Reuters: Steve Bannon’s effort to export his fiery popularism to Europe is failing

 After Bannon was charged with fraud for his role in an effort to raise money to help build Trump’s wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, two people working with him said an effort to found an academy for right-wing Roman Catholic activists in Italy faces a criminal inquiry by the Rome criminal court and a project aimed at ending the European Union has closed up shop. [...]

Along with Bannon, the institute has been trying to set up a two-track program: an “academy for the Judeo-Christian West” with a Bannon-designed curriculum and the Cardinal Martino Academy, which will promote Catholic social teachings, said Benjamin Harnwell, a former British Conservative party activist who leads the institute and works with the former Trump aide.[...]

Separately, a Brussels-based Bannon-backed project aimed at undermining the European Union shut up shop last year, said Mischael Modrikamen, the Belgian lawyer who teamed up with Bannon to promote the anti-EU “The Movement.”[...]

Populist candidates from France, Italy and Britain did well, but their counterparts in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Spain did not. And Bannon’s “Movement” found little support from right-wing leaders.

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UnHerd: What if Trump loses the election?

But rather than focus on addressing their failure of 2016, and the risk of repeating it, some in the party are going full Apocalypse Now: they’re claiming the President is going to delay the election or not accept the result. Joe Biden himself, at a fundraising event last month that was meant to be about his programme for office, managed to darken the mood. “Mark my words,” he said. “I think [Trump] is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.” [...]

So let us assume that the election will go ahead on 3 November. It is constitutionally mandated (and, as I have noted before, the lower the turnout the better for the Donald so there is really no reason at all that he would delay it even if he could). But what if he loses? Here is where some Democrats are getting really excited, and not in a good way. They think, or pretend to think, that he will refuse to leave. [...]

I am not suggesting that Donald Trump will be a happy man on 4 November if he loses. Or that he will go quietly and gently. I doubt he would attend Biden’s inauguration. But there is simply no evidence that he is planning a revolution. He is mandated by law — a new law passed by Congress during Obama’s time in office — to prepare a transition team even while trying to win re-election. He is, it seems, doing it. Only days ago, according to the Associated Press, Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a directive asking federal agencies to select transition coordinators by the end of the week. It is in hand. Joe: relax.

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UnHerd: The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

War For Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (published on 21 April) reads a bit like Dan Brown’s pol sci doctoral thesis — standby flights to Washington, 3am Skype calls with Kremlin advisors, mittel European intrigue in Budapest, racists in ashrams, a Black Hand of high-end political operators, all united by their faith in a shadowy paleo-religion.[...]

The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies. [...]

Most influential of all is Aleksandr Dugin, a long-time foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin. Though his relationship to the Kremlin has often been informal, it was Dugin’s ‘tanks to Tblisi’ sloganeering that persuaded Putin to seize South Ossetia in 2008, and his dreams of a greater Russia that undergirded both the taking of Crimea in 2014 and the continuing attempts to hack bits off eastern Ukraine. Dugin even wrote a book on Traditionalism: The Fourth Political Theory. [...]

The question of whether Traditionalism is a religious ideal with political dimensions or a political one with religious ones is never quite resolved. At its heart, it takes a sort of gnostic, Unitarian ideal of faith. It hardly matters which faith — but older, more ancestral creeds are prefered, which is why so many Scandinavian neo-Nazis embrace Wodin and Thor, and why Hinduism is considered an acceptable choice for the modish skinhead intellectual. It’s ancient, it’s pantheistic, it’s bafflingly non-linear. Which is why in 2009, two of America’s alt right founding fathers, John B Morgan and Daniel Friberg, ended up living at a Hare Krishna temple near Chennai. [...]

But Bannon is also far more pragmatic than either Dugin or de Carvalho. He seems to draw upon his intellectual tools like a bag of golfing irons. He tells Teitelbaum that “Traditionalism is a total rejection of racism in that it is a brotherhood of the spirit”. What he seems to be, at base, is anti-liberal. Be it in trade, migration, or even education.

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The Guardian: The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and then took on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced by Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front). [...]

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly. [...]

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

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The Atlantic: Why Doesn’t Steve Bannon Matter in Europe?

