Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green

 

Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

Joshua Green

New York: Penguin Press, 2017

Review by Joseph Szimhart (August 15, 2017)

Please note: This review will range far beyond the content in Devil’s Bargain.

Devil’s bargain or devils’ bargain?  Apostrophes can make all the difference, however, after reading this book the devil is not clearly identified. There are devils bargaining everywhere when the topic encompasses the über rich, the political elite, and biased media outlets.

Joshua Green writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, a magazine established in 1929 and geared toward the quality of informative journalism and research as in The Economist. In other words, the content appeals to right of center businessmen who tend to be fiscal conservatives, yet it sustains a sensible criticism of both right and left politics that effect the way money moves in culture and international relations. Having said that, Devil’s Bargain will appeal more to Trump’s critics and less to his devotees.

Green offers an intense overview of events that led to the internationally shocking election of Donald Trump. Even Trump and his inner circle were a bit shocked, Green tells us. Green offers insight into the quirky lives and strange philosophies that drive the perceptions and decisions of the wealthy. If there are devils, they lurk in murky back alley castles that exclude common voting folk. The castles harbor schemers (including oddball billionaire Bob Mercer who funded Bannon and Trump) that devise ways to manipulate voter perception. The devils play tunes to choreograph our angry minds whether we dance on stage right, stage left, or are lost in the muddy middle among indignant independents and those who could care less. Green does not go that far, so far as I did to cynically describe how we are all being played, but he gets close.

My interest in this book focuses more on Steve Bannon than Trump. Bannon, as we learn, is a study in superior drive and intellect fixated on how to influence the world from knowledge of hidden cultural and cosmic forces. Bannon has little respect for anyone, but he does respect the goddess Kali (I am speaking metaphorically) who heralds the final age of a cycle (Kali Yuga) in Hindu mythology. Green mentions the Kali Yuga’s importance to Bannon’s alignment with Traditionalism and its primary pundit, Rene Guenon (1886-1951).

Green references one source about Guenon and one of his more radical devotees, Baron Julius Evola (1898-1974), who also grabbed Bannon’s interest. That source is Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2002). I have the book and reviewed it many years ago. This is difficult territory that Green manages well enough with careful language to help us grasp how Guenon, a Muslim convert with Hindu leanings and Evola, an icon of Italian fascist idealism, figure into the Bannon world view that captivates Trump.

“Expounding on this view at a 2014 conference at the Vatican, Bannon knit together Guenon, Evola, and his own racial-religious panic to cast his beliefs in historical context. Citing the tens of millions of people killed in twentieth-century wars, he called mankind “children of that barbarity” whose present condition would one day be judged “a new Dark Age.” He added, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.” (207)

Further on down the same page 207, Green notes Traditionalist influence in Russia today:

“Vladimir Putin’s chief ideologist, Alexander Dugin—whom Bannon has cited—translated Evola’s work into Russian and later developed a Russian-nationalist variant of Traditionalism known as Eurasianism.” (207-208)

In 2016 summer, during the campaign, Bannon described Trump as a “blunt instrument for us,” and after the election, “He’s [Trump has] taken the nationalist movement and moved it up twenty years” (208). By “us” Bannon includes the movement of conservatives most represented by talk radio pundits who bitch incessantly about liberalism, but he basically meant the Breitbart crowd. 

According to Green, Bannon comes from roots in a Tridentine or old-school Catholicism that rejects the liberalzing intent of Vatican 2 that occurred in the 1960s. Tridentine Catholicism that celebrates the Mass in Latin is also inspired by Pope Pius the XI in his “1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno [which stated that] political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small-government conservatism” (206). Green does not mention that the pope’s encyclical also condemned runaway capitalism that leads to grotesque wealth.  

When we hear Donald Trump equivocate about racial tensions (as he has lately regarding the neo-Nazi/White Right protests that led to deaths in Virginia on August 12, 2017 by condemning “many sides”), we are hearing Bannon citing Evola as a champion of change, not racism. Evola was not a biological racist—he was an elite idealist who viewed “Aryan” as indicative of aristocratic and higher caste sensibilities carried by the “Nordic, light-skinned conquerors of ancient India” (Goodrick-Clarke, 65). The original Aryans were not the pinky-white Brits and Germans that neo-Nazis revere—the original Aryans were olive and tan-skinned folk from lands around ancient Persia.

