Opinion: The right wants revolution; the left is just going in circles

On Monday, July 1, Steve Bannon reported to federal prison in Danbury, Conn., where he will serve a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. Before doing so, the former adviser and ally to Donald Trump claimed he was “proud to go to prison” and, in so doing, to “stand up to tyranny.”

Bannon will be released on Nov. 1, just four days before the 2024 presidential election.

In the run-up to his prison term, Bannon sat down with the Washington Post’s David Brooks to discuss what Brooks called “the global populist surge.” During that interview, Bannon reiterated some familiar themes but broke new ground in laying out his vision for a Second American Revolution.

He criticized the “ruling elites of the West,” who he said have “lost confidence in themselves” and “lost faith in their countries.” Those elites, Bannon noted, “are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.”

Bannon compared former President Trump to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and credited Trump for being “the most nationalist guy we’ve ever had.” But he told Brooks that many people, and especially those on the political left, don’t understand that the MAGA movement “is moving much further to the right than President Trump.”

Bannon’s vision of a Second American Revolution combines an embrace of Christian nationalism with a program to put “American Citizens First.”

Americans need to take that vision seriously.

Many progressives seem to be in a state of denial, writing off talk of a Second American Revolution as just a flight of fancy from a rabble-rousing populist figure. They are consumed for the moment in trying to figure out what to do about President Biden’s flailing campaign.

Meanwhile, populists like Bannon have laid out their vision of what change in America should look like. They are speaking for millions of people who are not just part of a MAGA hardcore. Calls for a Second American Revolution respond to the deeply felt dissatisfaction of those people and crystalize their desire for change in our existing political and cultural arrangements.

What is the vision of change that people on the left are offering? And is there a figure on the left who has done the kind of work that Bannon did, day after day, year after year?

I can’t think of anyone.

As this campaign season proceeds, progressives have to do more than denounce Bannon’s program. They need to offer a clear and compelling program of their own that speaks to the widely felt desire for radical change in this country. They can’t prevail in a contest for what President Biden calls “the soul of the nation” by promising simply to preserve a system that many Americans want to overhaul.

They need to pay attention to sentiments of the kind that were registered in a January 2023 Gallup Poll. At that time, Gallup found that “most Americans remain dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. — 23 percent say they are satisfied, and 76 percent are dissatisfied. Forty-eight percent, the largest group, are ‘very dissatisfied.’”

In May of this year, ABC News confirmed those findings. “Across the board, voters were deeply frustrated over the state of democracy, suggesting that the country was off on the wrong track and expressing pessimism about whether it could improve.”

Thus, as an article in The Guardian noted last year, it should not be surprising that there is “growing anger and radicalization” throughout the American electorate.

Steve Bannon is not alone in expressing that anger and radicalization and in laying the groundwork for another revolution. Talk about revolution is very much in vogue among leading figures in America’s ultraconservative movement.

One of them, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, reacted to the Supreme Court’s recent decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution by saying that it would, as Newsweek reports , “bolster a second American revolution.” That decision, Roberts argued, would ensure that the next president could lead that change without having to “triple guess every decision they’re making in their official capacity.”

Beyond offering a commentary on a single Supreme Court decision, Roberts wrote , “Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats. These patriots are committed to peaceful revolution at the ballot box.”

“Like the First American Revolution,” Roberts continued, “the second began when a corrupt ruling class sought to overthrow the existing institutions of American life. But whereas the British passed laws and imposed colonial officials, our elites have been more subtle.”

The coming revolution will, Roberts says, target “corrupt elites” in universities, the establishment media and urban cultural centers. In his view, they are responsible for imposing “destructive and despotic changes” in the lives of ordinary Americans.

Reading what Roberts wrote, I was reminded of a point made several years ago not by a MAGA figure but by Harvard professor Michael Sandel. Sandel recognized then that “For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites, which he thinks have looked down upon him throughout his life. That does provide a very important clue to his political appeal.”

He warned that the “Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalization.” Sandel said that liberals did not understand that “There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.”

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer agrees . He recognizes that calls for a Second American Revolution are deeply rooted in the kind of resentments that Sandel diagnosed.

Writing on July 4, Serwer said, “If the basis of Trumpism were simply economic rather than social and political, Biden would be something close to the president Trumpist intellectuals said they wanted … but Trumpism is about offering status, hierarchy, and domination to its rank-and-file voters in exchange for an upward redistribution of power and income to its elites and that is not what Biden is offering.”

Taking up that theme, Bannon argues that “the spiritual part … (is) at the base” of the Second American Revolution. To succeed in revolutionary activity, Bannon says, “You have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare period. Everything is narrative.”

Figures like Bannon and Roberts use narrative warfare to speak to and mobilize the widespread dissatisfaction with American institutions. They know, as an IPSOS study explains , that the “belief that the system is broken is not a fringe idea.”

They know large numbers of voters “feel their country’s system is broken. Many agree that their country’s economy is rigged to advantage the rich, that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about them, and that experts don’t understand their lives.”

That is why they now speak openly and confidently of a Second American Revolution.

The question that we face is not whether change will come to this country. It is, rather, what kind of change it will be. Bannon has offered his vision. What is the alternative that progressives can offer?

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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