Yet after all that time, Bannon has little to show for his efforts. Though many far-right parties have made significant gains, further establishing themselves as permanent fixtures on the European political stage, the far-right surge that was expected didn’t come to pass. (This was reaffirmed in subsequent elections across the Continent, where although some parties underperformed, they at least demonstrated their relatively high electoral floor.) [...]

But perhaps the greatest inhibitor of Bannon’s success in Europe has been the very far-right parties he has professed to support. Though the former Donald Trump strategist has appeared alongside some of Europe’s most high-profile far-right leaders—from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally in France, to Matteo Salvini, the head of the League and Italy’s erstwhile interior minister—few have agreed to unite under his nationalist banner. The Sweden Democrats expressed “no interest” in Bannon’s project. Vlaams Belang, a Flemish nationalist party, called the effort “poorly organized.” The Alternative for Germany said the interests of Europe’s anti-establishment parties are too “divergent” to be united. [...]

But it’s not just Bannon’s Americanness that makes some European nationalist parties resistant to working with him. Their reluctance also stems from what is perceived as a fundamental misunderstanding of the way these parties work. Though many of Europe’s far-right movements are united in their shared views on immigration, the economy, and the role and future of the European Union, these beliefs don’t always manifest themselves in the same political goals. Despite hopes that they would be a dominant force in the European Parliament after elections this May, right-wing populist parties instead had to settle for forming the fifth-largest grouping in the legislature—their national priorities took precedence over any broader project. (The current far-right grouping, led by Salvini, failed, for example, to persuade Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz to join it.) [...]

“The mere fact that you are writing an article about him, I think, is part of his personal strategy,” Eric Maurice, the director of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Foundation, a European think tank, told me, “of trying to look like someone who is everywhere, pulling the strings, working on a master plan to put the far right … in power.”

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Curbed: Inside the strange—and misunderstood—saga of Biosphere 2

Escape fantasies have long fueled the search for utopia—that irresistible notion of putting everything wrong in the rear view and casting out to a new world of your own making. In the late 1980s, a motley crew of ecologists, engineers, artists, and an eccentric billionaire embarked on an experiment to see if humans were able to colonize space, presuming that the earth would, at some point, become uninhabitable due to environmental collapse, nuclear war, or some other catastrophic event. And thus, Biosphere 2—one of the strangest research experiments of the 20th century—was willed into existence. [...]

Biosphere 2 was influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic architecture, “Synergetics” systems thinking, and “Spaceship Earth” theories. Meanwhile, the writings of historian and urbanist Lewis Mumford informed Biosphere 2’s explorations of the natural world and technology working harmoniously together to support human life.

When the experiment began, it was met with curiosity and fanfare. But after a series of controversies and mishaps—including a near-lethal loss of oxygen and conflict between researchers and their new manager, Steve Bannon—it was dismissed as a failure in mainstream media. “Biosphere or Biostunt?” read the title of a 1993 Time story on the project. It was lampooned in the 1996 Pauly Shore movie Bio-Dome. But did the experiment actually “fail,” or was it just misunderstood and misinterpreted? It depends on who you ask.

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The Atlantic: What If the Chaos Is Strategic?

Of the many challenges facing anyone trying to understand Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that it is maddeningly nonlinear, lurching several times each day between policy objectives that may be dictated by a Fox News anchor, a friend from Mar-a-Lago, or the prime minister of Norway. This was especially true in the first six months of his administration, when the chief political strategist Steve Bannon was at the height of his influence, while Reince Priebus wielded the chief of staff’s potentially awesome authority with all the gravitas of a substitute teacher.[...]

The question of intentionality is impossible for anyone but Trump to answer, and he would surely answer it by claiming that he has had a plan all along. That would be a typically Trumpian boast. That aside, however, it is undeniable that the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government.[...]

The diversionary maneuver has been so effective because Trump remains an object of intense public fascination. If nothing else, Trump is an effective distraction from Trumpism, which is to say a kind of raw modern Republicanism that has shed the last vestiges of its eastern-establishment roots. The more Trump acts like Trump, the more it seems to the rest of us that his administration is about to collapse into a heap of faux-golden shards, the more the Trump administration actually gets done.[...]

