“We want the social revolution in order to bring about the national revolution,” proclaimed Georg Strasser, an early Nazi, to the German Reichstag in 1922, “We National Socialists want the economic revolution involving the nationalization of the economy.” In circumstances that are not yet entirely, clear, Strasser was killed in his prison cell twelve years later, during the “Night of the Long Knives.” This was an operation orchestrated by Hitler, and which cemented his role as a dictator. Its purpose was to get rid, through murder, of his opponents. Most of these belonged to the “brown shirts” or SA, the paramilitary unit that had brought Hitler to power. Now that he was at the helm of the State, he needed to distance himself from the anti-capitalist rhetoric that he once himself espoused, and thus from the most anti-capitalist among his radical supporters. “National socialism” now became socialist only in name. The move made Hitler more than acceptable to the German political and economic mainstream. The army declared its loyalty. The judicial system justified the murders unambiguously. The industrial-military-financial complex was reassured that it had nothing to fear, maintaining and indeed increasing its power at the minimal cost of its Jewish members.
Since the beginning of the Trump era, comparisons to pre-Nazi and early Nazi Germany have been popping up instinctively. The inevitable parallel between Trump’s Islamophobic and other racism and prewar German antisemitism was widely taken up by journalists, scholars, and the public.
The Trump-Bannon feud may suggest a new comparison: Trump is to Bannon as Hitler was to Strasser and the SA. The publication of Michael Wolff’s ascerbic book, Fire and Fury, heavily based on interviews with Bannon, has given the Trump-Bannon split an irreversible finality. But all the celebrity-talk style discussion of the affair misses the very substantial fact that their conflict is political. Trump just emerged triumphant from Congress passing, with his support and blessing, a tax reform bill that by most accounts constituted a gift to the rich. Bannon had advocated a 40% tax on the richest, to pay for tax breaks for the middle class. As Strasser was Hitler’s “socialist,” so was Bannon Trump’s.
Like all comparisons between Trump and the Nazis, this one is only partly valid at best, and not only because Trump is not Hitler and no one was killed. It’s also that Bannon is not Strasser. For as Trump was indeed moving to become more respectable by distancing himself from Bannon on his right, Bannon (unlike the “left-wing” Nazis) was himself trying to become more acceptable to the mainstream. For example, in a pattern followed by Trump as well as some European leaders moving from the right to the “center,” Bannon, too, has lately espoused anti-anti-Semitism and beats his chest in support of Israel.
This may pay off some day, should Trump’s personal craziness and his coziness with Wall Street finally lose him his voters. Then Bannon can step forward as Trump’s serious alter ego who will not betray Trump’s original working and lower middle class base. Either that, or he has sentenced himself to oblivion by falling into the gap between the president and the even more radical Right.
How do we know that Bannon has been banned for good from the right wing of the Right? Frank anti-Semitism has now become the line dividing the right, between the extreme become mainstream and the recalcitrant ultras. And the latter have already declared that Bannon was in cahoots with the Jews
The Wellington Review 