Steve Bannon, Project 2025, and their Perverse Affirmative Action Project
A recent piece from New York Times columnist David Brooks, “My Unsettling Interview with Steve Bannon,” unsettles me. I realize that after this upcoming presidential election, we may have to endure one of the most perverse affirmative action projects in American history.
From the beginning of the interview, Bannon spoke in his usual combative manner. Brooks asks, “Do you see yourself in the same business that Fox News’s Roger Ailes was in, sort of right-wing journalism?”
Bannon’s response:
“I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt. This is how we motivate people. This show is an activist show. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened.”
Revolt. Soldier. Army.
I know that sometimes people use the term army like the term nation to denote community, as in “Raider Nation” for fans of the Las Vegas Raiders or the “KISS Army,” which refers to the rock band KISS’s dedicated fan base.
But Bannon is serious. He’s not using these terms as a metaphor. Consider the sentiments expressed by Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation:
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.” - Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation President.
These words were said on Steve Bannon’s podcast, The War Room, as reported by the BBC. Roberts was discussing Project 2025, a document describing plans for the new Trump administration. I read the first few pages of the document, which amount to a summary. Some of Project 2025’s proposals seem batshit crazy: jailing people who produce pornography, hiring only conservatives for government jobs, abolishing the Department of Education and the FBI, and deleting words they don’t like, such as “abortion” and “gender” from all government documents. As I was researching this story, I learned that Project 2025 wants to ban same-sex marriage. It’s so unbelievable that Trump has tried, at least publicly, to distance himself from it.
I do believe we as a nation need to take seriously threats of violence from MAGA supporters. Yes, we know of January 6th. But that is the tip of the iceberg. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) have been raising alarms about a rise in domestic terrorism threats. DHS even mandated that states fund domestic violent extremism prevention efforts.
But even if the “revolution” is bloodless, that doesn’t mean it will be painless. Bannon and the boys have something in store for all non-MAGA folks.
On Social Stratification
The term social stratification refers to a phenomenon that anyone can see even if they wish not to admit it: some groups in society, generation after generation, tend to be “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or seen as somehow “better” than others. Groups in society are stratified. The standard analogy used in Intro to Sociology courses is geological stratification, the layering of the earth’s rock and sediment down to its core. This social, as opposed to geologic, stratification doesn’t tell the age of things, but it does tell the status of things.
Princeton sociologist Doug Massey describes it in his book Categorically Unequal:
“Stratification refers to the unequal distribution of people across social categories that are characterized by differential access to scarce resources. The resources may be material, such as income and wealth; they may be symbolic, such as prestige and social standing; or they may be emotional such as love, affection, and, if course, sex.”
Massey’s book, published in 2006, is an essential read for anyone with an academic interest in social stratification. Note that stratification is not only about which groups have the most money. It is also about differences in social status and sexual opportunities.
Meanwhile, Lisa Wade, in an introductory sociology textbook that I only wish I could write entitled Terrible Magnificent Sociology, describes social stratification as:
“…a persistent sorting of social groups into enduring hierarchies…The United States is a socially stratified society. Some kinds of people are persistently advantaged, or well served by our social institutions. Others are disadvantaged, neglected or harmed by them.”
Wade is pointing out how institutions - schools, banks, law enforcement, media, healthcare, and government - assist in reproducing societies where some groups are consistently “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or seen as somehow “better” than others. Maybe some groups have access to better school systems. Maybe politicians cater to them more. Perhaps the media is more likely to treat this group more sympathetically and less stereotypically than other groups. So on, and so forth. In this way, institutions assist in groups reproducing their group position in the next generation.
I used the word social stratification system in that last sentence. Sociologists describe modern societies and how they are stratified in at least two ways. One way is caste. Another is class.
I’ll start with caste. When individuals are “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or seen as somehow “better” because of birth, that system is called a caste-based system. Caste-based systems are societies with nobility and commoners, royalty and peasants, brahmin and untouchable. Think Bridgerton. I don’t follow this series closely, but I know it is very popular. Also, because this fictionalized depiction of early 18th-century England puts black and white on equal footing, the race issue is not salient. Attention is squarely focused on the dating and mating rituals of the people born into “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or “better” strata in society. America has had, until recently, a caste system concerning its people of color. White people were “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or “better.”