Higher caste sensibilities can be carried by the elite leaders of African and Middle East nations in Evola’s view. Skin color does have something to do with caste and the jati system in Hindu India, but not in Guenon’s or Evola’s Traditionalism which is a spiritual hierarchy about gnosis. Trump like Bannon has no overt biological racism platform. It is a serious mistake to view the Alt-right under Bannon as skin-color racism despite the invitation of all racists to join the White side of the Alt-right parade. “Mussolini adopted Evola’s ideas as official Fascist racial theory in 1938, when Italy enacted its own racial laws distinct from Nazi Germany” (Goodrick-Clarke, 65). Mussolini rejected that there were biologically pure races in opposition to Hitler. Following this view, Trump can rub shoulders comfortably without hypocrisy with brown-skinned Muslim elites as well as appoint an African American man to his cabinet. Obama was not hated by the elite Right because he was Black—he was dissed because he was not from that upper political caste.

As for the female gender:

“Evola’s view of history and political theory were grounded in a fundamental “doctrine of two natures,” the “primordial Tradition,” which distinguishes the metaphysical order of things from the physical, the immortal from the mortal world, the superior realm of “being” from the inferior realm of “becoming,” the dominant virile principle of spirit from the lower, feminine domain of matter” (Goodrick-Clarke, 58). Father sun dominates Mother moon. Hindu doctrine favors the male incarnation as prepared for moksha or soul freedom. Being born female is inauspicious spiritually for Guenon and the Traditionalists—being born male is highly preferred by many ancient cultures, thus the enduring myth to hope for many sons and the early Roman practice of female infanticide. Traditionalism is not feminism. Trump’s primarily old white guy cabinet looks “Traditional.”

A word here about “primordial Tradition,” also known as perennial philosophy. Guenon believed he found evidence of primordialism in the ancient Hindu Vedas. He had a point, but he over-valued it. He rejected the implications of evolutionary theory and why we cognitively remain species specific for the past 60,000 years or more—no matter what our caste or racial stereotype. Guenon mistook “Being” for the apparent steadiness of the human species. Like Bannon, I thought I found a hero in Guenon in the 1980s when I discovered his work, especially The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (1945), perhaps his best-known work and a good synopsis of his thought. Scholars such as Mircea Eliade endorsed Guenon’s views on Vedanta if not Guenon’s overwrought polemics.

Guenon was a Catholic in France and a young seeker who embraced Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy for a time, but later rejected “Theosophism” as a “pseudo-religion.” After his conversion to Sufism and Islam, he immersed himself in religious studies without supervision. He was an autodidact in spiritual studies, much like Bannon who fancies an individual insight into eternal values. Guenon never nurtured an individual cult, thus there is no regulating body like a Vatican of Traditionalism. Rather, a Traditionalist can be a Buddhist, a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, or a Freemason who believes in an underlying eternal tradition expressed through their own. The specific outward tradition masks a hidden Tradition that Guenon tried to unpack in his ponderous writings. Guenon and his elitist devotees see average Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, and Christians as worshipping superficially or only the outer form of the primordial Tradition. L. Ron Hubbard tried to sell this same notion with his cruder version of Tradition as Scientology, which he claimed is the basis of all religion. The cult I was in around 1979, Summit Lighthouse, offered the perennial basis for all religions also.

A Guenon Traditionalist eschews individualism that merely mires one in matter, the body, becoming, and modernism. Much like ancient Gnostics, Traditionalists see great men as infused with a spiritual election—the quirks of behavior matter not. So, Trump in the Bannon view has been chosen by fate or sacred forces and inhabits a spiritual function in the Kali Yuga. This view allowed Newt Gingrich to call Trump “a force of nature,” which is what I heard a smiling Newt say on a news show a few months ago. I knew what he meant—he was not being colloquial. Newt is on the Trump wagon because he believes in this principle of spiritual fate or design, a primordial force wending its way throughout creation and the cosmos. Newt is among the elect, and I say that facetiously, in case you did not catch my intent. This is not a principle of the elite right or the elite left but of both because both feel this force of destiny behind them.

