openDemocracy: Going back somewhere: nostalgia and the radical right

The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology. [...]

‘This country wants nostalgia’, mused the poet and musician Gil Scott Heron in 1981, reflecting on the election of Ronald Reagan. The American electorate had voted, he thought, ‘to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week’. In this analysis, the destination of our backwards gaze is less important to this type of politics than the fact that it’s backwards we’re facing. Indeed, for Scott-Heron, this gaze peered at a fictive, mythologized vision of America, one akin to the B-movie landscape in which Reagan had made his name. Yesterday was, for Scott-Heron, ‘the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment’, the ‘man in the white hat or the man on the white horse’. It is, tellingly, the ‘white’ cowboy that saves America at the last moment; the figure riding into our vision from out of screen shot is an idealized image of Anglo strength. ‘Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all American men were like Hemingway’. Hemingway’s projected vision of white masculinity – the great white hunter – has been undermined since, of course. Actually, it was undermined by Hemingway himself, in his own writing and career. Inscribed into the Hemingway mythos are the elements of its own collapse. It is a self-consciously stagey vision of the hard-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersman, a hammy performance of American maleness. [...]

In other words, the electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. ‘Put your orders in America,’ Scott-Heron proclaims, ‘And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes’. In a song that’s about cinema and authenticity, the Kodak reference speaks of a world in which value can be quickly and cheaply reproduced. Everything about this kind of politics, then, is fake, all is surface; and at some level its supporters know they are buying the cheap copy Rolex. ‘We’re starring in a B-movie, and we would rather have had John Wayne’, sang Scott-Heron in 1981. The point about the B-movie analogy is that the form makes no real attempt to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond its borders. [...]

Taken together, these seemingly innocuous emblems and rituals – foods, images, phrases – may hide a more sinister purpose, providing feel-good cover for dangerous new forms of ethno-nationalism, protectionism and racism. Neo-fascists are nostalgic nowadays; the Italian radical right group CasaPound have reconstructed fascism as what Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio have characterized as a ‘hybrid communication style’. Images of Mussolini and Fascist iconography mingle with references to cultural figures sympathetic to fascist ideas, or those who might be termed proto-fascist – Ezra Pound, obviously, but also Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Knut Hamsun, Yeats, and Nietzsche. The effect is a strange collage of nostalgic nods to the years of the Fascist ventennio and to ‘pop culture’.

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TLDR News: May's Final Speech to Parliament Explained

Yesterday Theresa May got to address Parliament for one last time, answering MPs questions during Prime Ministers Questions. In this video, we discuss May's last words to the House including reflecting on her time in office and her thoughts on her successor, Boris Johnson.

The Guardian: 'Staggeringly silly': critics tear apart Jacob Rees-Mogg's new book

But its early readers have not been persuaded that the project was time well spent. The historian AN Wilson, whose book The Victorians was published in 2002, wrote in the Times that Rees-Mogg’s effort was “anathema to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense”. Describing the work as “a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions”, he said it claimed to be a work of history, but was in fact “yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician”.

On the chapter about Gen Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Wilson wrote: “At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier.” [...]

She criticised the lack of women in the book. “In mythology, six of the 12 Titans, the children of Uranus and Gaea, were female; not here,” Hughes wrote. “The only female who appears in the book is Queen Victoria herself who, Rees-Mogg assures us, ‘became no less of a woman when she learned to rely upon Albert as a partner and to trust him’.”

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The Guardian - Politics Weekly: New politics and the far right

With the traditional two-party system in deadlock over Brexit, new political forces are emerging to challenge the status quo.

The first battleground looks likely to be the European elections next month, where the Independent Group and Nigel Farage’s Brexit party will be slugging it out alongside the usual suspects.

How will the newcomers fare?

Joining Rowena Mason to discuss these issues are Ellie Mae O’Hagan from the Guardian, Katy Balls from the Spectator, and Matthew Goodwin, co-author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.

Also this week: with David Lammy comparing the European Research Group to the Nazis, we take a look at how politics shifted to the right.

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Metro News: Past of top Brexiteers comes back to haunt them on massive billboards

Giant posters have emerged showing previous quotes and promises of prominent Brexit politicians. 

Pro-Remain group Led By Donkeys put up the billboards around Dover to remind people of what our MPs said.