The type of stratification system also determines political systems. It may not seem evident in our modern society where money buys politicians, but wealth or prestige and political influence are two distinct phenomena. They do not have to connect, even though they usually do. And so the caste-based system that organized European nations until the 20th century was, by and large, aristocracies.
What is unique about America is that its caste system was embedded in one of the most dynamic class systems the world has ever known. A class-based system gives rewards based on merit. Hard work, education, ingenuity, and so on determine to a large extent if you are upper, middle, working class, or impoverished. That is what gets you to the top of the American stratification system.
One has to earn one’s social standing in a class-based society. Indeed, one of the most insightful arguments regarding class comes from Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, who argues that upper-class families cannot simply pass on their class status to their children. It must be re-earned every generation. As a result, they must invest heavily in their children’s education, and their children choose occupations that are the highest paying to reproduce that class status. In the video below, Markovits discusses his ideas and the book he wrote about it, the Meritocracy Trap, with Brown economist Glenn Loury.
Achieving the American Dream can be understood as gaining entry into the middle strata or above in the American class system. When someone moves up or down a stratification system, we call this social mobility. When that mobility is done in one lifetime, say a person down on their luck and living hand to mouth goes back to school, gets a degree, and acquires a well-paying job, it is called intragenerational mobility (within one generation). I believe this rarely happens. Generally speaking, if one is a working-class adult, one retains that slot in the American class system their entire life. People don’t usually move from bank tellers in their twenties to tech moguls in their forties. We celebrate these stories when they happen (from homeless to Harvard, from prison to professor), and maybe that is why they seem more common than they are.
A more common scenario is intergenerational mobility (across two or more generations). Consider a family of immigrants new to the United States. The parents may work in low-paying service jobs all their lives. However, one or more of their children will attend college, find a well-paying job, and acquire all the trappings of middle-class life.
This is usually how the American Dream has played out for people in this country or who come to this country.
I have experienced intergenerational mobility. Like many other racial minorities, sexual minorities, women, and differentially abled people in this country have benefitted from the Rights Movements in the mid to late 20th century. This came a little too late for my mother, who grew up in a more caste-based system. There were few chances for social mobility for a black woman growing up when she did. Remember, stratification systems are not simply (or primarily) about pure income. So it is possible that during her formative years and early adulthood, say the 1950s to 1970s, some black people were doing better economically than their white peers. I am sure successful black pastors were well compensated and made more than the many white people who worked in the tobacco and textile industries that were so prevalent at that time. But, there was a sense that no matter what, those working-class white people were still “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or “better” than their wealthier black counterparts. I guess this is the wages of whiteness written about by W.E.B. Dubois and David Roediger.
This understanding of social mobility should call into question Bannon and other MAGA thought leader’s understandings of “elites.” For example, Brooks asks Bannon to explain the rise of far-right movements in the West. Bannon’s response was to finger elites as the culprit:
Well, I think it’s very simple: that the ruling elites of the West lost confidence in themselves. The elites have lost their faith in their countries. They’ve lost faith in the Westphalian system, the nation-state. They are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.
In another piece, I will write about the conceptual problems with the notion of “elites.” Like…who are they? How do I know them when I see them? Am I one? But for now, let’s say elites are people in high-status positions in business, government, media, tech, etc. If that is a passable understanding of elites, then…didn’t they earn their positions at the commanding heights of these industries? Go to the “about” page for the website of any Fortune company, and you will see people who have earned credentials or have been successful in some life endeavor. I don’t know about Bannon, who has an agenda and who himself, in this definition, is an “elite.” Still, this understanding should temper some animosity toward the folks shopping at Whole Foods while their hybrid BMWs are charging in the parking lot and their two kids with perfect teeth are off at coding camp. Through hard work, they earned their privileged place in the American class system.