In Trump’s first several months in office, Republicans used the CRA more than a dozen times. They repealed a rule that prevented internet companies from selling individuals’ data without their explicit consent. They undid the Stream Protection Rule, which was intended to keep surface mines from polluting waterways with the potential toxic products of their activities. They killed a mandate that employers report workplace injuries. And they made it easier to hunt bears in Alaska. Now you can shoot them from helicopters again.

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The New York Times: The Surprising Place Mueller Found Resistance to Trump

The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government. The F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies opened their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election even before Mr. Trump took the oath of office. The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president’s strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, “you can’t fire the F.B.I.” Mr. Trump’s appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions — an early Trump backer — refused to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia investigation.

Even more surprising, resistance arose from key White House personnel. In June 2017, when Mr. Trump tried to remove Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel Donald McGahn refused to carry out the directive. The next month, when Trump tried to get Mr. Sessions to limit the special counsel’s jurisdiction, the White House deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, declined to relay the order to the attorney general. Later in July 2017, when Mr. Trump told White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to demand Mr. Sessions’s resignation, Mr. Priebus refused. Mr. McGahn also disobeyed the president’s early 2018 directive to create a false paper trail obscuring an earlier effort by Mr. Trump to have the special counsel fired.

The resistance to the president from within the executive branch is not a new phenomenon. Clashes between the president and cabinet officials date back to George Washington’s conflicts with his first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, routinely disobeyed his boss’s instructions on matters ranging from press contacts to arms control talks. What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.

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openDemocracy: How Pope Francis became a hate figure for the far right

Harnwell was introduced to Bannon by another American and former Brietbart contributor Austin Ruse, who runs a Catholic conservative lobby group called C-Fam that has been described as an anti-LGBT ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [...]

Analysis for SourceMaterial by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, which works to counter right-wing extremism, meanwhile shows that several suspected Twitter “bots” that once pumped out pro-Trump messages have in the past year switched to attack Francis. [...]

But he (as other critics do) appears to differentiate between Francis the spiritual leader and Francis the politician. In December 2018, he’d said the pope is “beneath contempt”. [...]

Like many of the pope’s American critics, he appears most preoccupied with the pontiff’s views on the free market – “an economy that kills,” according to a 2016 speech – and global warming, addressed in his climate change encyclical in 2015. [...]

It was around this time, in 2015, that Salvini began courting conservative religious voters with a new emphasis on “traditional” marriage. Previously, his Lega party had been avowedly secular and had even supported civil partnerships for same-sex couples.

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The New Yorker: How Trump Made War on Angela Merkel and Europe

European leaders now worry that Trump’s illiberal aims go well beyond his insistent demands on Merkel to pay more for nato and stop shipping so many cars to the U.S. “Many European leaders have told me that they are convinced that President Trump is determined to destroy the E.U.,” a former senior U.S. official told me. Trump has begun publicly calling the E.U. a “foe,” and promoting the resurgence of nationalism, which Macron and Merkel see as a direct threat. Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in a recent speech at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels, attacked the United Nations, the E.U., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and derided what he called Europe’s flawed vision of multilateralism as “an end to itself.” [...]

The foreign-policy establishment, in both Washington and Berlin, told Merkel and her advisers that Trump was sometimes unpredictable and volatile, but not an existential threat. He was ignorant, but would be constrained by his staff. He didn’t really mean what he said. One veteran of Republican Administrations recommended “strategic patience,” telling a senior German diplomat to ignore the tweets and focus on policy. Other Europeans received similar advice and came to similar conclusions. Rob Malley, a senior Obama adviser on Europe, who now heads the International Crisis Group, said, of the French, “Their view was that you shouldn’t take irreversible steps as the result of a reversible Presidency.” [...]

