Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

Steve Bannon, regardless of whatever else he may be, is first and foremost a strategist. And he has a knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away. This is what he helped Trump do in 2016. He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton. Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats—most of it white, but not all of it. Bannon crafted a campaign message out of the betrayals of his rivals: Trump would be a new kind of Republican, one who would stand up to Wall Street, shred corporate trade deals, close the border to supposedly job-stealing immigrants, and end foreign wars—moreover, unlike Republicans before, he pledged to protect social programs like Medicare and Social Security. This was the original MAGA promise.