Intergenerational mobility also works in the opposite direction. The children of immigrant families who do well and those born after the Rights Movement who did better than their parents experience upward mobility. Unfortunately, many in the United States are experiencing downward mobility. They are experiencing a decline compared to their parents economically and in terms of social prestige.
This is a good segue into discussing Steve Bannon, Project 2025, and their perverse affirmative action project.
A Perverse Affirmative Action Project
I can describe their project like this:
To arrest the downward intergenerational mobility of MAGA voters in the American class system and create a new caste system with those MAGA voters permanently at the top as a privileged group.
That’s right. The goal is to ensure that one specific group is always “above,” “higher,” “more powerful,” or seen as somehow “better” than other groups. As we know, class-based systems tend to elevate individuals through merit. If MAGA thought leaders want to achieve their goals, they must do it through policy. They must act affirmatively to arrest the downward mobility of the people who support them. Yes, they will attempt something like a massive affirmative action project. Consider this exchange between Brooks and Bannon:
Brooks: “Let’s get back to the big narrative. Do you think immigration is the core issue here? That seems to be one issue that drives populist support everywhere.”
Bannon: “Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking.”
What does Bannon mean here? Whose civilization and whose culture? It is way too lazy to assert that Bannon is referring to “Western European” civilization or “whiteness.” Yes, those might be the normative baseline, in a sense. However, what we are experiencing in the United States is something different: a kind of new ethnicity evolving out of these historical roots that reject many white people and embrace, to an extent, people of color.
I have been trying to make sense of it in this newsletter, but whatever this amalgamation of fundamental Christianity and nationalism and working-class values and militarism and gun culture and patriarchy, that is what Bannon is talking about, and that is what he wants to place at the center of American life. I suspect the “elites” in our meritocracy have not lost much faith in themselves. Why would they? Would you lack confidence if you had successfully navigated the American class system and found yourself and your family near the top?
Indeed, it is the exact opposite. We see it in decisions made. Suppose a Disney executive decides to greenlight a new movie in which Pinocchio is re-imagined as a Korean kid living in Los Angeles, or an investment company decides to consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in addition to financial factors when investing. In that case, that is not an absence of faith but the presence of it. They are living their values when they support efforts to make trans persons less stigmatized in society or when they put up a Black Lives Matter flag. Decisions about diversity training, gender-neutral bathrooms, allowing young people to express their trans identity, teaching the history and consequences of racism, and so on do not suggest a lack of confidence in general. Instead, it means they do not want the same for our nation that Bannon and Project 2025 want.
Since people in class-based systems generally earned their positions in this meritocracy, they feel justified in holding them. Like the Russian communists who (ahem) forcibly removed the last czar and his family, Bannon and company will need to remove elites from their positions of authority forcibly. That is what constitutes the “bloodless revolution” by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts—forcibly removing people from their positions.
You may say I am exaggerating. But think about it this way. Project 2025 wants to abolish the FBI, DHS, and DOE. People work there. You may say this is not precisely forcibly removing people. If one shuts down a business, are they being forcibly removed? I guess not. But that is not the best analogy. Here is an excerpt from a piece written by the BBC about Project 2025:
“Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control - a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”…The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.”
To expedite this process, the Heritage Foundation has built what they call on their website a “Conservative LinkedIn” that “will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.”
If you haven’t noticed, things like this are already happening. What was the takeover of New College of Florida but a perverse affirmative action project for MAGA conservatives? Fire all the people who are not like us, and then put people in who are.
What the hell was wrong with the real LinkedIn? Nothing. It just has Americans who are not MAGA voters on it. Projects of exclusion, like Project 2025, require tools to exclude.
But this is maybe too subtle. I can present more direct evidence. Here is Bannon:
“We have a capitalist economy that has no capitalists, right? It has hypercapitalists or state capitalism. You’ve got to not just reallocate income, you have to reallocate assets. People have to have a stake in this. That’s all they’re asking for.”
