There’s a great article by Bill Scher explaining why Bannon lost out to the “globalists”, i.e. why Trump’s agenda will now be exactly like every other elected Republicans’ agenda, only with most racism and incompetence. I was struck by this from Bannon:
“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia … 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 … Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement. It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan … It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
[….]Where did Bannon go wrong? His first order of business had nothing to with jobs, let alone bridging racial divisions. He played a singular role in engineering the travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, cutting Cabinet agencies out of the loop and purposefully dropping it without warning on a Friday to stoke maximum weekend street protest from the left. Courts balked, and Republican members of Congress complained about the shoddy process. It was Trump’s first political defeat as president, a humiliating own-goal that sowed early doubts about the administration’s basic competence.
In other words, Bannon prioritized xenophobic, hippie-baiting bullshit over popular proposals. Why? Because he gets off on being an asshole.
The article goes to compare Bannon with Karl Rove:
Rove got further than Bannon did. He actually prioritized what he set out to prioritize. He met with Democrats immediately after the bitter conclusion of the 2000 election to talk education, and the No Child Left Behind Act passed with a big bipartisan vote in the spring of 2001. And he worked with Democrats again in 2003 to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
It was only the second term when Rove took on too much and saw his dreams of Republican realignment vaporize.
Rove also got off on being an asshole. I doubt he needed all that anti-gay bullshit to win in 2004, I think he did it because he, like many conservatives, likes all the prince of darkness type bullshit. He poisoned the well with that crap (and also with Swiftboating etc.), and gave the Democrats enough spine to resist his agenda.
What’s saved the country the last 20 years is that Republicans are too busy being petty assholes to destroy the country as thoroughly as they want to.
Update. To be clear, what I’m saying is that Bannon hates people of color more than he loves economic populism. (I also tend to think his brand of economic populism would be popular but probably catastrophic economically because it’s poorly thought out, so I’m glad he didn’t make much progress on it.)