The Biggest Name in White Nationalist Classics
Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists and continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee Delaware Nation in Ontario. Please read more.
Steve Bannon is back in the news, but not in the same way he was when Time wondered if he was the second most powerful man in the world. Now he’s facing prison time for contempt of congress and a trial in New York on charges of money-laundering, fraud, and conspiracy, crimes for which Donald Trump pardoned him at the federal level. At this remove Bannon’s legacy is also increasingly clear: few people have done more to introduce white nationalist ideas into mainstream American politics. As editor in chief he made the website Breitbart “the platform for the Alt Right;” at its peak it reached a vastly wider audience than any other mainstream or extremist political publication. Breitbart’s founder described Bannon’s previous political role as “the Leni Riefenstahl” — that is, the Nazi party’s propagandist — “of the Tea Party,” itself a racist movement that made open xenophobia central to mainstream conservative politics in the United States. After Breitbart, Bannon walked in the innermost circles of Amercian political power as the senior White House advisor to President Trump and played a role role in the drafting of the xenophobic “Muslim Ban.” And a year after leaving the White House, he told a gathering of nationalists in France that they should wear the label “racist” “like a badge of honor.” Back in the United States, he now hosts a podcast that has been described as “a watering hole for far right figures” and a “dangerous fantasyland of election lies.”
Bannon is also, as ancient historians and journalists have reported, obsessed with Greco-Roman antiquity. Many aspects of this obsession have become almost common knowledge: that Bannon’s computer password used to be “Sparta,” or that he promotes a (popular) reading of Thucydides that makes violent conflict between nations — such as the United States and China — inevitable rather than, as a more nuanced understanding of Thucydides would suggest, the result of one or both sides sowing fear about the other. According to a collaborator who worked with him when he was working in television and film production, one of his guiding principles was that “the greatest ideas are often the oldest ideas” and that he used the phrase “ancient wisdom” to characterize his favorite ancient thinkers, such as Plato and Marcus Aurelius. GQ even trolled Bannon with a list of some other ancient figures he should be interested in. But these turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the role Greco-Roman antiquity plays in how Bannon sees himself, his mission, and the people he recruits to support it. No other figure so completely embodies the danger that such uncritical and idealized views of antiquity pose if wedded to real political power.
Bannon’s first public attempt to use the ancient world to legitimate his political beliefs came in 2004. That year he produced a documentary called In the Face of Evil that was based on a “tendentious and extremely partisan” biography of Ronald Reagan. That film begins with a voiceover describing not the subject of the documentary but “Republican Rome’s most admired statesman Cato the Elder,” who is described as “the strongest advocate of freeman’s inalienable right to govern themselves.” In the rhetoric of the film, Cato provides an ancient prototype for the fearless proponent of freedom and adversary of evil that Bannon believes Reagan’s opposition to communism shows that he was.
The distortion of ancient evidence doesn’t bother Bannon any more than the hypocrisy of cold war rhetoric that casts America as a bastion of freedom
Bannon doesn’t seem much bothered that Cato was also known for his misogyny, or that it was Cato’s great grandson, not the Cato Bannon’s film invokes, that ancient tradition had made a symbol of the idea of libertas (“freedom”). No, Bannon focused on the Elder Cato because he wanted to cast the Cold War as a modern replay of Rome’s wars with Carthage. To make Carthage look like an analogue to the Soviet Union, Bannon has to say that Cato “viewed the tyrants of Carthage as the mortal enemy of the Roman people,” when in fact the constitution of Carthage was widely admired in antiquity before Roman propaganda villainized it. Aristotle, in fact, wrote that some aspects of Carthage’s constitution “incline more to democracy” and that “the Carthaginians…have never been under the rule of a tyrant.”
But this distortion of ancient evidence doesn’t bother Bannon any more than the hypocrisy of cold war rhetoric that casts cold war-era America as a bastion of freedom even as our nation turned a blind eye to genocide, supported totalitarian rulers abroad, maintained racist laws at home, and plundered the resources of colonized nations. Nor does Bannon seem to mind, when his voiceover praises Cato for ending every speech by saying the “Carthage Must Be Destroyed” (Carthago delenda est), that he is praising a (widely quoted) line that has been described as “the first recorded incitement to genocide.” But idealizing and sanitizing a figure like Cato is consistent with Bannon’s overall aim to idealize a racist and corrupt U.S. president who was the architect of the modern American carceral state and a perpetrator of war crimes abroad.
The attraction of Greco-Roman antiquity for Bannon is that the prestige it enjoys allows him to disguise his ideas as sophisticated and admirable
Fast forward to 2022 and it is clear that beginning his Reagan documentary with Cato the Elder was only Bannon’s first public foray into finding legitimacy for his particular brand of hateful politics in Greco-Roman antiquity. A biography of Bannon, written by a journalist who in 2018 urged conservatives to support President Donald Trump because doing so “is not quite the profound moral dilemma it’s been made out to be,” noted the centrality of the ancient world to Bannon’s political views. A Breitbart review of that biography called special attention to Bannon’s designation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as “one of his six most formative influences.” This is the massively influential work that blames “barbarism and religion” for the collapse of Roman political power in late antiquity. Historians have long recognized that Gibbon’s analysis, particularly his portrait of the supposedly violent and uncultured “barbarians” destroying civilization, derives from both an uncritical reading of biased Roman writers who described the barbarians in those terms and also from Gibbon’s own anxieties about the collapse of the British empire as he was working on his book, the first volume of which was published the same year as the American revolution. But this hasn’t stopped white nationalists from capitalizing on the fame of Gibbon to claim that violent foreigners and Jewish-influenced cultural values (such as the Christianity Gibbon deplored) pose an existential threat to the modern United States and Europe.
