VICE: The Next Generation of the French Far Right

All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]

Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.

Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]

But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”

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New Statesman: Britain at the end of history

 While the prime minister was firefighting at home, her position was deteriorating abroad. In January 1989, one of the great love affairs of modern diplomacy came to an end, as US president Ronald Reagan left the White House. His successor, George HW Bush, did not share Reagan’s affection for Thatcher, calling her a “very difficult” woman who “talks all the time when you’re in a conversation”. Bush saw West Germany, not Britain, as America’s “partner in leadership”, making it harder for Thatcher to amplify her influence through the “special relationship”.

Relations were also poor with West Germany. The federal chancellor, Helmut Kohl, thought Thatcher “ice-cold” and “dangerous”, while Thatcher herself made no secret of their “acrimonious discussions”. She got on better with the French president, François Mitterrand, who credited her with “the eyes of Caligula, and the lips of Marilyn Monroe”. Yet the two had little in common politically, and Thatcher had spent much of the summer belittling the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789. [...]

Over the winter of 1989-90, Thatcher gave a series of inflammatory press interviews, warning of a resurgence of German nationalism. “What is reunification all about?” she asked rhetorically. “One people, one fatherland.” She underlined references to the two World Wars in documents, and astonished George Bush and François Mitterrand by pulling out wartime maps from her handbag. Notes for one speech were scribbled on the back of a newspaper cutting on the 1938 Munich Agreement: an indication, perhaps, of what she was requesting from the archives. [...]

Powell was at the centre of one of the most damaging incidents of this period: the Chequers seminar of March 1990. Thatcher had invited a group of historians – including Gordon Craig, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Norman Stone and Timothy Garton Ash – to discuss Germany, and Powell produced a hair- raising summary of the talks. An account of the German “national character” included “angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying” and “egotism” in a veritable alphabet of insults. There were still questions to be asked as to “how a cultured and cultivated nation had allowed itself to be brainwashed into barbarism”; and the “way in which the Germans currently used their elbows… suggested that a lot had still not changed”. The document was leaked to the Independent, causing outrage in Bonn and dismay in other capitals.

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CityLab: Prague’s Communist-Era Apartments Get a Second Life

Prague’s paneláks may stand in stark contrast to the city’s historic core, but they fit in with local architecture traditions more than you might assume. Interwar Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic’s predecessor state, was a hive of modernist innovation in architecture, and many architects working on major projects after the Communists took power in 1948 had been part of the country’s aesthetic debate for some time. [...]

The real push for fully industrial building methods came from a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, who specifically called for the use of concrete panel construction as an efficiency measure in a bloc-wide drive for more and better housing. Despite the Soviet incentive, the housing produced to meet this call was nonetheless not fundamentally different from much being constructed in the West at the time. The internal layouts of paneláks, and their arrangement into planned, self-contained neighborhoods, had clear contemporary counterparts in Western Europe , where Sweden, France, West Germany and Britain were also building mass housing projects on a grand scale. In keeping with this exchange of ideas across the Iron Curtain, the name given to this 1950s new wave of Czech architecture and design was “Brussels Style,” after Czechoslovakian architects gained international attention for their designs at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. [...]

For their new tenants, these panelák homes often represented an improvement. Coming from tenements heated with coal stoves and often lacking hot water or reliable plumbing, many residents were relieved to move in. These new units offered central heating, balconies and much more light than you might have gotten in Prague’s existing courtyard buildings (akin to Berlin’s Mietkasernen). They also had more modern conveniences than the cramped cottages previously occupied by migrants from the countryside.[...]

That is not what happened next. Following the ousting of the communist government, panelák apartments were transferred to tenants’ ownership at rock-bottom prices, turning from something allotted by the state into free market goods. And, in a surprising twist, their reputation was steadily rehabilitated in the years after the division of Czechoslovakia into two states, along with the buildings themselves. Panelák apartments have appreciated in value significantly more than ones in brick buildings, according to housing researcher Martin Lux.

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The Atlantic: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

 The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court. [...]

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons. [...]

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. [...]

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Politics.co.uk: The break-up of the UK is coming - but will it be violent or peaceful?

 Contrary to the current talk of the British empire and the nostalgia around it, they are not Powellites. Their overriding concern instead is the restoration of the Westminster system. For them, our EU membership has been an historical parenthesis. Westminster is all. A century ago, ceding part of Ireland was a price worth paying for keeping the Westminster system intact. So was the loss of India, and the loss of the colonies in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, next year, whenever, Northern Ireland will follow.

