The War for America's Soul Read online

  In an interview with Lou Dobb’s of the FOX Business Network, after leaving the White House, Bannon put the suffering of those who built America into strategic context, when he said:

  [H]e’s president of the United States because of the rejection of working-class people, middle-class people, about managed decline of our country at the hands of people like Hillary Clinton. The Clinton Global Initiative, the whole Clinton apparatus, these globalists and elitists were very comfortable with the managed decline, particularly vis-à-vis the rise of China.

  And Donald Trump confronted them, particularly in the upper Midwest. This is the reason why he won states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. People understand, like J. D. Vance, the great sociologist who wrote the book Hillbilly Elegy, the factories went to China, the jobs went to China, and the opioids came in.8

  And then again within a long interview with Charlie Rose, Bannon unpacked how all of the above was now transmogrified into a platform of “economic nationalism,” the philosophy that undergirds the Make America Great Again mantra that elevated a populist New York billionaire with no political experience to the White House. While Trump’s economic nationalism was at odds with the liberal bipartisan consensus in Washington, it is well-rooted in American history:

  America is built on our citizens. Look at the nineteenth century, what we called the American system, from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, a financial system that lends to manufacturers, and the control of our borders. Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system, we’re going back to that. We look after our own, we look after our citizens, we look after our manufacturing base, and guess what? This country’s gonna be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been. And it’s not—this is not astrophysics. And by the way, that’s for every nationality, every race, every religion, every sexual preference. As long as you’re a citizen of our country, as long as you’re an American citizen, you’re part of this populist, economic nationalist movement.9

  It was this “American Way” which made the prosperity that J. D. Vance’s clan had participated in and profited from possible, that had made us the most powerful and the freest nation in world history. And it was this way of life that the radical Left has systematically dismantled in recent generations with the acquiescence of the political establishment.

  And finally in a public debate with one of the pillars of that establishment, David Frum, Steve explained how Donald Trump was in fact the nation’s reaction to this “managed decline” piloted by the elite, the antidote to a philosophy of self-loathing which saw America as the problem and not as the greatest experiment in human self-governance:

  If you’ve owned assets, intellectual property, stocks, real estate, a hedge fund, name it, in the last ten years, you had the greatest run in history. For everybody else, a disaster. Fifty percent of American families can’t put their hands on $400 of cash. It wasn’t Donald Trump, it wasn’t the populists [that caused that]. The populist movement, the nationalist movement, it’s not a cause of that, it’s a product of that. Donald Trump’s presidency is not a cause of that, it’s a product of that.10

  This is the macro context into which Donald Trump stepped as the presidential candidate the establishment deemed laughable. But to the tens of millions of Americans who had been forgotten—who had been thrown to the wind by a political class that spent decades making decisions that systematically undermined the culture of working- and middle-class Americans and exported their livelihoods overseas—Trump was the one last hope. That group included J. D. Vance, and this is where we return to his story.

  In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance tells how—needing money and desiring a sense of independence—he ended up working as a cashier at the local grocery store. It was the perfect perch from which the bright young teenager could observe and analyze the changes in his community, how a once proud people often became welfare scammers, gaming the system instead of doing an honest day’s work. He tells of people who would buy soda in bulk with their government food stamps, sell the bottles for cash on the street corner, and then use the money to buy cigarettes and alcohol. He mentions welfare recipients who spent their days talking on their new cell phones (which Vance himself couldn’t afford) and his drug addicted neighbor who ate better on food stamps than Vance and his sister did on his pay check. The government, in short, subsidized dependency, rewarded bad behavior, and effectively discouraged working at a low wage job. (This was why the Obama administration used to brag about its expanding food stamp rolls.)11

  From his autobiography, it is clear that this is the moment when a teenage hillbilly had an epiphany and began to understand that his grandparents’ devotion to Democrat politics and “the party of the working man” wasn’t paying the dividends promised for so long to the American working class and middle class. Taxing the working man and woman to help those who needed help wasn’t meant to provide booze and drugs to the unemployed; it wasn’t meant to subsidize drug addicts like Vance’s neighbor Patti, who one day called her landlord to tell him to fix her leaky roof. On his arrival, what did the landlord find? Patti half naked and passed out on prescription painkillers as water dripped through the ceiling from the bath she had left running upstairs. This economic, cultural, and social decline was the hellish and transformative journey that too many Americans made as the world around them changed in ways that they had no control over, as the sheltered elite which Bannon described created the conditions that not even the hardened culture of the hillbilly clan could overcome. In one passage, Vance summarizes it so well:

  When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such a large population with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.12

  These are the people that Hillary Clinton so cynically called the “basket of deplorables” during the election campaign, a move that she must regret to this day, given that these communities became the key to Donald Trump’s victory, the name “Deplorable” eventually being used as a moniker of pride by the future president’s staunchest supporters. It would be millions of Americans like the author of Hillbilly Elegy who would see a ray of hope in the candidacy of Donald Trump.

