November 19, 2017
By Andrew O'Hehir
"Steve Bannon, Bolshevik: May be Donald Trump's alt-right Svengali really is a Lenonist"
Steve Bannon, (click here) the former head of Breitbart News who is now President-elect Donald Trump’s bullshitter-in-chief — not an official title, although it should be — has been called many things in the past couple of weeks. According to many people who evidently don’t care for him, Bannon is a racist, a white supremacist or a white nationalist (which are not all the same thing), and may also be an anti-Semite and a misogynist. These epithets may or may not be accurate, but they strike me as giving off more heat than light. They provide very little information about what sort of person the incoming White House strategist might be, or what he might want.
According to the somewhat reliable testimony of writer Ronald Radosh, Bannon has embraced one unlikely “-ist” label. At a book party at Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse in November 2013, Radosh recounted in the Daily Beast, Donald Trump’s future Svengali referred to himself as a “Leninist.” We’ll get back to the details of Radosh’s account, but Bannon has not denied it, saying only he doesn’t remember the conversation. So let’s take Bannon at his word, sort of, or at least figure out what kind of Leninist he is. The parallels between the Trumpian mastermind and the man who shook the world are instructive, as are the differences....
...the Winter Palace in Petrograd to Bolshevik forces happened on Nov. 8, 1917....
...the Winter Palace in Petrograd to Bolshevik forces happened on Nov. 8, 1917....
