Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a frequent opinion contributor to CNN and The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author. Read more opinion pieces on CNN.
Since leaving the White House last year, it’s clear that Steve Bannon had hoped to both make it back into the headlines in the US and appear even more influential in the eyes of Europeans. The New Yorker magazine has just granted him his wish.
The magazine’s invitation to President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and campaign CEO as the featured guest at its upcoming festival ignited such a firestorm of criticism that Editor David Remnick decided to cancel it within hours of the announcement.
The entire cycle, from invitation, to controversy, to the invitation being withdrawn, amounted to a big victory for Bannon – a man who was looking very much like a has-been in America, but who likes to think of himself as a genius of historic magnitude on the global stage.
If Trump is the personification of narcissism for our bizarre times, Bannon perfectly embodies 21st century megalomania. What better way to feed the man’s outsize image of himself than by turning the mere prospect of a public interview into front-page news?
What better way? The interview itself.
The New Yorker indeed had blundered in inviting Bannon. To be sure, his views should be openly, publicly discussed and refuted. But Bannon – a man who travels the world trying to foment a toxic, divisive form of racist nationalism – does not need a more powerful megaphone or a prominent place on the stage at a highly-regarded gathering.
In announcing the invitation’s rescission, Remnick assured critics that he’d had no intention of allowing Bannon to “propel further the ‘ideas’ of white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and illiberalism.” Instead, he envisioned a “combative conversation.”
But combating the ideology driving Bannon and his acolytes is not just an intellectual exercise. Their ideology is already destroying lives. The ferocious backlash against the invitation makes it clear that Bannon and his views are repugnant to the mainstream of America. They should remain in the fringes, even if the President has turned some of them into policy and energized the far right.
Remnick revealed that he had “tried for months to get him” but that Bannon had only just agreed to this uniquely prestigious platform. Of course he did. The New Yorker should interview him for print, dissect his views, maybe even put him on a panel in the festival – one among many – where we can see his outdated ideology for the dangerous failure that history has proven it to be.
In the US, Bannon flamed out. The White House was not big enough for two egos. After Trump fired him, his publication, Breitbart, also ousted him.
But not before Bannon turned the conservative website into “a cesspool of the alt-right,” as former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro described it. When Trump plucked Bannon from Breitbart to run his campaign in 2016, Shapiro warned of a takeover of the Republican Party by “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.”
Bannon’s anti-establishment revolution all but fizzled in the US, with high-profile candidacies rejected by voters and wealthy donors withdrawing support.
That’s when Bannon took his show on the road. Shunned in America, he decamped to Europe, the birthplace of white nationalism. It is here where the 20th century version of the ideology now espoused by Bannon and like-minded politicians had its day in the sun, and proceeded to blot it out.
It is here where the creed of “blood and soil” – racially based nationalism made famous in Germany and repeated by Americans in Charlottesville last year – proved beyond any need for further empirical experimentation that it is not just a failure, but catastrophically dangerous.
Bannon’s self-regard as a world-changing intellectual and revolutionary leader is being tested beyond US shores.
He plans to campaign and strategize with far-right European parties ahead of next year’s European Parliament elections, threatening European democracy. He’s already close to prominent far-right figures across the continent.
Not everyone thinks he will be successful, but there is no question that some of Bannon’s ideological soul-mates are making gains in Europe. The far right AfD has gained ground in Germany, and we have seen the street violence that predictably goes with the ideology. Bannon has praised Hungary’s President Victor Orban as a hero, even as he dismantles the foundations of open democracy.
Here in Italy, Bannon has found his greatest source of satisfaction. The country now has Western Europe’s first modern populist government. Bannon claims he helped bring together the far-right League party of Matteo Salvini with the populist Five Star movement, so they could take over the government. Salvini, who is a big fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin – a common sentiment among nationalists – now serves as interior minister, but he is really the power behind a weak compromise prime minister.
Salvini’s slogan was a Trumpian, “Italians first,” an epigram for a campaign powered by anti-immigrant rhetoric and attacks against the “filthy” European Union.
Salvini now wants to conduct a census of Roma (Gypsies), saying “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood.”
Next on Bannon’s megalomaniacal plans for world revolution is Australia, which he claims is ripe for an uprising. “Australia,” he told an interviewer, “is at the tip of the spear on this.”
In the US, Bannon’s star has dimmed even inside the alt-right. Perhaps they noticed he got a little big for his unfashionable britches. If Trump got tired of him, they could only embrace the President’s position.
Bannon is not yet a big figure in Europe. Sure, nationalist ideas have gained ground, but he is not the leader of a global movement, however much he would like to be.
Making him a headliner for major events, whether by the New Yorker or another one later this month by Britain’s Economist magazine, only serves to promote him personally and propagate his rancid worldview.
By all means debate his ideas, unmask their sophistry and empty promises, but don’t turn up his microphone. Don’t give him the biggest chair on the highest stage.