The Trump-era has been a boon to people inclined to bizarre or conspiratorial thinking. The QAnon online subculture—a group insisting that, any day now, Donald Trump’s secret plan to expose and imprison the “establishment” villains running satanic pedophile rings will come to fruition—continues to attract a shocking number of adherents. Trump’s 2016 victory also led to some silly conspiracy theories from his opponents. Some critics still claim that Putin is controlling Trump and his allies like marionettes. The Trump era has also created a generation of numerology enthusiasts on the left, people looking for Trump tweets including the numbers 14 or 88, convinced the president is sending secret codes to hidden legions of neo-Nazis. Most of the recent conspiracy theories across the political spectrum can be dismissed as obvious nonsense. That does not mean, however, that world politics lacks strange characters pursuing secret agendas.
In his new book, War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers, Benjamin Teitelbaum makes the case that (now-indicted) former White House strategist Steve Bannon, along with other right-wing figures of varying importance, embrace a peculiar view of the world, a view that may have political consequences. Rather than a generic conservative traditionalist, Bannon, to at least some degree, is a Traditionalist (always capitalized). Traditionalism in this form is a radical philosophical perspective that completely rejects modernity. It also rejects the notion of historical progress, thinking instead in terms of historical cycles. Traditionalists further argue that we are currently living through a dark age—the Kali Yuga—which must eventually give way to a new golden age. Until that point, however, human beings will continue to live in a depraved and degraded state, focused solely on the material world, cut off from true spirituality.
Read Full Article »