  America’s promise of economic opportunity had been broken. Who better to restore it than a patriotic, populist businessman who spoke the language of working people and understood their problems? The policymaking class, which was meant to consist of “citizen politicians” in the spirit of our Founding Fathers, had devolved into a “swamp” of professional politicians, many of whom spent decades in office, inexplicably ending up as multi-millionaires on a government wage, while dismissing the “deplorables” as losers within the liberal economic system that both parties promoted.

  Let us not forget the truly historic nature of what happened on November 8, 2016. All forty-four of America’s previous presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama, had been established politicians or senior military officers before becoming commander in chief. Every single one had been either a governor, a senator, a congressman, or a general. Not Donald Trump.

  How did this happen? How did a brusque real-estate magnate from Queens who had a reality TV show become our forty-fifth president? The election of Donald Trump was only possible because of a bipartisan betrayal of middle America. The radical Left set the agenda, the Democrat party promoted it, and the Republican party largely accepted it immediately or in due course. Donald Trump was the sole alternative to managed American decline that rewarded the establishment at the expense of working- and middle-class American citizens. How did the Left plan to subvert America, and who were the main perpetr
ators? Read on, dear friend, read on.

  CHAPTER THREETHE PLOTTERS—AND THEIR PLAN—TO DESTROY AMERICA

  On a crisp, clear November night in Berlin thirty years ago, we won the Cold War. Or did we?

  That war had begun forty-one years earlier in the same city when America’s World War II ally, the Soviet Union, decided to blockade Allied access to the sectors of Berlin that were under Western control after 1945. Stalin had control of all of East Germany, but of only one of the four sectors into which the former Reich capital had been divided after the collapse of Hitler’s regime. Stalin wanted it all, and because Berlin was deep within East Germany, he assumed that using his Red Army to isolate the Western sectors held by France, Britain, and the United States would be easy. On April 1, 1948, Soviet troops blocked the roads in occupied Berlin and barred all civilian and military traffic that wasn’t authorized by Moscow.

  Stalin’s plan eventually backfired as the Allies refused to relinquish the innocent people in their sectors to Stalin’s Communist forces and instead initiated the greatest airlift resupply in history. To break the Berlin Blockade, which lasted from June 1948 until May 1949, when Stalin reopened the land routes, the Allies flew 2,326,406 tons into an effectively besieged West Berlin,1 landing a plane every thirty seconds.2 Stalin’s failed aggression against West Berlin was the tangible start of the Cold War.

  For the next forty-one years the Communist East was pitted against the Capitalist West in an arms race, as well as dozens of local wars and proxy conflicts in which Soviet-aligned forces fought America-aligned forces. The competition was fierce and more than once almost precipitated disaster, most obviously in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The root cause of all this—the ideological incompatibility of communism with the free societies of the West—could have only one of four outcomes: an endless Cold War that turned occasionally hot on the global periphery; a world war where both sides abstained from resorting to nuclear weapons, and one side militarily defeated the other; an armed conflict in which nuclear missiles were used and neither side could be said to have won; or the scenario which came to pass: that the inhuman, totalitarian Communist system founded on the ideas of Karl Marx collapsed in on itself. The enslaved people of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc finally tore down the walls of tyranny brick by brick—or in the case of Berlin, concrete slab by concrete slab on November 9, 1989.

  Just a year and a half earlier, President Ronald Reagan had stood at the Berlin Wall, the most powerful symbol of a world divided, separated by those who had freedom and those who lived in Communist slave states, and demanded of the Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall!”3 Gorbachev never tore down the Berlin Wall, but those who had been captive behind it for decades were inspired and their morale strengthened by Reagan’s words, and soon enough their time would come.

  The most liberal of Soviet satellite regimes, the Communist government of Hungary would lead the way. Seeing the writing on the wall, finally acknowledging the truth that communism was a political and economic failure that could not be maintained, the government in Budapest took the shocking step of opening Hungary’s border with Austria, allowing Hungarians to travel to freedom and the West. In May 1989, the Communist government ordered border guards to remove sections of barbed wire along the border. In June, the foreign ministers of Communist Hungary and the free Republic of Austria together ceremonially cut the barbed wire that was part of the “Iron Curtain.”

  East Germany was—save perhaps Albania and Romania—the most oppressive of the Communist Warsaw Pact nations. Positioned as it was next door to the free Federal Republic of West Germany, which had become an incredibly successful country and an economic powerhouse, the East German regime greatly feared for the future of its Communist “paradise” with such a seductive—and free—alternative Germany just across the border. In fact, that is why the Communists had originally built the Berlin Wall in 1961—to divide the city and prevent East Germans from escaping to freedom.

