Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. This is an election year. Will Donald Trump be re-elected? What is going on with the Democrats? And has America gone even more crazy? We'll be discussing all of these things and more, more than once a week, because

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I'm joined today by Benjamin R. Titlebaum, and we're going to be discussing his

book, War for Eternity, the Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Now, Ben,

first of all, congratulations on the book. It's very, very interesting indeed. And I would just

like to start asking, I mean, the hero of this book the more the anti-hero

perhaps is is Steve Bannon and I think what this book does which is very original is address this

idea of traditionalism which probably needs a bit of explaining can you explain to our listeners

what you mean by traditionalism in the way you use it in the book and in the way that it applies

to Steve Bannon. Sure, sure. And thank you for having me with you, Freddie. It's a pleasure.

Traditionalism has a deceptively simple and familiar sounding name, but it is first and foremost a philosophical

and a spiritual school, not a political ideology. It was an attempt once upon a time to look

for commonality among the older religions in the world based on the belief that there used to be

a true, authentic religion that was later lost to humanity as the years went by. But where it comes into play in politics is with a couple

simple ideas, you could say. One is that it rejects the notion of linear time. So it may seem like

a wild idea, or like a simple idea, rather, that what I'm saying right now is now in the past,

irrevocably so. But traditionalists tend to believe in cyclic time.

Instead, they follow Hinduism, which is one of the religions they look to for truth,

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