The primordial force is no respecter of persons, so goes the narrative. We find it in Calvinism and in Darwinism. It is in science and in magic. The mystics of Theosophy from Pythagoras to Blavatsky and Evola and Bannon all believe that the primordial force is with them—not in them, as they are “mere” instruments of the divine will. Calling this power “the Force” was no coincidence in Star Wars. How we use it is the question. Are you Darth Vader or his son? Are you Han Solo who has no time for mystic training but finds the Force in a charmed existence and in incredible luck? Knowing the primordial is the key, not whether it comes from the left or the right. Gaining power proves the Force is with you. Trump gained ultimate power politically, or at least the symbol of power.

Symbols like money and fame are very important to Traditionalists who tend to Platonism and the pure and ideal states that can only be approached through symbol and metaphor. Reality on the ground is a mere plaything for science and of no eternal consequence for the Traditionalist. Bannon adopted a sloppy, un-rich appearance to prove he is not mired in materialism. Guenon lived like a common Muslim among Muslims who viewed him as a modest if quirky sage. Few Muslims found anything of value in his writing—Guenon’s devotees are mainly from the Western educated classes of elite seekers.  

Guenon may have dismissed Blavatsky as a pseudo-religionist, but he adopted her view of evolution that turned Darwin on his head. Traditionalists like Theosophists find a medieval version of creation as truer, a view that sees the spiritual devolve into matter, then struggle to free itself from matter through gnosis.        

“Evola ultimately dismisses evolutionism as a science typical of dark-age myth, which derives the higher from the lower and man from animal in total ignorance of Tradition.” (Goodrick-Clarke, 59)

Evola saw himself as an instrument of the Kali Yuga. That means any disruption of the paltry status quo or creating “tension” is good. The old must be wiped clean for the new to evolve. Remember, Drain the Swamp became a slogan in the Trump campaign. Bannon believes that the riff-raff neo-Nazi and comically rude KKK will eventually be absorbed or shrugged off by the new Traditional society. The radical right does serve a purpose. That purpose is to create tension, so neo-Nazi marches that causes riots are good. What we see in the Trump White House up till now is an example of that tension that delights Bannon, no doubt helped along by Trump who Green described as “thrashing about like a loose fire hose” during the campaign (209).     

Evola’s “ideal was the Indo-Aryan tradition, where hierarchy, caste, authority and state ruled supreme over material aspects of life. Invoking the heroic and sacred values of this mythical tradition, Evola advanced a radical doctrine of anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. He scorned the modern world of popular rule and bourgeois values, democracy and socialism, seeing capitalism and communism as twin aspects of the benighted reign of materialism.” (Goodrick-Clarke, 53)

Futurism is not mentioned in Green’s book Devil’s Bargain. Futurism was both an art movement and a political orientation prior to World War 1 in Italy that had a strong influence on the burgeoning Fascist politics that fed into World War 2. As an art form, think Cubism in dynamic indications of movement. Boccioni’s horse paintings are Futurist icons. Inspired by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto that Mussolini found relevant, Futurists believed in the power of technology, the machine, movement, energy (the Force), and a New Age that celebrated revolution. War was a cleansing action that must be embraced. I bring this up because, no matter the manifesto, there are always elements in social discourse that would want to wipe out the other quickly and finally. How many times have we heard angry Americans say blow them all up referring to the radical Muslim menace in the Middle East? Trump has echoed this pathological solution to everything and it appeals to the crude politics of the angry man. The Force will force them out—build a wall, blow them up, and drain the swamp.

“The Futurist Manifesto was read and debated all across Europe, but Marinetti's first 'Futurist' works were not as successful. In April, the opening night of his drama Le Roi bombance (The Feasting King), written in 1905, was interrupted by loud, derisive whistling by the audience... and by Marinetti himself, who thus introduced another element of Futurism, "the desire to be heckled". Marinetti did, however, fight a duel with a critic he considered too harsh.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti

Now we have Trump with a penchant to thrive on heckling, if only up to a point. It adds to his charisma as an outsider with politically incorrect views. Trump like Marinetti drives his opposition crazy, and that craziness is precisely what this Futurist approach to change wants. The hero in this scheme is the Joker in Batman comics.

