The Atlantic: The Rise and Fall of Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage

It may have cost Farage his political raison d’être, too. A survey by YouGov in June found that the popularity of vocal Brexiteers like Farage has plummeted in the year since the referendum, with 78 percent of respondents saying they dislike or really dislike Farage (58 and 83 percent of those surveyed said the same of Conservative Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, respectively). Bannon, meanwhile, has fared no better. A YouGov/HuffPost survey found that only 13 percent of Trump voters still regard Bannon favorably after his public spat with the president this month, with approximately two-thirds of the president’s supporters turning on him.

For all the ideological similarities between Bannon and Farage, there are also important differences. For one thing, they didn’t find their start in the same way. Farage, despite his own railing against the British establishment, has spent much of his life in politics; Bannon, conversely, is more of a political novice, having spent the majority of his career working in finance and Hollywood. And while both share similar views on nationalism and immigration, only Bannon has succeeded in propelling those views to the U.S.’s highest office; Brexit, meanwhile, has become the responsibility of the U.K.’s ruling Conservative party, not Farage or UKIP.

It’s their ideological similarities, however, that could spell trouble for both of them. “They have an exaggerated sense of how many people actually bought into their core agenda,” Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester and a research investigator at the independent think tank U.K. in a Changing Europe, told me. He noted that while both men were able to successfully leverage a contentious wedge issue—nationalism—to unite different groups among their respective electorates and catapult themselves to the top, they didn’t necessarily earn enough widespread support to stay there. “Ultimately their influence does have some relationship to their electoral power. Farage got himself on the agenda because he was pulling votes from the Conservatives; Bannon catapulted Trump to the top through a series of upset primary wins. So the same mechanism that put them up can pull them down—and is already pulling them down, it seems.”

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openDemocracy: Iran’s protesters are secularizing the 1979 revolution

They are not only determined to overthrow the dictatorial religious state, but are saying that they want "independence and freedom" in a new-model Iranian Republic without ‘Islamism’. They are loyal to the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution, but are now demanding a secular version of it.

Furthermore, the new constitution being introduced by secular and Islamic opposition separates state from religion and does not include any official religion. As Abolhassan Banisadr has repeatedly argued, the religion that was usurped by the state should return to its real place, the hearts of believers. [...]

The ensuing struggle between dictatorial and democratic fronts within the country’s leadership lasted for more than two years. The last nail in the coffin was when the newly elected president was overthrown in a coup in June 1981 after refusing to stay silent about the destruction of freedoms. [...]

Rouhani then failed to fulfil his own promises. The Iran-US nuclear deal failed to deliver a golden goose. Worse yet, against his promises, his budget prioritized the clergy, religious institutions and Revolutionary Guards at the expense of ordinary people who were suffering from chronic unemployment and poverty as well as insecure jobs. This coincided with an increasingly acrimonious war within the regime and the ineptitude of the supreme leader to put an end to it. 

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Political Critique: Surfing the wave. How conservative populists hijack politics

Not every group mentioned shares the same agenda, but similarities exist that outline a common ideology. These Conservative populists (Conpops) resemble classical conservatives in their belief that Society’s strength comes from its traditions which must be preserved. Conpops add to this a belief that establishment politicians have sold out to globalization and its actions the source of all the country’s ills. The solution is a return to traditionalism, accomplished by ethnic unity, restrictive immigration, strict gender and religious hierarchies, and a reclamation of national sovereignty. These ideas and Conpops’ aversion to liberal democratic norms places them somewhere between center-right parties and far-right Fascists. [...]

Conpopism is popular because it offers an authentic vision for the future. Voters have so little trust in politicians that someone who has firmly held beliefs simply stands out. But either you’re sincere or you’re not and surfers by definition aren’t.  They can’t simply jump on hoping to hijack a movement. Voters will either reject them outright or punish them once they’ve shown their true colors. Prior to Brexit, Boris Johnson was known as a slightly left-of-Conservatism politician who was a Conservative Party loyalist. He, however, saw an opportunity for self-promotion and took a prominent role in the pro-Brexit campaign. Since the Brexit Referendum, however, the public has turned and Johnson’s approval ratings have sunk like a lead weight thrown from Big Ben. The movement he hoped to appropriate has thrown him out as an establishment interloper and he has been left without a leg to stand on. [...]