The group said: ‘If they want us to trust their judgment as we enter the choppy waters of Brexit it’s right that we remind ourselves of their record.’ 

The new posters include quotes from arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, Prime Minister Theresa May, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox.  

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Pindex: Brexit 2: May & Trump vs Truth, with Stephen Fry

Spiegel: A Series of Miscalculations Has Brought Britain to the Brink

For some it's anger at a political class that has made so many promises and kept so few of them. For others, it's anger at the nationalist tempters gambling away the country's future in a quest to reclaim past glory. There is anger at a government that no longer has the power to solve critical social problems. Anger that it's not over yet. And yes, also, self-directed anger. [...]

For non-Brits, the Brexiteers' chauvinist rhetoric may be hard to understand, but it is part of a long tradition. The Brits only hesitantly joined a united Europe in 1973. At the time, the plan's opponents had similar arguments to today's Brexiteers. Labour Party lawmaker Peter Shore later explained: "What the advocates of membership are saying is that we are finished as a country; that the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended; that we are now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations almost as though we had suffered defeat in a war." [...]

The nostalgic nationalists told them so nonchalantly because none of them seriously expected that a majority of Brits would vote to leave the EU. It was easy to make these mistakes because their primary aim had been to exploit the referendum to win a fight within the Tory party. Ultimately, the people voted 52 to 48 percent in favor of Brexit. While the rest of the Europe unloaded its frustration with the status quo by swelling the ranks of right-wing populists, the Brits found their scapegoat in Brussels. [...]

May would later say that her stance represented what "British people want." But that wasn't true. The people were asked whether they wanted to leave the EU -- not how. Clearly, there wasn't just one way people wanted that to happen. And the more time that passed, the more it became clear that these many potential ways of exiting the EU were irreconcilable. [...]

The battle over Brexit has poisoned the United Kingdom. At some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be taught as a case study for political failure. Planning for a Brexit museum is likewise underway. Several activists have joined forces for the project, hoping to show how the United Kingdom took back its "sovereignty." Or not. Who knows, perhaps the museum will ultimately be home to a blue bus and a red bus.

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Jacobin Magazine: What Is a Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Rees-Mogg’s background is comically elitist: the son of a former Times editor, William Rees-Mogg, he attended the private boarding school Eton, then studied history at Oxford. Rees-Mogg the Younger is fully aware of the class privilege he exudes; indeed, he emphasizes and plays it up: opting for anachronistic outfits, an Instagram account stuffed with photographs of himself in double-breasted suits, or his young children dancing on a Union Jack rug. In parliament and in media interviews, Rees-Mogg appears to have been invented purely to act as a living example of pleonasm: his speeches and remarks are long-winded and reliant on stuffy, antiquated and obscure vocabulary, deliberately obfuscating meaning in an attempt to appear more intelligent than his opponent.[...]

Class allows both Rees-Mogg and Johnson to propose outlandish right-wing ideas with less fear of repercussion: by playing into the stereotypes of the bumbling but erudite elite gentleman, they provide a necessary psychological distance between the ideas and the man beneath them. When they go too far, they’re merely dismissed as acting eccentrically; if others agree with them, the far-right thinking is whitewashed as mere upper-class fun, packaging it in far more palatable clothing. The messaging of Rees-Mogg rarely differs from that of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, but they speak to different people: Farage playing into the “man of the people” charade, and Rees-Mogg remaining aloof, playing a caricature of an English toff, and insisting his political stances are the result of both serious intellectual endeavor and straightforward common sense.

At first glance, Rees-Mogg appears to be little more than a complex joke: peel away the layers, and it becomes clear he has no plans to become Conservative leader — who would want to when the party and country are in such disarray? Instead, he’s playing a far longer game. As the far right — traditionally found in fringe groups like the British National Party, English Defence League, and recently formed Football Lads Alliance — gains ground in the UK, Rees-Mogg and his fellow travelers are working within the Conservative party to steer it further to the right, undoing David Cameron’s long appeal to the center. For Rees-Mogg, politics remains a low-stakes affair: he has nothing to lose, and a huge mountain of cash to support him should he retire early. That makes him all the more dangerous.

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Politico: UK worse off under all Brexit scenarios

The government analysis was echoed later in the day by a separate report from the Bank of England, which warned economic output in the U.K. could drop by as much as 8 percent if Britain drops out of the EU without a deal in place, compared to expectations had the U.K. stayed in. That compares to a 6.25 drop during the 2008 financial crisis. [...]

