In 2018, Steve Bannon, lately disemployed by the first Trump administration, attempted to launch the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West in an 800-year-old monastery at Trisulti, south of Rome. The New Right was rising in Europe and America, and Bannon wanted to harness the populist mood across the West. Working with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank, he devised a curriculum for training the young warriors of a New Right international.
It sounds like a parody of The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel of decadence at Davos, or The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse’s 1943 novel of philosophical frottage in a monastery. It turned out more like Mann’s Death in Venice — an old man capsized in a deck chair as the unattainable image of youth flits away from him forever.
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