They haven’t. Instead, mainstream parties have attempted to cling to power by either surfing or offering the same stale politics. In the Dutch 2017 General Election, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) were only narrowly defeated by Prime Minister Mark Rutte. But Rutte pivoted hard during the election, even taking out enormous newspaper ads, calling for immigrants who “don’t respect Dutch customs” to leave the country. Some infractions? Homophobia, Sexism, and calling Dutch people racist. By winning using a strategy that blames immigrants for intangible ills in society, Rutte placed himself in a horrible bind. Either he follows through, forcing immigrants to leavE the Netherlands and the Dutch economy implodes (Immigrants are 11% of the population) or Rutte completely backtracks and loses all credibility. Meanwhile Wilders’s ideas have been completely normalized and his party has secured itself as the second largest in the country. Other European parties should take a long look at the Netherlands before adopting similar rhetoric.

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The Atlantic: The Resurgent Threat of White-Supremacist Violence

And the threat they pose is not trivial. According to the latest data from Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, white supremacists were responsible for more than half of the 34 fatalities linked to domestic extremists of all stripes last year, claiming 18 lives in 2017.

That represented a reversion to the long-term trend; right-wing violence had accounted for the largest share of domestic-extremist related killings every year from 1995 until the Pulse nightclub shootings in 2016. Global totals may tell a very different story, but in the United States far-right extremist murders far exceed those carried out by Islamic extremists over the last decade: 71 percent of all murders were carried out by right-wing extremists, and 26 percent can be linked to Islamic extremists. [...]

Modern white-supremacist ideology is founded on the belief that white people are on the verge of extinction, thanks to a “rising tide” of non-white populations (supposedly controlled by a Jewish conspiracy). As a result, some white supremacists and other racists justify their actions as attempts to “save” their race. When they say the white race is being threatened with “genocide” or “extinction,” it becomes easier for them to justify or rationalize violence in the name of “preserving” the race.

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The Guardian: May’s Brexit pledges have turned to ashes. Was she deluded or dishonest?

Exactly one year ago, the prime minister stood in Lancaster House and gave a speech setting out her Brexit plan. Following an embarrassing series of flip-flops, it now reads like a long list of broken promises and empty threats. [...]

The prime minister said she wanted the greatest possible access to the single market without being a member of it, her version of Boris Johnson’s cake-and-eat-it approach. She also knew this was going to be tricky to get. That is why she threatened to turn the UK into a Singapore-style tax haven while hinting that we would abandon cooperation with the EU on fighting terrorism if she didn’t get her way. [...]

The same goes for her “no deal … is better than a bad deal” mantra, which was given prime billing in the Lancaster House speech, and her promise that “the days of Britain making vast contributions to the European Union every year will end”. As it is, May has ended up promising £39bn to the EU to settle our past bills, and abandoned her “no-deal” bravado. [...]

We are told that she is preparing another big speech next month setting our her vision for our future relationship with the EU. If Lancaster House is anything to go by, we should expect the same combination of delusion and dishonesty – when the least the public deserves is realism.

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Al Jazeera: Why Russia refuses to give refugee status to Syrians

Although he qualifies for refugee status according to the Geneva Convention, which Moscow is a party to, it is not what Baibers and the thousands of Syrians who have sought asylum in Russia received.

In fact, since 2011 when the war started in Syria, only one Syrian national has been granted refugee status in Russia. [...]

According to numbers obtained by CAC, as of October 2017 there were 589 people with refugee status in Russia, most of them Ukrainians who fled the recent war and Afghans who arrived after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the late 1980s. [...]

That same month, Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, dismissed the idea of hosting Syrians, saying countries that caused the refugee crisis should bear the costs of it.

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The Atlantic: The American far-right is crashing after its Trump victory high

Within the White House, the far right has been practically decimated. With Steve Bannon’s departure, and recent excommunication, the Breitbart faction has become marginalized. Clowns like “Dr” Sebastian Gorka have been kicked out, while others, including his wife, Katharine Gorka, work under the shadow of being purged, too. The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has fallen out of Trump’s favor, but remains influential within the Department of Justice and a continuing threat to the rights and protections of minorities. [...]

Outside the White House, the situation of the far-right movement is not much better. The extreme right, hiding behind the term “alt-right”, of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer has expressed great political ambitions, but has been unable to bring together more than 100 people since the deadly demonstration in Charlottesville in August. They remain an online troll army, which mainly survives because of the disproportionate attention of the (mostly liberal) media. They have no political relevance outside of their violent potential. [...]

Within the Republican party, longstanding radical right politicians like Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa might have become even more open about their nativism and support for Vladimir Putin, but they remain fairly marginal within both Congress and the White House. At the same time, at the local and state level, many establishment Republicans now run radical right campaigns, hoping to profit from the illustrious Trump effect, but it is doubtful they will actually vote as radical rightists (if they get elected). And even if they do, it is doubtful it will be enough for the still radicalizing base, who in 2016 considered former “Tea Party warriors” as “establishment Republicans”.

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MapPorn: The distribution of the languages in Northeastern Italy

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MapPorn: Change in rail as mode of transport in Europe, 2002-2014

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