Straight White American Jesus - Steve Bannon's War on Democracy, Christianity, and You
Aired: 2022-02-21
Duration: 06:44


=== Bannon's Complex Pantheon (05:42) ===

[00:00:00]  Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
[00:00:17]  Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
[00:00:21]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:00:34]  My name is Brad Onishi.
[00:00:36]  Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I am faculty at the University of San Francisco.
[00:00:43]  I have an incredible guest tonight who has written an incredible book, and so we're going to jump into that in a second.
[00:00:48]  But for now, I'll just say, Dr. Benjamin Teitelbaum, thanks for joining me.
[00:00:53]  It's a pleasure to be with you, Brad.
[00:00:54]  So you are an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder, a true Renaissance man, a performer of Scandinavian music, and an author and a scholar.
[00:01:07]  We're going to talk tonight about your most recent book, which is War for Eternity, the return of traditionalism and the rise of the populist right outwith Penguin, HarperCollins, et cetera.
[00:01:18]  And I just got to embarrass you a little bit.
[00:01:21]  It's definitely an international bestseller and has been covered everywhere from the Financial Times to all over the place.
[00:01:29]  I think my favorite-- In a way, I thought it was kind of brave of him.
[00:01:34]  at Spiked who says, Bannon has been called far right, a fascist, a white supremacist, but according to a gripping new book by academic Benjamin R. Tidalbaum, Bannon's philosophy is actually a lot weirder, if perhaps no less alarming.
[00:01:48]  Fascinating insight.
[00:01:49]  And that kind of really, to me, sums up what I found in the book.
[00:01:53]  Yes.
[00:01:54]  And I liked it.
[00:01:55]  In a way, I thought it was kind of brave of him when a lot of people ask me, well, why don't you just call Bannon the fascist?
[00:02:01]  And if I'm in the midst of calling him something other than a fascist, the implication is, well, I must be saying that he's not that bad.
[00:02:08]  Um, And that's that the fascism is like the utmost measure of evil.
[00:02:13]  And if you're something different than that, then you're less evil.
[00:02:16]  And that's, that's a not true, just in terms of that, that sort of spectrum and scale.
[00:02:20]  But we also miss, we miss a lot of the the details and the important details of someone here.
[00:02:25]  It's, it's, it's, it could be more scary, it could be more interesting, also than fascism, all those things are possible.
[00:02:32]  Well, and I'll admit, you know, it's interesting, as I thought about your book, over the course of the Trump presidency, I feel like I had deep dives on a lot of the figures.
[00:02:41]  I feel like there was just this sort of pantheon of Bond villains that we were introduced to, and some of them got a lot more sort of deeper coverage, as I would call it, than others.
[00:02:50]  Bannon always seemed to me, and I think he was presented to the American public this way, A classic white nationalist misogynist, the guy who was on your TV screen with a scowl.
[00:03:02]  He looked like he had probably just drank seven or eight whiskeys, was angry about something.
[00:03:08]  And I'll admit that that's kind of for a long time how far I got with him.
[00:03:13]  Your book opens us up to something that is No less good.
[00:03:17]  There's no good surprises here, but there's a lot of complexity and a lot of weird philosophical underpinnings and ideology behind Bannon.
[00:03:30]  Yes.
[00:03:31]  I almost think if it's the attention span of mass media or the Let's say the expertise of political reporters.
[00:03:42]  I don't think that they're well prepared for someone like Bannon.
[00:03:45]  I'm not sure who really would be, but this is a guy who's so strange.
[00:03:49]  I don't know who to compare him to.
[00:03:50]  Some people say Karl Rove, but I don't know.
[00:03:53]  Some people will say Rasputin.
[00:03:56]  You need someone who will take the time to actually understand everything and not simply just to call him a white nationalist.
[00:04:03]  It communicates some of the threat and some of the identity politics edge that he has.
[00:04:08]  But it's also kind of exasperated.
[00:04:09]  It's just kind of a last, it's just a gasp.
[00:04:12]  Okay, I don't know what to make of this guy.
[00:04:14]  So we're going to just, I'm going to use the most familiar term that I have to describe someone who's dangerous in this particular way and call it a day and go on with it.
[00:04:22]  That's fine for journalists to do.
[00:04:24]  It's fine for political activists to do, perhaps, if I'm being generous, charitable.
[00:04:30]  But I think for a scholar, there's an imperative to understand exactly what's going on, especially if these actors are influential.
[00:04:39]  Well, it does speak to it does speak to the I mean, I think there's a lot of folks out there that have flippant views of scholarship is like, well, what is that useful for anyway, and a book like yours is, is really a testimony to how a book can be incredibly well researched and be an overwhelming deep dive into a person and their philosophy and yet be gripping at the same time and readable.
[00:05:02]  At the center of the book is Bannon's philosophy, what he calls traditionalism.
[00:05:07]  And I'm just wondering if we can take that in parts because it's complex.
[00:05:12]  Like it is, this is just not an, uh, there's not, it's not a straight line sort of situation here.
[00:05:17]  Uh, traditionalists have very complex understandings of the past and the future of various, uh, castes or classes that human beings fall into, uh, various ages.
[00:05:28]  Uh, and they, they seem to have, uh, Murky goals for what they want, at least from the first sort of read.
[00:05:35]  And so can we just start with the past and the future?
[00:05:37]  Like if, if I'm Steve Bannon, and I'm a traditionalist, we're going to try to get a hold on this philosophy.

=== Complex Traditionalism Past/Future (01:01) ===

[00:05:43]  How do I see world history?
[00:05:44]  How do I see what's happened before us?
[00:05:46]  And what do I want to happen in the future?
[00:05:48]  Well, if you're a traditionalist, capital T, just so no one thinks that they're familiar with this, it's a very strange ideological school.
[00:05:57]  If you're a traditionalist, capital T, you don't really believe in the past or the future.
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