm of three equally obscurantist but mostly benign Abrahamanic religions.

The Manichean view of religion can only take place if the critic takes religion seriously. Now, self-evidently, Bannon is speaking to an audience in the Vatican and so he may just talking his book to a particular audience but I do not think so. Everything I have written before this point hangs together to give us the picture of a man who may or may not believe in God but does believe in Judaeo-Christian communitarianism whether his boss does or not. In fact, it might be argued that the internal contradiction outlined above in populism is partially resolved by having a libertarian President with a communitarian ideologue in his ear whispering truths about half his country base and guiding his language to hold the movement together.

Apocalypticism

We are painting a picture of a highly intelligent man, who in the tradition of de Maistre, is not interested in creating a reasoned political philosophy but in expressing a more or less coherent and very flexible philosophy of political sentiments. In this regard he is a throw-back to the right-wing response to the French Revolution yet one where the radical has now adopted the central tenets of the Revolution - democracy and free speech - to overturn its values which (I think rightly) he sees as having, in any case, degenerated and given him his opportunity for his politics of sentiment. However, each sentiment is not just simple brute emotion.

Each relates to the other and each, on closer investigation, has 'just cause' - the anger and resentment are based on justifiable concerns about household and personal security and at the overweening sense of entitlement of the liberal elite. But part of the personality type involved - a testosterone and energetic male type of a certain age - requires an habitual gloomy apocalypticism, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It isn't, of course, (the Cold War was scarier and so were the 1930s) but it feels as if it is because lots of men of a certain age have seen no progress since 2008 and feel insecure. This means they get to feel apocalyptic. Once a word for women trapped into certain behaviours by their condition, hysteria now transfers easily to early and late middle aged men in the West as well as liberal snowflakes in the universities who send each other into paroxyms at the drop of a Tweet.

Bannon's apocalypticism (which he seems to enjoy) centres on two beliefs - that capitalism is in crisis and that we are at the beginning of a global war against Political Islam (which he calls Islamic fascism as most neo-cons and Israelis do). The first is partly true although it is not capitalism in crisis but the prevailing neo-liberal form of it: all that is happening is a challenge by national capitalisms to globalised regulatory capitalism on one side and a challenge to liberal accommodation with neo-liberalism (by both Right and Left) on the other. Looked at more closely, even a Trotsky-inspired radical like Shadow Chancellor McDonnell in the UK is not reviving any form of state socialism but doing little more than offering us his own brand of National Keynesianism that will probably have more in common with Trump's programme (insofar as we know it) than either neo-liberalism or state socialism.

The war with Islamic fascism is, however, pure hysteria since Political Islam presents serious threats to Europe in terms of incidents but little more than that - crush IS and you have no place where it holds sufficient state power to threaten any other State existentially. Any State it did seize control of (and Saudi Arabia is not an example of it) would be surrounded and pummelled if it did prove a serious threat. Only Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal is a country to be truly scared of in this context and a war on Political Islam in Islamabad is as likely to create the problem for us as resolve it. What it is about really is Israel but not quite in the way we may think. We have to go back to the ideology of Judaeo-Christian communitarianism to see why Israel is so important to Bannon. His Jews are not the cosmopolitan intellectuals so distrusted by Stalin or the combination of those and poor refugees and shtetl dwellers hated as the enemy within by Hitler but Judaic communitarian heroes of the Book who built a land of settled immigrants (ironically). Protecting Israel is protecting a strong global communitarian ally and so the communitarian transformation of the West.

The Putin Problem

The internal contradiction we have identified within populism represented by Trump's libertarianism and Bannon's communitarianism is exemplified by the different attitudes to Putin. I suspect Trump really does not care over much about Israel and only looks at it through the lens of political expedience. But Trump sees Putin as a deal-maker would see a rival businessman with whom he can co-operate on a major development.

Trump rationally sees that IS is the real threat to America insofar as Islamic radicals have already declared war on the country and that the only people fighting IS in Syria (as opposed to Iraq) are the Syrians and the Russians. He has a 'sphere of influence' view of international relations and, like any good businessman, weighs up the profit and loss of whether to be in one theatre or another. He probably sees the American Empire as over-extended and that it is time to dump some loss-making subsidiaries. That does not make him weak. It makes him pragmatic, rational and non-ideological.

Bannon however is idealistic, sentimental and ideological. He acknowledges Putin as a social conservative and traditionalist who appeals to many populist communitarians but he resists his charms (this evidence, of course, comes from the period before the current phase of the Syrian crisis and well before Trump announced his nomination). He sees Russia as expansionary (probably falsely since Russia is really only protecting a sphere of influence that is existentially threatened by Western expansion) and as an example of the crony capitalism that he excoriates at the centre of his ideology. He probably has limited understanding of Russia and fails to see that the 'kleptocracy' is a creation in part of the way Yeltsin responded to events, backed by the West.

After all, an American executive said in my hearing in 1992 in Moscow that the right strategy for Russia was to drive it into a robber baron phase in order to ensure capitalist development - Putin has been cleaning up stage by stage ever since. Nevertheless, from an absolutist point of view, Russia epitomises the sort of crony capitalism Bannon sees as a global problem that is destroying the basis for a legitimate or 'enlightened' capitalism that would be beholden to Judaeo-Christian moral values. The point is not whether he is 'for' or 'against' Putin at any one point in history but why he is critical - and it comes down to a less informed but wholly consistent critique that derives from his observation of American conditions. In the talk, Bannon admits his lack of knowledge of foreign affairs and it is to be doubted whether he has had time to become more sophisticated since then.

Where We Are

Bannon is important but he is probably not quite as important as liberals fear. Having said that, what he has done is bring Judaeo-Christian communitarian thinking into the inner counsels of the most powerful military and economic leader on the planet and we should take this seriously. Although his President undoubtedly has different values, that President is a pragmatist and the maintenance of his movement requires respect for Bannon's ideology even as he is challenged, in turn, by alternative visions from radical nationalists, economic libertarians and social conservatives of a more elite type.

Bannon's ideology is emotional, sentimental and ignorant in key areas (especially foreign affairs) but coherent and based on some political realities - that American liberalism has become corrupted, that capitalism is failing and in the hands of unaccountable elites and that the deep anxieties and insecurities of perhaps half the American population have been ignored at best and treated with contempt at worst.

As for responses to him, calling him a fascist is just plain ignorant and counter-productive. He sits within a Western right-wing tradition that may be said to include fascism but he is better described as the radical democratisation of traditional right-wing authoritarianism. It is that radical democratisation in substance and in method that has knocked liberals sideways.

Only weeks after the vote, most liberals still do not know what they are dealing with - that identity politics can be turned against them, that conservative religious interpretations of the decline of capitalism have force because Left critiques of capitalism were fully marginalised in the 1990s and that the new populism has proved more adept than liberals, not at campaigning per se (Clinton still got the majority of the popular vote) but at creating a sustainable movement during a technological revolution in the means of communication. Campaigns come and go but movements tend to stick.

But perhaps most interesting is that at the end of the Q&A in his talk to the Human Dignity Institute, he positioned his struggle as primarily (in 2014) one against the 'crony capitalist' conservatives in the Republican Party. If one was looking at the response of the Left in 2017, it would have to echo that of Bannon - the struggle is primarily against the 'crony neoliberals' in the Labour and Democrat Parties. If Bannon could do what he did for the Right, democratic socialists could do the same for the Left by the next round of critical elections in both the UK and US (2018-2020).