Steve Bannon and Lee Atwater

 It has been quite a week for everyone's least favorite political jackass, Steve-O.  He was convicted of criminal contempt, and much of the political world is transfixed by the audio recording in which Bannon admitted, in advance of election day, what Trump would do and why.  Bannon knew that the first votes to be counted would favor Trump because Republicans would vote in person, but the absentee/mail-in ballots would be reported later.  So, the numbers would shift over the course of the night, and an early Trump advantage would not be stable.

What would this mean?  Trump would declare victory early as a matter of strategy, and if the numbers shifted to Biden later, Trump would "do some crazy shit," not because of fraud, but because Trump would not, "go out easy."  All with full knowledge that the process of watching the numbers on election night would be one in which the numbers would start with a Trump advantage and shift to Biden as absentee ballots were counted.

Short-version:  Trump's actions weren't just predicted by leftists and other assorted Trump detractors.  They were predicted, in advance, by Bannon.  On tape.  Not because of fraud, but because Trump would not "go out easy," and instead, he would "do some crazy shit."  Bannon did not say word-fucking-one about Italian satellites or bamboo or whatever other crazy shit Rudy and Sidney pulled out of the craziest corners of the internet.  Bannon, whatever else we may say about him, knew exactly what he was doing.

Basically, if anyone ever starts talking about voter fraud, or whatever batshit conspiracy theory Trump and his people cook up next, all you should really have to do is play that recording and say, "you've been duped."  Would it work?  Obviously not, or that person wouldn't have bought into a batshit conspiracy theory in the first place, but... seriously.

And this has me thinking about Lee Atwater.  Atwater was a longtime advisor to Republicans, most notably Ronald Reagan (Kronos to Trump's Zeus in the Republican-pagan polytheistic pantheon, and yes, you should be disturbed by the image of Trump turning into a swan before committing a bunch of rapes, but when you're the king of Olympus, they let you do that), and at one point, he was recorded speaking just a bit too freely about what has euphemistically been called, "the Southern strategy."

Yeah.  Basically, Atwater was admitting that racial dogwhistles are real.  Social norms first prohibited racial slurs, then moved away from issues like bussing, but "abstract" issues still allowed Atwater to talk about politics in ways that got people to think about race in kind of a backburner manner, because the ideas were there, in the background.  Yes, in 1980, Reagan was talking about race, even when he claimed he wasn't.

Catch the advisor on tape admitting the truth of the strategy.  Funny, that.

This little clip of Lee Atwater is a minor piece of history, known to a few political obsessives, but of course, Atwater wasn't embroiled in an insurrection plot, never required a presidential pardon, and so forth.  And for the ugliness of the statement, it wasn't a plan to overthrow democracy.  It was just repulsive.

Leave it to Steve Bannon to make Lee Atwater look like a mensch.

Yet the criminality surrounding January 6 brings Bannon, and his recording to a higher level of attention and public scrutiny.  The consequence?

Well, not much.  What it should do is make clear to everyone, Trumpists included, that everything Trump said about 2020 and January 6 was bullshit.  In many ways, it is the most damning recording we have, because it is one of Trump's most loyal flunkies admitting the whole plot, in advance.

But let's not delude ourselves.  If you are going to criticize self-delusion, don't practice self-delusion.

Instead, let us note the importance of having strategists who see through the bullshit.  As I regularly note, it is not appropriate to say that Donald Trump "knows" or "believes" anything, because either word denotes some statement about a connection between what is in his head, and how he perceives the relationship between that and objective reality, and he's so fucked in the head that he doesn't accept objective reality.  Yes, I bash the left for their postmodernism-influenced ideology, but Donald Trump, himself, is the ultimate postmodernist.  Not because he read Foucault or Derrida, but because he is a narcissistic moron, so sociopathic that he cannot conceive a world outside his own head.  That's different.

But the strategists?  Bannon, Atwater, anyone in that kind of a position?  They may be willing to lie their asses off, or manipulate people on the basis of their most heinous impulses, but they sort of need to know, yes, know what they are doing.  They cannot delude themselves in the same way that Trump can.  Did Reagan know what he was doing?  With respect to race, that's a harder question than with Trump, who threw out the dogwhistle and used a bullhorn, and Trump had his own bizarre "cognitive" process throughout the 2020 election based on his psychological inability to face his own defeat, but that's a result of cognitive deficiencies.

Deficiencies that the strategists do not, and cannot have.

This, of course, brings up an interesting question.  Do strategists really matter?  Probably not that much.  We can predict presidential elections with a few basic variables.  The state of the economy, the two-term penalty, and maybe a couple others if I feel like being really generous, but basically, they don't really matter in the sense of swinging votes.

So would it matter if the strategists were as delusional and fuckwitted as Trump?

Well... um... uh...

They might have a harder time getting hired.  Then again, at this point, Trump will only hire the craziest, most slobbering, slavering sycophants, which selects against intelligence, so where does that leave Bannon?

Prison!  Ha!

Chet Atkins, "I Know That You Know," from Mister Guitar.