Russia figured heavily in the dinner conversation at the Adlon: Trump was threatening to abandon the Ukraine policy and embrace Putin. Obama’s lobbying that night to get Merkel to run for a fourth term was, I’ve been told by German sources, critical in her considerations. “I think the Chancellor listened very carefully to what [Obama] said,” a senior German official told me. As Rhodes recounts in his memoir, “The World as It Is,” when Obama left the country, on November 18th, he thought he saw a tear rolling down Merkel’s face as she said goodbye. Obama turned to Rhodes and said, “Angela, she’s all alone.” Two days later, Merkel announced that, because of “insecure times,” she was running again. However, she cautioned those who hoped that she would be a foil for Trump and the Trump-friendly forces throughout Europe: “No person alone, not even the most experienced, can turn things to good in Germany, Europe, and the world, especially not a Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.” [...]

The irony is that, for all of Trump’s bluster and threats, the Trump Administration’s positions on these issues, aside from the Iran nuclear deal, are consistent with his predecessor’s. Obama also pushed for greater European defense spending, set in motion nato troop increases in Eastern Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and objected to Nord Stream 2. Many German leaders oppose the pipeline project, too, and favor more defense spending. Where Trump is different is in how far he is willing to push his allies to accomplish long-standing American priorities, not to mention his public denunciations, abrupt policy shifts, and willingness to insult his allies. This behavior has thoroughly alienated Germans, who are sharply divided on many issues but united in their dislike of Trump and their resistance to just about anything he champions. The Pew Global Attitudes survey this year found that only ten per cent of Germans had a favorable view of Trump. When Trump “tells the German public on television that you owe me, the German public says, ‘We owe this guy? Don’t pay him a dime,’ ” Wolfgang Ischinger, the former Ambassador, told me. “It makes it harder to agree on anything. It is poisonous for the relationship.”

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The New York Review of Books: How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right

Everything about Trump’s discourse—the words he uses, the things he is willing to say, when he says them, where, how, how many times—is deliberate and intended for consumption by the new right. When Trump repeatedly accuses a reporter of “racism” for questioning him about his embrace of the term “nationalist,” he is deliberately drawing from the toxic well of white supremacist discourse and directly addressing that base. Trump’s increasing use of the term “globalist” in interviews and press conferences—including to describe Jewish advisers such as Gary Cohn or Republican opponents like the Koch brothers—is a knowing use of an anti-Semitic slur, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, “a code word for Jews.” Trump’s self-identification as a “nationalist,” especially in contrast to “globalists” like George Soros, extends a hand to white nationalists across the country. His pointed use of the term “politically correct,” especially in the context of the Muslim ban, speaks directly to followers of far-right figures such as William Lind, author of “What is ‘Political Correctness’?”[...]

Building on the ugly history of white supremacy in this country, and on European far-right movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, a new right has emerged in America. The central tenets of this American new right are that Christian heterosexual whites are endangered, that the traditional nuclear family is in peril, that “Western civilization” is in decline, and that whites need to reassert themselves. George Shaw, an editor at a leading new right publishing house and the editor of A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders (2018)—a collected volume intended to give voice to the self-identified “alt-right,” including well-known figures such as the co-founder of AltRight.com Richard Spencer, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, the founder of American Renaissance Jared Taylor, and a 2018 candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Senate seat in Florida, Augustus Invictus—opens his introduction on the race question: “If alt-right ideology can be distilled to one statement, it is that white people, like all other distinct human populations, have legitimate group interests.”[...]

“White genocide is underway,” Shaw warns, and those responsible are Jews, Muslims, leftists, and non-whites. Note how these claims of white genocide and Jewish power resonate in Trump’s discourse. His last campaign ad in 2016 vilified three opponents, all Jewish: George Soros, the former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and the CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein. Last August on Twitter, Trump adopted white nationalist propaganda that the South African government is engaged in a genocidal campaign against white farmers.[...]

A central strategy of the European new right is to argue that anti-racism, even multiculturalism itself, is actually racist because it encourages “dissolution of European identity” and “the multi-racialization of European society.” As Faye argues, “anti-racists use their fake struggle against racism to destroy the European’s identity, as they advance cosmopolitan and alien interests.” Friberg adds that “to be ‘anti-racist’ is […] to be part of a movement which is directly linked to a reckless hatred for Europe and her history.”

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The New Yorker: New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit

Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor of exiting the European Union. The U.K. narrowly voted for the so-called Brexit in June, 2016. The tumultuous fallout has roiled the U.K. ever since, threatening the government of the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May. [...]