Brexit-supporting MPs were also quick to dismiss the Bank’s analysis, recalling its (so far incorrect) pre-referendum warning that a Leave vote could result in a recession — a prediction that was linked by Brexiteers to an anti-Brexit campaign by the David Cameron government that they branded “Project Fear.” [...]

Likewise, the opposition Labour Party was quick to attack the government. John McDonnell, the Labour party’s shadow chancellor, said: “The Bank has confirmed what other independent reports this week have been telling us: a no-deal Brexit could be even worse than the financial crisis of 10 years ago, and the country would be much worse under Theresa May’s deal. Instead of plowing on with this discredited deal the government should set new priorities that would protect jobs and the economy.”[...]

Regionally, the northeast of England would be the hardest hit economically in a no-deal or Canada-style free-trade agreement scenario, according to the document. Under no deal, the region’s growth would be more than 10 points lower than it would have been inside the EU.

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Jacobin Magazine: Divided They Fall

Steve Baker, the junior of resigned Brexit Secretary David Davis, interprets the White Paper as a stitch-up from the top. He argues that the Brexit office was a Potemkin village designed to distract people while the Cabinet Office’s Europe Unit got on with developing a soft Brexit plan. This is congruent with long-standing Brexit complaints that the higher civil service is an anti-Brexit fifth column. Indeed, they have long complained that effective control of the process of withdrawal has been ceded to this treacherous group. [...]

Most businesses want to be tied down by EU rules, and Brexiteers just don’t see why. If middle-class “free market” ideology had minimal descriptive accuracy, that shouldn’t happen. Businesses should be queueing up for tax cuts and deregulation.

And if British capitalism is as globally important as the Brexit Right think, then China and India ought to have been eager to offer British businesses access to expanding export markets — as was necessary to support domestic austerity and wage cuts. In fact, India seemed mildly embarrassed by the approach, while China was politely indifferent.

Part of the problem is that British capitalism no longer exists in the way it once did. Earlier this year, businesses in the European Round Table of Industry threatened Theresa May with what amounts to an investment strike if she failed to secure a frictionless customs union. The fact that they could make such a threat demonstrates just how much the British economy is imbricated with the rest of Europe. [...]

The EU seems to have understood this. For all that it has worried about “unfair competition” from UK tax cuts, it is also concerned about the “distortive effects of subsidies on investment, trade and competition.” Thus, the steel cage of special sanctions being devised for the United Kingdom in any future trade deal is intended to uphold “state aid” rules as much as anything else. One of the reasons why pro-EU Tories are so incandescently angry with Brexiteers is that they risk unintentionally creating opportunities for a future Corbyn government.

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The Guardian: How can the Brexit stalemate be broken?

Discussions in Brussels will continue over the summer, key leavers including Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom are still onside, and some analysts believe it would do no harm for May to have to abandon aspects of the Chequers deal that the EU27 would always be likely to reject – including the complex “facilitated customs arrangement”.

According to Anand Menon, the director of the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, the ERG has “scuppered a plan that could never have worked: calm down everyone”. [...]

Paradoxically, the article 50 deadline of March next year could also strengthen May’s hand. A good proportion of MPs in her party – though not many of the ERG – and Labour are convinced that leaving the EU with no deal would be a disaster. So as time runs out, it will become less and less practical for MPs to try to send May back to the drawing board.

The deadline also makes it less tempting for the hardliners to throw May overboard, by firing off 48 letters to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee, and trigger a vote of no confidence in an attempt to replace her.  [...]

Cowley says: “Labour has a four- or five-point lead in some polls. That’s as nothing compared to what I think you’d see if we had a general election fought with the Conservative party in the state they’re in at the moment, because they would just fall in on themselves.”

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Politico: Theresa May caves in on Brexiteer amendments to head off rebellion

Unless May is able to claw back enough support among MPs for her compromise plan, it is likely the impasse will only be resolved if either the U.K. crashes out with no deal at all, a solution favored by some hardline Brexiteers, there is a second referendum, which a small number of pro-EU MPs publicly endorse, or the prime minister can find a way to ask Brussels for more time.