Bannon’s particular reading of Gibbon emphasizes the “striking parallels” that Bannon believes Gibbon’s work suggests between contemporary America and ancient Rome. These include how “core virtues” made both Rome and America, according to Bannon, attractive to immigrants (Gibbon’s “barbarians”), whose “uncontrolled” flow soon “overwhelmed the capacity of the society to subsume them.” Many of the “core virtues” that Bannon claims were “passed down from Jerusalem, to Rome, to Athens, to London,” including “self-reliance,” “the self-determination of the individual,” and the “freedom to be the traditional family” sound more like libertarian talking points than anything one could identify as authentically Roman (the Roman family looked nothing like what Bannon has in mind). And it’s ironic that the Americans whose virtues Bannon wants to parallel in ancient Rome were, for Gibbon, themselves the barbarians whose revolution threatened his own empire.
How many of the recruits to Bannon’s "Gladiator School" would have understood that most Roman gladiators were enslaved, low-status individuals rather than heroic revolutionaries?
But for Bannon, Greco-Roman antiquity isn’t just a model for America, it’s a model for himself. For example, he rejects the label “fascist” and prefers to describe himself as a “populist.” When the difference came up in an interview with a journalist who has attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of the fascist dictator Mussolini, Bannon compared himself to Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, whom he describes as “populists.” It’s not a terrible description of these two Roman tribunes who proposed laws that, among other things, would have redistributed land from rich to poor. And the fact that both of them were murdered by Roman senators doubtless appeals to Bannon as a means of identifying himself as a persecuted political outsider. But beyond this it’s hard to see what Bannon’s politics have in common with those of these men, or the proto-socialists who have claimed them as models, until one remembers that it’s common white nationalist sleight-of-hand to protest wealth inequality and other ills of neoliberal capitalism as a means of concealing a racist message.
Indeed, part of the attraction of Greco-Roman antiquity for Bannon is that the prestige it enjoys allows him to disguise his ideas as sophisticated and admirable. When pressed on his self-comparison to the Gracchi, Bannon accuses his interviewer of “trying to dumb it down” and says “Come on, dude, you’ve got to know your Roman history.” He then asserts the sophistication of his analysis with another Classical reference: “I come from a blue-collar family that reads Plutarch.”
Bannon’s model for the "perfected version" of a man is taken from antiquity: the Homeric "Ajax"
And just as Bannon casts himself in the role of the Roman politician, he casts those he seeks to recruit to his movement in the role of Classical warriors. In 2019 Bannon attempted to open the “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in a medieval Italian monastery, describing it as a “gladiator school for cultural warriors.” One wonders how many of Bannon’s recruits would have understood that most Roman gladiators were enslaved, low-status individuals who were “forced to commit acts of violence for the pleasure of spectators” rather than the heroic revolutionary portrayed in the film Gladiator, itself a piece of political propaganda. We’ll never know, because Bannon’s “Academy” never opened; Bannon lost a legal battle in 2021 over the lease to the monastery and the Italian group he was working with was officially evicted later that year.
But even without his “Gladiator school” Bannon continues to conceptualize his followers as Classical warriors. In 2018, Bannon told documentary filmmaker Errol Morris that his ideal reader of Breitbart was a man who, bored of his job “in the accounts payable department” and alienated from his “wife and two kids who don’t really know him” prefers the “more perfected version” of himself that he can play in online video games. Bannon’s model for what this “perfected version” of a man might look like, unsurprisingly, was taken from antiquity: the Homeric “Ajax,” whose heroism and life of honor in the online world is, according to Bannon, more real, more important, to the man who plays him than his real world self is. Bannon wanted these men to come to Breitbart and build a community in the comments section, where “angry voices…have latent political power [and] could be weaponized.” A few years later, when asked about this Homeric analogy in an interview, Bannon said that yes, this was his model for the movement he was building, one which would allow each and every disaffected man to leave behind his online persona and, as Bannon put it, “be Ajax in his life.” Although white nationalists frequently invoke Homeric characters as models of heroism, we have not (yet) seen a terrorist attempt to embody Ajax specifically. But the same principle inspired those who put on Spartan helmets and joined the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that Bannon helped inspire and promote.
Even though Bannon has appealed his recent conviction for contempt of congress, the net seems finally to be closing around him as the investigation into January 6th continues and the office of the New York State attorney general prepares its case. But there are indications that Bannon’s “Europe Strategy” (which at first was dismissed, just as Trump was) is bearing fruit: Italy has just elected a prime minister who has never repudiated the fascist roots of her political party, which also boasts the dictator Mussolini’s granddaughter as a member (and now council member of Rome). Or consider the recent elections in the United States. Voters reelected Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert to congress, both of whom embrace the white genocide conspiracy theory; Greene recently boasted that if she and Bannon had been in charge on January 6th “we would have won.” Greg Abbott, whose immigration rhetoric is reminiscent of that of mass murderers, was reelected governor of Texas. Ron De Santis, who failed to condemn neonazis who waved “De Santis country” flags at a rally, was reelected Florida governor in a landslide victory. Whatever the outcome of Bannon’s trial it seems the movement he did so much to promote has enough momentum to carry on without him.