The precise role played by foreign entities in promoting and possibly funding Brexit has been clouded in mystery and controversy. British law forbids foreign contributions to its political campaigns—just as U.S. law bars foreign campaign contributions. The laws are designed to prevent international manipulation of domestic affairs. Executives working for Cambridge Analytica, which filed for bankruptcy this spring, have categorically denied that the firm was paid to do any work for the Leave.EU campaign. The new e-mails do not contradict that, but show that, even if the firm was not paid for its services, it laid some of the early groundwork for the Leave.EU campaign. The e-mails show that Banks and others in the Leave.EU leadership met with Cambridge Analytica executives in 2015, and discussed what Banks called a “two-stage process” that would “get CA”—Cambridge Analytica—“on the team.” [...]

Whether foreign funds secretly supported the Brexit movement has become the focus of intense speculation and investigation in the U.K. The British probes, in many respects, are parallel to the Robert Mueller investigation of possible Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Banks has drawn particular scrutiny because his business spent some nine million pounds supporting the Brexit campaign, making him the country’s single largest political-campaign donor by far, despite questions about whether he had the personal wealth to contribute that much on his own. Banks has insisted that his contributions were legal, and that foreign sources, including Russia, contributed no funds. But multiple British agencies have launched inquiries, including a criminal investigation into Banks’s role by the National Crime Agency, the U.K.’s equivalent to the F.B.I. [...]

The American investigations into foreign interference in Trump’s election, and British probes into Brexit, have increasingly become interwoven. The role of the Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, has reportedly been the subject of interest both to Mueller’s investigators and to those in the U.K., who have examined his relationship to Banks. The role of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the far-right, Euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party, who has been an ally of Bannon and Trump, has also reportedly stirred the interest of investigators in both countries, especially after he was spotted in 2017 leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, in which Julian Assange has taken refuge. Assange’s media platform, WikiLeaks, published many of the e-mails stolen by Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election season.

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The Guardian: Stephen Fry pronounces the death of classical liberalism: ‘We are irrelevant and outdated bystanders’

“A grand canyon has opened up in our world,” Fry said. On one side is the new right, promoting a bizarre mixture of Christianity and libertarianism; on the other, the “illiberal liberals”, obsessed with identity politics and complaining about things like cultural appropriation. These tiny factions war above, while the rest of us watch, aghast, from the chasm below. [...]

One might be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing less dangerous in modern Australia than an arts festival, but it could have been otherwise. FODI split last year from its founding partner, the Sydney Opera House, and relocated to Cockatoo Island’s industrial precinct. The Opera House ran its own ideas festival, Antidote, in September, with a program that had a distinctly (implicit, if not explicit) progressive flavour. FODI, by contrast, is known for courting controversy, from Hitchens’ inaugural keynote to reports in July that the festival was trying to secure former head of Breitbart, former Trump advisor and one-time mentor to Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, to speak. The program was eventually launched Bannon-free – perhaps to FODI’s benefit, given the (in this correspondent’s view, legitimate) criticisms of the ABC’s approach when giving the man a platform earlier this year.

Bannon aside, there’s always a certain amount of what feels like trolling in a program that is doing its best to be edgy. If one hadn’t had their fill of evangelical proto-capitalism listening to Scott “have a go to get a go” Morrison, one could, for instance, head along to hear a discussion between pundits like Nick Cater and Judith Sloan about the supposed benefits of economic inequality. Similarly, if one were not already aware of what headline magnet Germaine Greer thinks about anything, one could attend her festival panel, titled Too Dangerous, presumably to hear her speak about how she’s “too dangerous” to be allowed to speak at festivals.[...]

While it’s never quite clear what the primary outcome of these festivals is supposed to be, they do tend to serve as something of a barometer for the preoccupations of the literary class. The conversations over the weekend exposed a genuine frustration with the lack of nuance in popular debate. Cracks about the “musical chairs” (Fry) or “revolving door” (Tim Soutphommasane) of parliament aside, the Australian government seems to be little more than a sideshow to what is happening overseas – in the United States, in Europe, and increasingly, in Brazil. Does Trump represent fascism or populism? Do the opportunities presented by the mass collection of data by corporations and governments outweigh its potential to be used against the interests of the public? How are we to understand the collision between politics and social media that seems to characterise this decade?