In a bid to see off a Brexiteer uprising, No. 10 Downing Street accepted four “wrecking” amendments laid by hardline Euroskeptics in Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group of Tory MPs, all designed to undermine the prime minister’s new Brexit proposal agreed at Chequers, but insisted the new amendments did not undermine government policy. Defense Minister Guto Bebb quit after voting against one of the key changes, defying official government policy. [...]

In a major test of parliamentary strength for both sides of the Brexit debate, the government saw off the pro-EU rebels’ bid to remove the Euroskeptic clause banning any future customs arrangement with the EU which sees the U.K. collecting tariffs for Brussels without the EU doing the same for Britain in reverse. [...]

The fact May felt compelled to accept all four amendments proposed by Brexiteers exposes the precariousness of her situation in parliament as she battles to find a compromise Brexit deal with Brussels acceptable to both wings of the Conservative Party. Experts said the clause effectively killed off the prime minister’s proposed “customs facilitation agreement” — the center-piece of her Chequers plan for a compromise customs model designed to keep the Irish border open while also allowing the rest of the U.K. to strike free trade deals with new countries.  

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The Guardian: Brexit Britain is out of options. Our humiliation is painful to watch

We have been vindicated on every point. The Trump visit ought to be a moment of national awakening. Instead, it has been a national humiliation. A government and an opposition with an ounce of self-respect would have responded to Trump’s ultimatum that he would not allow a trade deal unless we delivered the Brexit he wanted by reassessing our decision to leave the EU. A Conservative party that still respected itself and the country would have revolted at the impertinence of the leader of an increasingly hostile foreign power telling them to see Boris Johnson as “a great prime minister”.

Instead, Theresa May’s government allowed the special relationship to become an abusive relationship. Like a battered wife lying to the police, it pretended that Trump had not insulted May and that a trade deal would go ahead and then waited for a pathological liar to lie that he had never said what he had said, on the record and on tape.   [...]

A second defeat is worth noting. To its proponents, Brexit was never meant to threaten Britain’s security. By last week, it was clear that Trump’s America, on which the Tory right has gambled our futures, is a clear and present danger to Nato. With a wonderful serendipity, as Trump was meeting the Queen, the US Department of Justice indicted 12 alleged Russian spies for helping Trump to power. We already know that Russia wanted Trump because he was against Nato and because, in all his foul harangues, has never once uttered a bad word about Putin.

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The Observer view on how Trump’s scorn has laid Britain’s isolation bare

Britain’s response to this global uncertainty beggars belief. On the one hand, we are turning our backs on the European Union, trying and failing to figure out how to disentangle ourselves from the world’s most successful – even if imperfect – diplomatic and trade alliance. On the other, we are putting ever greater store in the “special relationship” with the US, just at the very moment Trump is undermining multilateralism and co-operation in the west. [...]

Second, Trump’s values fundamentally clash with those of modern Britain. Attitudes to immigration in Britain have become more, not less, positive in recent years; where issues about immigration exist, they are driven mainly by pragmatic concerns. The proportion of people whose hostility to immigration is driven by opposition to other ethnicities or religions shrank from 13% in 2011 to 5% today. The president, on the other hand, was comfortable using his visit to sound his anti-immigration dog whistles and to continue his hateful attacks on Sadiq Khan, London’s Muslim mayor. On Thursday, it emerged that one of Trump’s envoys complained to the British ambassador to the United States about the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, for disrupting a British trial. [...]

But there is one big difference: while the global might of the US imbues Trump with the power to act unilaterally, the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have an utterly inflated view of Britain’s place in the world that harks back to Britain as a 19th-century colonial power. They want us to leave a trading bloc, whose rules and regulations we have had a powerful role in shaping, in order to become a rule-taker through free trade deals with economies much bigger than ours. The US would undoubtedly dictate the terms of a trade deal with Britain – a race to the bottom on regulatory standards.

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Politico: Theresa May, Britain’s zombie prime minister

Labour aides now openly talk of a new “coalition of chaos” to bring down the government when the final agreement is brought back to the Commons, by voting with hard-line Conservative rebels like Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the pro-Brexit caucus in the Commons, and the Scottish National Party against any proposed deal the government strikes with Brussels along the lines of May’s plan. [...]

“Go back to basics,” said one leading U.K. aide who has been intimately involved in the Brexit talks. “She has handled these negotiations in about as catastrophic a way as is imaginable. She failed to prepare for no deal and she allowed the entire thing to be pushed through the prism of Northern Ireland. What are you left with? We’re going to offer vassal state with a note attached saying ‘would you like your £39 billion by check or direct debit?’ It is catastrophic and she is to blame.” [...]