The more troubling question is whether the Brexiters see Scotland in the same way, and whether their view of Scottish independence is the same as that of Unionists south and north of the border. Scotland is a nation of the United Kingdom, not a province that can be snapped off and tacked on to another state. It can only become separate by becoming independent and sovereign. [...]

That project's mode of governance is not the centralised one the less intellectual Brexiters constantly moan about, but actually about subsidiarity - decisions being made at the most local feasible level. By contrast, the heart and distinctiveness of the Westminster system is centralisation. Scottish nationalists believe Scotland would be freer to act autonomously within a federal, decentralised European Union than they are with devolution inside a unitary state.

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UnHerd: Is Critical Race Theory racist?

 The founding father of critical race theory was Derrick Bell, professor at Harvard Law School. Bell argued that racism has not improved and is, in fact permanent, and that whites simply find less obvious and legal ways to maintain their dominance. Bell developed his theory of “Interest convergence” which argued that whites only extend rights to blacks when it is in their own material interest. This cynical and pessimistic materialist approach tends to present empirical evidence of disparities and then claim racism as the sole cause of them, while ignoring progress. [...]

This is how critical race theory developed within the academy. However, since around 2010, it has moved into the mainstream. The ideas we are most likely to hear are those of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi’s How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) were New York Times bestsellers for months and sold out again following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

The work of Ibram X Kendi seems to draw most of its spirit from the materialist approach, presenting us with two intertwined false dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or anti-racist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them.

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New Statesman: Munira Mirza: the former radical leftist advising Boris Johnson

Those who know Mirza describe her as an independent thinker, intelligent, intellectually curious, reasoned, articulate and unflappable. Far from being a strident right-wing Tory, she once flirted with Marxism and is now a libertarian. Like Cummings, her fellow Downing Street iconoclast, she is not a Conservative Party member and is said to harbour no political ambitions of her own. [...]

Mirza does not deny that racism exists in Britain, but she argues that racial inequalities are the result of cultural and socio-economic factors more than institutional racism. She contends that efforts to promote racial equality through diversity programmes and “box-ticking multiculturalism” serve merely to deepen divisions, stoke tribalism and foster a “culture of grievance”. She rejects identity politics based on race and religion in favour of a universal humanity or “universalism”. [...]

Through PX she published “Living Apart Together” (2007), a paper that argued multiculturalism had encouraged Islamic extremism in Britain by dividing people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines instead of promoting a national identity. [...]

She was a principal author of the Tory party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election. As a northerner, like Cummings, she champions the idea of “levelling up”. There has been speculation, given her libertarianism, that she may have encouraged Johnson’s costly reluctance to impose the coronavirus lockdown last spring. True or not, she certainly would not have expected to be overseeing government interventionism on a scale unprecedented since the Second World War.

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New Statesman: The twilight of the Union

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed the trial, and made the constitutional debate about Scotland’s future seem trivial. Suddenly there were other more pressing issues to think about, a lethal and mysterious plague that threatened to overwhelm the NHS and devastate the economy. Although, technically speaking, NHS Scotland is a distinct entity, founded on separate Scottish legislation, this fact belongs to the arcane lore of policy wonks: the NHS is widely regarded in Scotland as a UK institution. During lockdown Scots banged pots and pans on a Thursday night for the NHS, not specifically for the NHS in Scotland. And everybody knew that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s generous furlough scheme came courtesy of the deep pockets of the UK Treasury.

Yet, bizarrely, the Scottish Question did not hibernate. Instead, opinion about Scottish independence shifted significantly during the Covid lockdown. At the start of the year, the pro- and anti-independence camps were running neck and neck in the opinion polls, and remained tied as late as May. But more recent polls demonstrate a marked rise in support for independence, which is now running at 54 per cent, once the don’t knows are excluded. [...]

To be sure, nationalism plays a significant part in the independence cause. But in the broad miscellaneous coalition of voters that supports independence, flag-waving nationalists, though the most obviously visible cohort, rub shoulders with a range of other social types. There are the voters, often middle-aged, who think independence is the best way of preserving what remains of Britain’s cherished welfare state; those who want to live in a normal northern European country – like Denmark or Norway – with a Nordic model of egalitarian social democracy; those who despair of the Brexity delusions of Britain’s post-imperial nostalgia; and a radical younger generation that identifies with Rise, the alternative movement for “Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism”.

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