Clearly for you ad hominems come before any factual accusation. Steve is a public figure, but honestly, how would you like it if someone insulted you without giving a decent reason. I mean all the modern ad hominems - racist, homophobe, fascist, etc have to refer to some actual act(s) otherwise they are meaningless and reflect very badly on the person who utters them.
David
Take a breath. I was not engaging in an ad hominem attack. I was passing comment on Bannon's political philosophy. It's my opinion and I stand by it. I could be wrong, of course. Also, I did answer you question. Admittedly, my post was somewhat obscure and not particularly helpful as I didn't take the time to flesh put an important point.
Here goes again.
Steve Bannon has claimed a relatively obscure philosophical orientation, Traditionalism, as a major influence on his thinking. As typified in French thinker René Guénon, Traditionalists see the progression of civilization out of feudalism and into the modern liberal democratic era not as progress but as degeneration. They also view history as charting an inevitable slide toward an apocalyptic end. While Guénon explicitly denounces the restoration of traditional values and structures through political action, Bannon has name checked another, far more controversial, Traditionalist, Julius Evola, a man who called for a return to a feudally structured and strictly hierarchical society. It's worth mentioning that Evola criticised the Nazis for being too democratic. Evola also espoused a number of rather odd and unpleasant racial theories. To be fair, Bannon has explicitly rejected these, but he does share Evola's belief in a resurrection of the traditional through political action. Characterising the 20th century as a fight between Christianity and atheism, Bannon's own version of the apocalypse at the end of our historical era seems to be a major conflagration between the Christian nations and the what he calls the barbarians, namely Islam and command capitalism countries like China. On the other end of this conflict, he sees the re-emergence of a reinvigorated and Christian west.
It's this wanting to restore an allegedly traditional orientation through political action and a revolutionary war, combined with his penchant for economic nationalism, his hope for a remasculinized society and a newly influential and assertive Catholic church that leads me to class Bannon's political philosophy as fascist.
Tell me, if I were to claim Marx and Lenin as influences, express an admiration for the thinking of Chairman Mao, call for a centrally planned economy, and hold to the belief that history will inevitably lead to a revolutionary instituted worker led utopia, would it be fair to call me a communist or at the very least a fellow traveller?
It's true that Bannon is not an exact fit with classical fascism. But this is not unusual. See Japan's
Yukio Mishima as an example. Also, I feel Traditionalism always has a tendency to slide into fascism when it ignores Guénon's injunction against forced change.
So, you see, not an ad hominin. It's my opinion. As I said, I could be wrong, but it's also possible that you don't know enough about Bannon's philosophy to judge.