April 16, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/steve-bannon-may-have-something-to-offer-1492126592
Does Steve Bannon Have Something to Offer?
In 2014 the beleaguered White House aide raised important moral questions about today’s capitalism.
Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Feb. 23. Photo: European Pressphoto Agency
By
Peggy Noonan
April 13, 2017 7:36 p.m. ET
My late friend Bill Safire, the tough and joyous New York Times columnist, once gave me good advice. I was not then a newspaper columnist, but he’d apparently decided I would be. This is what he said: Never join a pile-on, always hit ’em when they’re up. Don’t criticize the person who’s already being attacked. What’s the fun in that, where’s the valor? Hit them when they’re flying high and it takes some guts.
So, in the matter of Steve Bannon :
I think we can agree he brings a certain amount of disorder. They say he’s rough and tough, and there’s no reason to doubt it. They say he leaks like a sieve and disparages his rivals, and this can be assumed to be correct: They all do that in this White House. He is accused of saying incendiary things and that is true. A week into the administration he told Michael Grynbaum of the Times the media should "keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.†"I love a gunfight,†he reportedly said in the middle of his latest difficulties. When he tried to muscle members of the Freedom Caucus to vote for the ObamaCare replacement bill, a congressman blandly replied, "You know, the last time someone ordered me to do something I was 18 years old, and it was my daddy, and I didn’t listen to him, either.†When I said a while back that some of the president’s aides are outlandish, and confuse strength with aggression, he was in mind.
But there’s something low, unseemly and ugly in the efforts to take him out so publicly and humiliatingly, to turn him into a human oil spot on the tarmac—this not only from his putative colleagues but now even the president. "I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,†Mr. Trump purred to the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin.
Peggy Noonan: Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary 2017
So let’s take a look at something impressive Mr. Bannon has done. I’ve been meaning to write of it for a while. In 2014 he did a live Skype interview for a conference on poverty at the Vatican. BuzzFeed ran it during the campaign under the headline "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.â€
It shows an interesting mind at work.
The West is currently facing a "crisis of capitalism,†he said. The world was able to recover after the world wars in part thanks to "an enlightened form of capitalism†that generated "tremendous wealth†broadly distributed among all classes. This capitalism was shaped by "the underlying spiritual and moral foundations . . . of Judeo-Christian belief.†Successful capitalists were often either "active participants in the Jewish faith†or "active participants in the Christian faith.†They operated on a kind of moral patrimony, part tradition, part religious teaching. But now the West has become more secular. Capitalism as a result has grown "unmoored†and is going "partly off track.â€
He speaks of two "disturbing†strands. "One is state-sponsored capitalism,†as in China and Russia. We also, to a degree, see it in America. This is "a brutal form of capitalism†in which wealth and value are distributed to "a very small subset of people.†It is connected to crony capitalism. He criticizes the Republican Party as "really a collection of crony capitalists that feel they have a different set of rules of how they’re going to comport themselves.â€
Read the whole thingat the Wall Street Journal
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