As MPs piled into parliament’s bars and restaurants at the end of the day, there was one silver lining for May’s team — the last vestiges of ambiguity that have hung over the Brexit process finally appear to have burned away, leaving the stark reality of the situation clear for all to see.

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Politico: How Brexiteers lost control of Brexit

At the beginning of May, Cabinet Brexiteers, including Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, openly derided the prime minister’s favored “customs partnership” proposal — which would involve the U.K. collecting tariffs on the bloc’s behalf to avoid a hard Irish border — and backbenchers threatened a leadership challenge should she sell them out. Come the end of the month, those same critics had swallowed the PM’s Irish border backstop, which would keep Britain inside part of the EU customs union after 2021 if no other arrangement is agreed. [...]

But, despite all the noise, May and her team believe they have found a fudge that the majority of her Cabinet can stomach, partly because some pro-Leave Tories didn’t realize what was happening, because others came around to May’s approach, and because the rest did not have a plan to stop it. [...]

No. 10 convinced them the commitment to “full alignment” with EU regulations in the absence of agreed solutions was merely a form of words to move talks on, Brexit-backing MPs say. In reality, the December text, coupled with the abandonment of the prime minister’s much-loved mantra that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” firmly set the U.K. on a path toward a close regulatory relationship with Brussels after Brexit. [...]

In a major win, May convinced some Brexiteers they should sign up to a deal they may not love in the short term, but that gives them a chance to diverge in the years ahead, according to officials in Downing Street and allies of Leave-supporting Cabinet ministers. She warned them that not doing so would see them end up with political turmoil and the possibility of no Brexit at all. To turn a phrase, “a bad deal is better than no deal.”  [...]

The problem for those who subscribe to this view is they have little leverage to force May to change tack. Despite having the numbers to trigger a confidence vote that could topple the prime minister, most hard-line Brexiteers agree she would likely win the support of a majority of Tory MPs. What’s more, in the event that a challenge succeeds and installs a Brexiteer in Downing Street, this faction does not have enough votes in the House of Commons to get through their vision of Brexit, and that would not change without another general election.  

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Channel 4 News: A United Ireland? Some Northern Ireland Unionist figures 'ready to talk' unification

The thorny question of the Irish border after Brexit was on the agenda when the Prime Minister met the Irish Taoiseach at a summit today. Mr Varadkar warned that a possible Brexit deal could collapse if Britain doesn't say how it plans to keep the border open. And if a collapse led to a hard Brexit, could the outcome for Ireland be even more unexpected?

Channel 4 News has learned that some respected figures from the liberal wing of unionism are now ready to talk with the government in Dublin about Irish unity - and even a border poll.

The Guardian: The incontinent fury of the Brexiters who rage against everything British

The hard Brexiters have a peculiar way of expressing their patriotism. They proclaim an unsurpassed love for Britain while trashing its institutions with an unbridled hatred. The supreme court, the Bank of England and the civil service have all felt the white heat of the hard Brexiters’ incontinent rage. The BBC is another of their “enemies of the people”, as are any parliamentary colleagues who have the temerity not to subscribe to the fundamentalism of the true believers. “Traitors”, “wreckers” and “saboteurs” all.

The latest target for their furies is the House of Lords, because peers have performed their function by suggesting some changes to the withdrawal legislation. A particular focus of Brexteria is the 9th Duke of Wellington, who sits in the claret chamber thanks to the hereditary title that was bestowed on his long-dead ancestor as a reward for battling Napoleon Bonaparte. The 9th duke’s contribution was to table a successful amendment that removes the March 2019 deadline for departure from the EU. This is not such an unreasonable idea given where we have got to or, rather, not got to. [...]

On this we can agree. In a less absurd world, the 9th Duke of Wellington wouldn’t be sitting in parliament. It is beyond ridiculous and all the stations to absolutely ludicrous that you get to occupy a seat in one half of our legislature because of the military feats performed by an ancestor more than two centuries ago. You wouldn’t trust your brain to a neurosurgeon whose only qualification for the title was that his great-great-great-grandfather was a neurosurgeon. Yet Britain’s uniquely comical set-up still reserves seats in its parliament for hereditary legislators. The rest of the upper house, the “life peers”, are appointees of highly variable merit, ranging from those who have distinguished themselves in other walks of life to those who have distinguished themselves by being long-pocketed donors to political parties. [...]

