The Bannon Doctrine: Network Insurrectionism and Democratic Backsliding

This chapter unpacks insurrectionist practices driving democratic backsliding and authoritarian reversion typically distributed by grassroots networks and backed by the political leadership. These practices advance Steve Bannon’s mission of revolting against the compromised political class by leveraging the highly centralized and far-reaching audiences engineered by social media platforms, which provide the channels to distribute insurrectionist frames rallying grassroots activists and coordinating elite rhetoric toward an envisioned revolution. We discuss the implementation of this insurrectionist playbook in the 2020 United States and the 2022 Brazilian elections, a set of presidential campaigns marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud that culminated with insurrectionist attacks against federal government buildings. We review the influence of Bannon’s doctrine on the social media posts of Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump and the relative alignment of their campaigns with Bannon’s call for action. The article concludes with a discussion of the remarkable adaptability of this broad ideological program that spans the ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Brazil above everything, God above everyone’ projects.