Chaos Agent focuses on the strange career of Steve Bannon in order to illuminate the fascist threat arising in the US today. Why is the far right able to mobilize millions? What forces and feelings are at work? Made famous by his leadership of the Trump campaign in 2016 and his subsequent role as a senior advisor to President Trump, Steve Bannon has continued to hold a weirdly persistent appeal across multiple media platforms and within the electoral arena years after Trump fired him. Drawing from his experience working at the crumbling heart of US power--on Wall Street, in Hollywood, in Washington, and in the digital surveillance economy--Bannon's long and unlikely career is a window into how hard-right nationalism has bubbled to the surface and come to thrive in American political life.

Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Sensationalism and American Modernity and Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy, coauthor with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, and coeditor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest. Her most recent book, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and Neoliberal Greed, was published in the book series she co-edits at University of California Press, "American Studies Now." She was president of the American Studies Association during 2014-2015.