Reallocate assets? If I said this, I’d be put on Charlie Kirk’s Professor Watch as a communist. But, in the abstract, Bannon is correct. People need to have a stake in society. Social scientists understand this in an academic sense. They build theories and collect data examining the link between being invested in society and social dysfunction (an example of this is Social Bond Theory). News flash: there is a link! This well-known link underpins many of the diversity efforts in America today.
Do you want more black businesses in an area where, historically, they have been excluded? Reallocate some assets from government coffers (i.e., tax money) that may have gone elsewhere into a program lending black applicants small businesses loans at low interest rates. Do you want to give trans youth, who may have dropped out of school because of being stigmatized, a chance to attend college at higher rates? Reallocate assets at your university - money in your budget, staff hours - to start a program that identifies and prepares those youth to get their GEDs. We all understand this. When we tell ourselves to “join something” or “be a part of things,” we are urging ourselves to invest in society and have a stake in it. This is acting affirmatively.
Unfortunately, the affirmative action project Bannon and others want to undertake is perverse. The Rights Movements of the late 20th century were attempts at inclusion by providing opportunities into the middle class for groups historically barred from it. This MAGA Rights(?) movement is an attempt at exclusion. It is the difference between a federal agency recognizing they hire few women and setting a goal to raise their numbers from 15% to around 35%, and abolishing an agency one thinks is filled with people they don’t like and reconstituting it with people with the same cultural orientation. In the first scenario, individuals from across society are welcome, even as we ensure the historically excluded ones will have a place. In the second, one group is welcome, others are excluded, and those expressing wrongthink will be forcibly removed.
I should provide one more piece of evidence. A stratification system—class or caste—is not simply about economics. It is about the groups at the top setting the cultural norms for a society. At a minimum, they set aspirational norms. You may not want to shop at Whole Foods while your hybrid BMW charges in the parking lot and your two kids with perfect teeth are off at coding camp. But yet and still, if you find yourself doing those things out of necessity (you fell madly in love with an “elite” and adopted some of their behaviors?), you know people will understand you’ve played the stratification game well.
But they also set what is normative - not what you could aspire to, but what you should be doing now. I have written about progressives in positions of authority being oblivious to the fact that everyone does not share their point of view. If we start from the assumption that those progressives earned their position, then in some ways, the decisions they make in those positions are justified. One way of addressing this concern is to adopt a diversity or affirmative action program oriented towards a point of view or culture. For example, I think Conservative Studies programs in colleges and universities would be a good idea. A reallocation of assets in a university from other sources into such a program would expand our understanding of modern conservatism and give opportunities for more conservative scholars to contribute to the scientific community. In other words, it is an attempt to include people who identify as conservative.
Now consider this from the 2025 Project:
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Putting aside the odd use of “woke culture warriors” in what I assume is an official document from that foundation and the logical non-sequitur that even my students could spot (can you?), I can understand these goals as an attempt to slingshot the culture of MAGA voters to the top of the prestige heap: you should be a fundamental Christian with no interest in these things. We are going to unilaterally delete them from American institutions.
It goes on and on. I’ll do one more:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
They are not talking, mind you, about something that is nearly universally condemned, like child sexual abuse images (child pornography). They are also not talking about something that, through careful research, has shown to be harmful to people, like Class A drugs. Nope. It’s just a personal preference grounded in Christianity and old Victorian notions of sexuality being inherently evil. I respect that because I believe in diversity. Moreover, I am sympathetic to these ideas because I grew up in a similar culture.
But if I owned a tech company, believed in free speech, and wanted to provide a space for adults to produce and consume this product, my company would be forcibly taken from me, and I would be imprisoned.
The Loudest Yelps
I have more to say, and I will do so in future essays, but I leave you with these thoughts about Steve Bannon, Project 2025, and their perverse affirmative action project.
It is a sad irony that the people who now want to adopt a perverse, exclusionary form of affirmative action - the most expansive affirmative action project in our history, were the most vocal in their opposition to it when applied in an inclusionary way to other groups in society. This has echoes of Samuel Johnson’s famous quote: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”