Bannon: The Sociopath of the Right

I found an excellently written article that gave a lot of information without attempting to push an opinion on readers.  This article is "What Bannon Really Wants" published by Quartz and written by Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad.

The article addresses what Steve Bannon, who is the Assistant to the President and Chief Strategist, worldview is and how it influences and guides Trump's administration.

As far as the article is concerned, there are a few curious points.  First, the authors point out that Bannon believes in the "great civilizational showdown" between Islamic Mideast and the Christian West.  What Bannon fails to realize is that Islam is not a unified or centralized force, any more than modern Protestant Christianity.

Not recognizing the true enemy, which is fundamentalist Islam, is a severe mistake that will have far-reaching -- both in time and space -- consequences that will be as severe as Obama's misstep of not recognizing this subset of Islam as the threat.  There are plenty of Islamic sects who do not hold the authority of the Koran as absolute and thus are more secular as a result.  Bannon's error of labeling all of Islam as the enemy is equally as mistaken as Obama's error of labeling none of Islam as the enemy.  Misconstruing this as a grand struggle between civilizations, while sensational, is also wrong.  The fight with Islam is jihadi Islam versus the world (moderate Muslims included).  From the jihadi Islamist perspective anyone who does not believe in their strict interpretation of the Koran and Islam is a legitimate target and should be killed or enslaved.

Where Bannon's worldview takes a wrong turn is in his view of utilitarianism as the ultimate form for moral authority.  This is where Bannon departs from true Christianity and truly Judeo-Christian values.  This basically establishes Bannon, and by extension Trump, as an authoritarian who seeks to use his power to enforce a specific view of the world, rather than enforcing the minimum necessary law for society to exist.  The very fact that he actually broad-banned people from specific nations shows that he is not interested in a free or individualistic society, merely his vision of a free society.

Bannon's idea that society disintigrates without Christianity or Judeo-Christian values is not entirely wrong, but also not correct.  When you remove Biblical Judeo-Christian values from society, you get authoritarianism.  Might makes right is all that is left when you remove the Christian framework from beneath society, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Bannon and Trump have no desire to rule the nation with Biblical Christian values.  They are strongmen who want to impose their version of right on everyone else, and are thus as criminal as Obama, except on the other end of the spectrum of sociopaths.