The last effort was in the coalition years, when Nick Clegg, with tepid support from Mr Cameron, brought forward legislation which proposed that the Lords be replaced with an 80% elected chamber. That attempt at reform was sabotaged by a rebellion by Conservative backbenchers. And who was prominent in that revolt against democracy? Among the names were one Bernard Jenkin and one Jacob Rees-Mogg, the very same Jenkin and the very same Rees-Mogg who now fulminate against the unelected peers they previously battled to preserve. Also among the saboteurs were Nadine Dorries, Peter Bone, Steve Baker, Bill Cash and other hard Brexiters who now pose as tribunes of the people. Oh, and we shouldn’t forget that David Davis, the Brexit secretary himself, was one too, along with the Brexiter press that now bellows about the “treachery” of the upper house.

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openDemocracy: Why I am not a Liberal and how we need to fight bin Trump and Brexit

I am not a Liberal with a capital ‘L’ because the nature of its embrace of individualism is inseparable from capitalism, and I want to see the replacement of capitalism. By capitalism I mean a world run in the interests of those for whom accumulation is the measure of value and success. I am not saying we know how this will happen or that it will be soon, but I live my politics as a refusal of our present circumstances. In any society, however, a precondition for replacing capitalism is a robust constitutional democracy and openness. Rightly, voters will not trust a more collective form of government without a rock-solid framework of human rights, privacy, active toleration, freedom of expression and organisation and the equality of all persons. Liberty Before Liberalism was what Quentin Skinner titled his exploration of what this might mean. Liberty after liberalism, while standing on its shoulders, might describe my anti-capitalism. [...]

The excruciating paradox of Trumpism is twofold. First, it is rooted in the anti-political, let-it-rip economics of Reaganism and the deceits and over-reach of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld: it is an extreme expression of the deceitful era that gave birth to it. Second, at the same time it rides the rage of opposition to that era and its consequences and presents itself as the most ferocious opponent of the fraudulent elite - which Trump in fact personifies. [...]

This means we have to take Trumpism and the hard right seriously not only as an irrational threat capable of destroying the checks and institutions essential to democracy and liberty, but also a force that does have an empirical claim on reality. Its repudiation of the previous order has some justice to it, even if its response does not. Simply calling for Trump to be stopped is too feeble a response, therefore, and is unlikely to succeed; as Hungarians have just learnt with Orbán and the Brits are learning with Brexit. We have to dig deeper. A process and a claim need to be reversed. It is not credible to call for a reversion to the way politics was conducted before 2016. [...]

At least in his new book, Counter-Revolution, Liberal Europe in Retreat, Zielonka poses the issue of whether democracy and neoliberalism are incompatible. He does not provide an answer; yet he emphasises, correctly in my view, there can be no way forward without a confronting what went wrong. In his article that started these exchanges Fawcett agrees that there has been a "long failure by the liberal centre to keep democratic liberalism in good repair". He provides a vivid list, both conceptual and strategic, from misbegotten wars to the financial crash. Yet the metaphor of repair suggests that these were merely accidents and there were no fundamental flaws with the way the world was run after 1945.

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Bloomberg: Theresa the Delayer: May's Secret to Surviving in Brexit Britain

The minister’s colleague was more sanguine. May has survived so long by avoiding confrontation and would continue by finding a compromise that enables both sides to declare victory.

At least part of May’s strategy appears to be more procrastination: An inner cabinet meeting was canceled Thursday, and another scheduled on Tuesday is now uncertain. Meanwhile, lawmakers wonder when they’ll get the chance to vote on key pieces of Brexit legislation. Two have been on pause since February, and May has now put her flagship EU withdrawal bill on ice. [...]

Debates in the House of Commons on May’s Brexit laws, when they come, are likely to expose her predicament even further -- she’s stuck between a likely majority for a customs union, and the more than 60 lawmakers in her Conservative Party threatening to derail her government if she goes for one. [...]

Delaying to apply pressure would anger her lawmakers, but this is where May’s capacity for long-suffering helps. With the Conservatives divided on Brexit, neither wing of the party is keen to remove her in case they like her replacement even less. Surrounded by critics and undermined by her Cabinet, May stays for as long as she can stand it.

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