“Steve Bannon’s show became a key platform to promote Trump, who appeared regularly. During one interview, Bannon likened the reality TV star’s ability to negotiate with networks about the terms of the primary debates to the skills needed to negotiate international treaties.”
But of course, if we’re post-truth, we must be post-analogies, so there can be no “alt left”, even as Trump’s reign will resemble Berlusconi’s by the time it fades into the history of P.T. Barnum’s imitators...
Yes, that Berlusconi. The Italian business magnate who spearheaded a widely mocked but remarkably successful political movement, eventually serving as prime minister for nine years over four stints — the longest of any postwar Italian leader — before becoming embroiled in scandals involving corruption, women and, of course, “bunga bunga.” Out of office since 2011 and still facing court cases, even Berlusconi thinks the Trump comparison is fitting, telling the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the parallels are “obvious.”
In fact, the comparison didn’t first appear in this election cycle. Paul Ginsborg, chair of contemporary European history at the University of Florence and an expert on Italy’s Berlusconi era, had suggested more than 10 years ago that there was something Trump-ish about Berlusconi.
Consider the following passage from his 2005 biography of the then-prime minister, “Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony.”
“Berlusconi is certainly a consummate salesman, and a very well-prepared one. But he is also, and probably above all, a buyer of commodities and services, of villas and footballers, of television channels and entertainers, of supermarkets and publishing houses, and much else besides. His is a patrimonial and acquisitive instinct, fired by the production and the use of wealth, as well as the need for his name and face to be omnipresent. In this respect, though not in others, he can be compared to a figure like Donald Trump, who used to boast that he had the largest living room in New York and the city’s most spectacular view.”
www.washingtonpost.com/...
In 2003, during an interview with Nicholas Farrell, then editor of The Spectator, Berlusconi claimed that Mussolini"had been a benign dictator who did not murder opponents but sent them 'on holiday'".[253] In 2013, he returned to calling Mussolini a good leader whose biggest mistake was signing up to exterminate the Jews.[128]
On 27 January 2013, on the occasion of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, Berlusconi said the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, except from passing anti-Jewish laws in 1938, only had done "good things" for Italy; and also said Mussolini from a strategic point of view did the right thing in siding with Adolf Hitler during World War II, because Hitler at the point of time when the alliance was made had appeared to be winning the war.[275]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Trump saw the immense potential appeal of an American restoration — all nationalism finds its roots in a gloried, mythical past — after the presidency of a black man, Barack Obama, who prudently chose not to exalt the exceptional nature of the United States but to face the reality of diminished power.
The proposed restoration went beyond that. It was of the Judeo-Christian West against what Trump’s chief strategist — read propaganda minister — Steve Bannon calls “this new barbarity.” That barbarity has many components. One is the crony capitalism of the “party of Davos” — the elites who have the system rigged. Another is the dilution of Judeo-Christian values through rampant secularization, migration and miscegenation. The mass 21st-century influx of Muslims in the West may be equated, in these people’s eyes, with the mass emancipation and emergence from the Shtetl of Jews in 19th-century Europe: disruptive, threatening, a menace to the established order.
Obama is of mixed race. Who could better symbolize the looming decadence? For “Make America Great Again,” read “Make America White Again.” Trump saw that racism and sexism could be manipulated in his favor. He was the self-styled voice of the people to whom he bore least resemblance: those at the periphery far from the metropolitan hubs of the Davos consensus.
From headline to headline Trump stumbled, ending up with the last thing he wants: a minutely scrutinized life. You can wing a campaign; you can’t wing the leadership of the free world. An unethical commander-in-chief is a commander-in-chief with problems.
Then there’s the bubble-killer, WH Chief Strategist and misunderstood minarchist.
Trump is a “blunt instrument for us,” Bannon told Vanity Fair this summer, before joining the campaign. “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”…
In the fall of 2015, before Stephen K. Bannon became a trusted adviser to the next president, he launched a daily three-hour radio show that catered to what he called “those ‘low-information’ citizens who are mocked and ridiculed by their ‘betters’ — the clueless elites.”
Bannon welcomed guests whose views, he often said, had been suppressed by the left’s political correctness.
He gave regular airtime to Milo Yiannopoulos, who was banned from Twitter after cheering on supporters who barraged “Ghostbusters” actor Leslie Jones with racist and sexist tweets. Bannon described an anti-Islamic activist who campaigns against what she calls “creeping sharia” in the United States as “a voice in the wilderness.” A former Heritage Foundation staffer who had argued that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs was “one of the smartest brains out there in demographics, demography, this whole issue of immigration,” Bannon said.
From his perch as chief of the Breitbart News empire, which produced the satellite radio show, Bannon cemented his role as a champion of the alt-right, an anti-globalism movement that has attracted support from white supremacists and helped power Donald Trump’s populist White House victory.
Bannon’s appointment as Trump’s senior White House counselor is an early sign that the incoming president intends to continue promoting the hard-line approach to issues such as immigration and Islam that galvanized nationalist enthusiasm for his candidacy.
Bannon told Bloomberg that he was disgusted by how the banking industry handled the 2008 financial crisis.
“I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn’t deserve it,” he said in the interview…
“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy,” Bannon told The Washington Post early this year, adding, “We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Most importantly for independent media makers, people are looking for new places to turn for their news. Bold and preferably anti-partisan publications, like weeklies in the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and outlets with muckrakers like those in The Media Consortium, whose members set the tone of progressive coverage on national issues.
As the editor of the alternative DigBoston and the co-founder and editorial director of BINJ, I welcome such curiosity and enthusiasm, and hope that Baby Boomers who have slid toward the center return to the kind of grass-roots social justice coverage that motivated them back in the day.
billmoyers.com/...
We saw this dynamic during the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was so focused on explaining how bad Mr. Trump was that she too often didn’t promote her own ideas, to make the positive case for voting for her. The news media was so intent on ridiculing Mr. Trump’s behavior that it ended up providing him with free advertising.