Monday, February 06, 2017

BANNON'S NEW AIDE SURE IS THE SALT OF THE EARTH, ISN'T SHE?

The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz tells us that Steve Bannon has a new deputy named Julia Hahn who, according to #NeverTrumper Bill Kristol, will “be Bannon’s Bannon and will make Bannon look moderate.” Now, Bannon may be a Goldman Sachs alum, but we've been told in no uncertain terms that he's totally in touch with his working-class roots. Recall the passage I quoted from the Time magazine cover story on Bannon:
To understand Steve Bannon, you have to understand what happened to his father. "I come from a blue collar, Irish-Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats," he once told Bloomberg Businessweek. Martin Bannon began his career as an assistant splicer for a telephone company and toiled as a lineman. Rising into management, the elder Bannon carved out a comfortable middle-class life for his wife and five kids on his working man's salary. Friends say Steve pays frequent visits to his father, now 95 and widowed, at the old family home in Richmond's Ginter Park neighborhood.

The last financial crisis put a huge dent in Martin's life savings, according to two people close to the family. Steve watched with fury as his former Wall Street colleagues emerged virtually unscathed and scot-free--while America's once great middle class, the people like his father, absorbed the weight of the damage.

"The sharp change came, I think, in 2008," says Patrick McSweeney, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia and longtime family friend. Bannon saw it as a matter of "fundamental unfairness": the hardworking folks like his father got stiffed. And the bankers got bailed out.
Bannon has his finger on the pulse of blue-collar whites. They hate "cultural elitists" with the fury of a thousand suns. So what's the background of Bannon's new aide? Surely she's a self-made bootstrapper who attended non-elite schools and studied practical, goal-oriented subjects -- right?
Hahn was raised in Beverly Hills and attended Harvard-Westlake, an exclusive private high school in Los Angeles.... She majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago and studied in Paris....

Hahn’s senior thesis, about “issues at the intersection of psychoanalysis and post-Foucauldian philosophical inquiry,” drew on the work of Leo Bersani, whose ideas she called “hugely transformational.” Bersani, a left-wing cultural theorist who taught at Berkeley, is known for his provocative writings on Freud and sexuality; his books include “Homos” and “Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays.”
That's the top aide to the most powerful man in the White House. Together, she and the Goldman Sachs alum are going to usher in a new golden age for the common man.

Blue-collar whites, you've been snookered again.

7 comments:

Victor said...

If you wrote this lunacy as a novel in the past 30 years, your editors would have made your friends and family have a drug/alcohol intervention, and it'd only be now, that fiction became reality, that you could say "Good-bye" to your neighbors in The Hanibal Lecter Wing of Ye Old Modern Mental Asylum!

K. Chris said...

Victor, in a way this insanity was written about. In about 1948 the author Orwell wrote and warned us of what was coming. His 1984 being but a fictionalized version of the Protocols realized.

An American citizen, not US subject.

Procopius said...

I'm not familiar with Leo Bersani, but I find it jarring to see him referred to as a "left-wing cultural theorist," whose books have titles that sound thoroughly homophobic. What's a "cultural theorist" when it's at home, anyway?

Iron City said...

Not sure what a "cultural theorist" is but sounds like it has tenure or a trust fund.

Anonymous said...

While I can see where 1984 could be confused with a fictionalized version of "the Protocols", we would do well to recall that "the Protocols" are not what they are purported to be.

And as I recall not an open topic here.
Ten Bears

Lawrence said...

Are those book titles real? I don't want to google them at work.

Steve M. said...

Yup. Published by Harvard University Press and the University of Chicago Press, respectively.