Steve Bannon is making an active move on the establishment GOP in Washington — who are finally actively counter-moving against him. This is a weirdly volatile dynamic.
1. More moderate and establishment GOP (themselves no great band of heroes) wanting to defeat the neo-fascist wing of the party should be encouraged by all sides. The election of Trump in 2016 demonstrates that playing the odds that a Bizarro World extremist could never, ever, possibly be elected is a mook’s game. Gambling that a Bannon lackey couldn’t possibly win the general election even if they won the GOP primary seems similarly over-optimistic.
2. The establishment GOP is already weakened — it’s difficult to tell the extent to which their power has been electorally hollowed out, and the extent to which they still have some measure of influence on the electorate and the results of the 2018 elections.
3. The “concern” that the establishment GOP has over the anti-establishment populist rebellion against them is very much to to be laughed at (if the stakes were not so frighteningly high). This is an anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-Washington movement that the GOP has both passively and actively supported in the Reaganite 80s, the Gingrich 90s, the Dubya 00s, and the TEAbagging 10s. Disdain for the federal government (and, by extension, its swampy politicians), distrust of the media (even the Fox contingent), despising of compromise, arrogance toward numbers and data and science — these are all things that the GOP has fostered for thirty years. And only now are concerned that the Revolution, like Saturn, will consume its own children.
4. The attempt to tar Bannon as a racist and part of the neo-fascist wing of the alt-Right is ballsy, but unlikely to be effective within the party itself. Too many of the GOP’s base have been trained by the GOP itself to consider all blacks as welfare queens and thugs, Jews as liberal coastal elites and moneyed interests, and all the other targets of the Nazi types infesting the walls of the Republican party as traitors against True America. The GOP establishment’s assumption that they can pivot their base against such sentiment is chutzpah of the highest caliber.
5. Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. You know who’s even more unpopular, at least among the GOP faithful? Mitch McConnell. And Paul Ryan isn’t much better. Trying to defeat Steve Bannon isn’t easy, and neither McConnell nor Ryan have the popular support to stop the Monster from the Id they, themselves, have unleashed. Attempts to do so, especially ones using the arguments the Dems have already put forward, are going to be very difficult to pull off.
6. And, for that matter, Trump doesn’t have the popularity to do so, either. The raw meat base love Trump for his rhetoric, and are willing to send to the political guillotine anyone who opposed him — but are apparently well aware that, rhetorically, he’s unreliable and petty. They love that he’s in the White House, but they’re more than happy (see Luther Strange) to ignore him as they see fit. He’s the John Gill of leaders, an ideological figurehead that they’re happy to scream for at rallies, but are also willing to ignore in favor of more malign figureheads like Bannon when ideological consistency becomes important.
7. The one hope here is that a Bannon candidate, wounded but not stopped by the establishment GOP, will be a targetable victim for the Dems (assuming that it’s in a district or race that the Dems are actually bothering to challenge). The concern here is whether the the establishment GOP will consider a win by the Dems as better for the country than a win by the Bannonites.
They should — the Dems are not likely to destroy the country, and will not be competing in the future against the same population as the Bannon wing. Establishment Republicans playing the long game will enlist or at least support Democratic opposition to Bannon’s rebels; hack Republicans will pay more attention to party labels and threats of retaliation that they think they can avoid by appeasement.
8. The wild card here is which way Trump will jump. Will he rally to the defense of Bannon, his once-trusted advisor, or will he consider him a threat to his own power? Will he draw closer to the swampy GOP establishment? Or will he simply consider himself more important and durable than either faction, and seek to rise above it all?
It would all be fascinating to watch unfold, were the very future of our nation not hanging in the balance.
