War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Powerbrokers
by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
View on GoodreadsEthnomusicologist-turned-political-anthropologist Benjamin Teitelbaum's strange and well-sourced book on Steve Bannon's relationship to the global "Traditionalist" intellectual movement — Aleksandr Dugin (Russia), Olavo de Carvalho (Brazil), and others — that animates significant parts of the international far right.
Core ideas
- Traditionalism — the early-20th-century esoteric philosophy of René Guénon and Julius Evola — is a real intellectual tradition that took Bannon, Dugin, and Bolsonaro-circle figures seriously, and the policy outputs make more sense with the framework than without it.
- The international coordination is real but episodic — Bannon's "movement" is more a network of intellectually sympathetic figures than an operational alliance, but the network itself is documentable.
- The book reads as ethnography, not polemic — Teitelbaum interviewed his subjects extensively and represents their self-understandings before critiquing them, which is part of why the portrait holds up.
Published2020
Pages1
ISBN9781094149752
ReadOct 2024