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Foreign Policy: The Economic Crisis Is Over. Populism Is Forever.

The larger significance of Merkel’s fate is that the materialist assumptions of Western liberalism no longer capture the reality of Western politics and culture. It is in the nature of liberalism, a credo founded on rationalism, secularism, and utilitarian calculation, to regard material interests—i.e., your pocketbook—as real and the realm of values as ephemeral. That is why in What’s The Matter With Kansas?, the economist Thomas Frank could argue that Republicans had hoodwinked working-class Americans into voting against their true interests by seducing them with traditionalist values. That is also what Barack Obama was thinking when he said during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It is, of course, no coincidence that the wave of populist nationalism now breaking over the West began in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, when millions of working- and middle-class voters lost savings, jobs, and future prospects. But the wave engulfed liberal politics even where economic pillars remained intact. Poland was Eastern Europe’s economic engine—its Germany—when the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party defeated the classically liberal Civic Platform in 2015. Civic Platform Prime Minister Donald Tusk had described his platform as the maintenance of “warm water in the tap.” When I was in Warsaw the following year, Konstanty Gebert, a columnist and former Solidarity leader, said to me, “He thought that was enough, but he was wrong. People wanted history, they wanted glory, they wanted meaning. And PiS offered a meaning. Their meaning was, ‘We’ll make Poland great again.’”[...]

It is also no coincidence that hostility to immigrants and refugees runs much hotter in eastern Germany than in the wealthier and more open west. Yet during several visits to Dresden, near the country’s eastern border, I found that economics was not uppermost in the minds of either the officials of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party whom I met nor even among the marchers in the weekly rally of the anti-immigrant group Pegida. The demonstrators were not lumpen; most were small-town folk who had seen a few Muslim refugees—often very few—and concluded that their world was under siege. The nationalist spirit has begun spreading westward: In elections this month in wealthy and worldly Bavaria, the AfD won more than 10 percent of the vote and entered parliament there for the first time. The right of center fell, the left of center collapsed, and both extremes profited.

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Reuters: Steve Bannon drafting curriculum for right-wing Catholic institute in Italy (SEPTEMBER 14, 2018)

Benjamin Harnwell, director of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute based in a mountaintop monastery not far from Rome, told Reuters Bannon had been helping to build up the institute for about half of its eight-year life.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative who is president of the Institute’s board of advisers, said Bannon would be playing a leading role there.[...]

Bannon’s increased engagement with the Institute demonstrates how his involvement in Europe extends beyond electoral politics to an effort to build a populist faction inside the Catholic Church.[...]

Harnwell said he founded the institute while working as an aide to a British Conservative European Parliament member. At the time, one of the legislature’s committees was trying to block Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of Pope John Paul II, from becoming European Commissioner for justice and security.

During a confirmation hearing, Buttiglione, who was nominated to the European Commission by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, described homosexuality as a sin and said the principal role of women was to have children. Amid political uproar, Buttiglione withdrew from consideration for the Commission.

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The New York Review of Books: The Menace of Eco-Fascism

Across Europe, for example, a longstanding cultural relationship between Nature and Nation permeates environmental debate with a nativist sentiment stronger than is typically visible in the United States. In Germany, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, die Wandervögel (the hiking birds) began to coalesce around a disdain for modernity and a romantic conception of the nation’s Teutonic agrarian past. The Hitler Youth eventually appropriated a lot of the Wandervögel aesthetic—including its early use of the swastika and its militant Boy Scout look—and the movement’s ideological obsessions; the way it tied local ecology to ethnicity in a “Blood and Soil” mythology is still echoed today by many on the far right. (The German Green Party has been periodically plagued by this tension, sometimes leading to the creation of splinter groups such as the Unabhängige Ökologen Deutschlands, the Independent Environmentalists of Germany, whose platform pairs ecological goals with the protection of “cultural identity” and racial purity.)