  It was this geographic reality that helped in part to make East Germany so repressive, more authoritarian than other Warsaw Pact Communist satrapies like Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary, a true police state held together by a vicious network of the STASI, East Germany’s own version of the KGB.

  The hardline East German government was shocked when Hungary opened its border to Austria because, while East German citizens weren’t free to travel to the West, they could vacation in other Communist countries, Hungary included, and that meant they could now escape to the free world. The Hungarian government announced that it would do nothing to stop them. The Iron Curtain was rent. And so it was that on September 10, 1989, thirty-three years and three days after the Hungarian Revolution that had seen my father liberated from a Communist prison and escape to the West, the Cold War that had threatened the survival of the human race began its end. Twenty-eight years after building the Berlin Wall to keep its citizens trapped inside East Germany, the acolytes of Karl Marx had lost control. If people wanted to escape via Hungary, they could, and they did, crossing into Austria, and then into West Germany to be reunited with family members they might not have seen in three decades or more. Within two months, the Communist system had effectively collapsed, and on that crisp November night the Berlin Wall came down.

  The decrepit nature of Communism became clear for all to see. Even those who had fared well by being members of the party elite—who never had to worry about food rationing or the dreaded “2 A.M. knock” on the door if they fell out of favor with the state security apparatus—knew that they could no longer resist popular pressure; their Communist governments and economies were no longer feasible. With the legitimacy of Karl Marx’s ideas demonstrably laughable, economies that were bleeding out, and a West that was more powerful and wealthy than any Leninist pamphlet could ever admit, the usual reliance on brute force was impracticable. By the winter of 1989, the ability to use tanks to suppress the call for freedom—as had been done in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968—or the imposition of martial law, as had been the last desperate move of an ailing regime in Poland in 1981, was simply out of the question, because too many of the people commanding and manning the tanks and the guns had had enough.

  And so it was, that after a comical late-night press conference by a misinformed party official who said the East German regime would be changing its laws on citizens who wanted to visit the West, the imprisoned people of East Berlin took to the streets with hand tools and the will to change history. That night, with chisels, hammers, and picks, they went at the wall that had become a symbol of all that is evil about communism. They dismantled and climbed over it to freedom—crossing over to West Berlin. At least one hundred forty fellow Germans had been killed or died at the Berlin Wall over the previous twenty-eight years of Communist oppression.4 Now the people of East Germany were free.

  I was eighteen as I watched world history change before my eyes that night. Sitting in our home in West London, the child of parents who had crossed from East to West and almost been killed as they did so, with a father who had been tortured and imprisoned by a system that he thought would be around long after he died, I watched the incredible images on the news bulletin that dominated all channels that night. The images were unforgettable: triumphant East Germans, released from their captivity, smiling at shocked yet impassive border-guards, climbing a wall that had cost so many lives, with champagne bottles in their hands, crying, smiling, singing as they were met by friends, relatives, and joyous strangers on the other side.

  It was a euphoric time. It was a historic time. And it was part of a series of events that changed my life and my parents’ lives forever. In its dying days, the Communist regime in Hungary reached out to my father in London—not to torment him, but to try to make amends. They reinstated his Hungarian citizenship and that of my mother, and they expunged the death sentence and warrant on his head for having escaped from political prison during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. We
would eventually all return to visit the land of their birth, where they were reunited with old friends, family members, and former brothers-in-arms. And since I had served in a NATO military, the British Territorial Army, and spoke fluent Hungarian, I would end up with a job offer to work for the first freely elected, post-Communist Conservative government as an official in the Hungarian Ministry of Defense. Soon after that, my parents moved back to Hungary too. (For more details of the amazing journey I was blessed to undertake as a result of the above historic events, see my two previous books, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War and Why We Fight: Defeating America’s Enemies with No Apologies.)

  My parents have since passed away, but they did so back in the country of their birth, laid to rest in the country that they thought they would be exiled from for the rest of their lives. I spent fifteen years in a free, post-Communist Hungary doing my small part to help get the nation of my ancestors back into the community of free nations that comprise Judeo-Christian civilization. You can understand why I, among many other scholars, was convinced that we, the West, had slain the dragon that was communism, killed the ideology of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Scholars as revered as Francis Fukuyama even wrote successful books on how all evil ideologies had been vanquished by the West, and how the future belonged to market democracies. Oh how wrong we all were.

  Yes, America and her allies may have defeated the deadly, totalitarian regimes of national socialism and fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War, but neither ideology is dead. In fact, communism is very, very much alive today. And I am not referring to China, North Korea, or Cuba. Yes, they are all Communist regimes, which have survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. What I am talking about is the Communist and socialist threat inside America, a threat that has internalized key elements of fascism to boot. We may have won the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its slave satellites, but thirty years later, the internal threat from those who wish to dismantle our nation from the inside is greater than it has been since the Civil War.