Green mentioned a passage in Bannon’s rise to power in the 1990s that caught my attention. In a weird way, Bannon crossed my path regarding the Biosphere 2 enterprise. Biosphere 2 is a huge and impressive greenhouse experiment outside of Oracle, AZ inspired by the Synergia group south of Santa Fe, NM and its cult leader, Johnny “Dolphin” Allen (born 1929). I lived in Santa Fe from 1975 through 1992 and was very aware of the doings at Synergia. Allen managed to recruit some very well-educated and wealthy people during his tenure as leader of various phases of his cult following since the 1970s. One of the most significant was Ed Bass Jr. who joined Allen at Synergia Ranch as a twenty-something, hip seeker with millions of dollars to spend. Biosphere 2 was launched in 1991 and that meant four women and four men entered a supposedly sealed system to prepare for living on Mars for two years. John Allen’s inspiration for this came primarily from the 1972 film Silent Running starring Bruce Dern. The architects employed Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome designs that already existed in smaller models at Synergia Ranch.

The Biosphere 2 experiment was a national media sensation in 1991, but behind the superficial glitz was a pending fiasco with poor science foundations and a cult-like atmosphere between John Allen and at least four of the Biospherans. Allen was clandestinely communicating with the group when they were supposed to be fending for themselves between 1991 and 1993. I toured the Biosphere the night before it launched in 1991, but I was down there for other reasons than curiosity. I was hired by a notable family whose adult child was one of the eight about to go in for two years. We attempted a surprise intervention with the Biospheran which allowed me to share some information about mind control and the alleged cult problems for less than an hour. The intervention was a long shot, but the family were very concerned that this Biospheran had been hoodwinked by the clever Allen many years before. Now they were concerned for the person’s safety and life in what appeared to be a doomed project. The family merely wanted to alert their relative that they had his or her back no matter what happened.

The eight made it through for two years but only after an outside air supply and new supplies sustained the struggling crew. This experiment on Mars would have killed everyone within months even with a proper building—the Bucky Fuller dome structure would have exploded immediately in negligible Martian atmosphere. The billionaire Bass family finally convinced their cult child Ed, who had sunk over thirty million dollars into Biosphere 2, to pull out and get new management. The new manager was Steve Bannon, hired in 1993, then rehired in 1994 to divest the project from John Allen’s influence. Bannon did clean house, but not without fighting off a lawsuit by my client’s relative, then a former Biospheran onto other projects in Japan.

One of Johnny Dolphin Allen’s influences was G. I. Gurdjieff and his manipulative Fourth Way teaching techniques. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) like Guenon claimed to represent a perennial philosophy handed to him by a hidden Sufi brotherhood he called the Sarmoun (no such brotherhood existed). Gurdjieff’s teachings influenced a wide range of esoteric seeker elites, perhaps more so than Guenon—Frank Lloyd Wright and enneagram enthusiasts have been among them. Bannon was a good choice to clean up the Biosphere 2 mess for the Bass family—Bannon grasped the strangeness of the problem and could navigate the esoteric arguments behind the Johnny Allen cult that he viewed as a bunch of loons. With Bannon, the Bass case in the 1990s was one of loon verses loon, but Bannon won out. Johnny Dolphin, also an alpha male guru, sunk back into the depths of obscurity after the Biosphere debacle. He has reverted to John Polk Allen. At 88 Allen is yet struggling to salvage the heroic legacy he thought he had.   

Green’s book is timely, but the Trump-Bannon legacy is strained. Trump is a man who thrives on theater and (like any good narcissist) he needs a stage through which he controls his image—like Trump Tower. If Bannon starts making Trump look stupid (duh) and Trump finally realizes it (double duh), Bannon will be cut loose into that same murky sea as the Dolphin, struggling to salvage the heroic legacy he thought he had.

That is Tradition for you.

Steve Bannon, Don Trump, Bob Mercer, Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, Biosphere 2, and the Tradition of loons in the elite and esoteric seeker worlds.

There's always more than meets the eye on top of the pyramid on a dollar bill.

But sometimes an eye is only an eye.