Russia today is seeing the rise of a similar eco-nationalist homesteading movement, sometimes dubbed “Ringing Cedars” after a series of fantasy novels by the Siberian author Vladimir Megre, whose mysticism and Old World nostalgia inspired readers to go “back to the land.” The catalyzing force of a popular fantasy series is oddly something that the Ringing Cedars communities share with the United Kingdom’s mid-century Green movement, which arose in tandem with a largely conservative longing for the English countryside, rekindled by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. [...]

In that disturbing and carefully calibrated statement, Spencer clearly hoped to bridge the divide between those on the far right who believe that climate change is a hoax, that the environmental movement is a crypto-socialist bid for state intervention (effectively, the Koch-funded Tea Party line), and those who actually find the science undergirding environmental causes persuasive (even if they ultimately care more about intrusions into their own personal sphere, like GMO crops and fluoridated water, than international problems like rising sea levels and ocean acidification). Spencer’s goal here is to build a consensus on preserving the natural environment—for the privileged ownership, use, and pleasure of Western ethno-states. [...]

There’s a strain within environmentalism that shares this primordial outlook, holding fast to a belief in “climax” or “deep ecologies”—perfectly balanced states of nature that would be enduring and eternal were it not for the interference of man. The unresolved tension surrounding this concept has been a feature of ecological debates since at least the early twentieth century, when the English botanist Arthur Tansley sparred with American ecologist Frederic Clements over the latter’s view of the ecosystem as organism, striving for total symbiotic balance. Finally putting this to rest, with the help of decades of continuing research, will probably be an essential step toward saving the cause of environmentalism from one of its more dangerous foundational myths.

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UnHerd: How rival extremisms are firing up Britain

Choudary’s role was much more significant, however, than simply that of a self-appointed provocateur: such was his radicalising influence that Choudary has been linked to 15 terrorist plots since 2000. His followers included Khuram Butt, who was part of the attack on London Bridge that killed eight people last year, and Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby.[...]

Yet while Choudary has been in prison, Robinson has experienced a fresh rush of celebrity among the alt-right in the US, for whom he has recently become something of a cause celebre. After Robinson was tried and convicted of contempt of court in May (he already had a conviction for the same offence from 2017) Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former advisor, later called him a “solid guy” and “the backbone of this country”. Bannon recently described Robinson “a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons.” For Robinson’s defenders, his brushes with the law are explained away by an excess of passion in opposition to Islam – although Robinson often shifts his criticism, without apparent distinction, between Islamism, Islam and Muslims in general. [...]

If the intricacies of the UK justice system don’t much concern Robinson, the same goes for his US supporters, who include not just Bannon but Donald Trump Jr. Beyond Robinson and his anti-Islam stunts and rhetoric, too, there is an ominous rise in far Right terrorist activity: Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last July that “the threat from extreme Right-wing terrorism is growing” with four extreme Right-wing plots disrupted since May 2017. The tiny but deeply nasty neo-Nazi organisation National Action has now been proscribed in the UK.  [...]

The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.

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Bloomberg: Bannon’s Meeting With a Populist European Leader Ends in Trade Clash

The mastermind of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory met Czech President Milos Zeman, an early fan of the U.S. leader, this week in Prague. Zeman also welcomed Petr Bystron, a lawmaker for the euroskeptic, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party that is part of Bannon’s push to bring together anti-establishment groups to challenge the EU’s liberal order. [...]

“He asked for an audience, got 30 minutes, and after 30 minutes I told him that I absolutely disagree with his views and I ended the audience,” said Zeman, an economist and former prime minister who’s also a leading supporter in the EU of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The reason why I disagree with his views is because he was defending American trade restrictions.” [...]

Zeman, who won a second term in January after waging an anti-refugee campaign, has triggered outrage among some mainstream Czech political parties for endorsing an anti-Muslim party. He didn’t comment to the newspaper on any other parts of his discussion with Bannon or on his plans to mobilize support for nationalists before the May EU Parliament ballot.

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Politico: Steve Bannon’s European dream is delusional but dangerous

Bannon’s idea betrays a deep lack of understanding of how European politics work. Even if one leaves aside the inherent contradiction of a nationalist American trying to use the European Parliament to undermine national governments, it’s unclear exactly how the mechanics of his operation will function. [...]

Yet Bannon’s effort does put its finger on a weak point of the EU that has persisted for decades: Political parties often deprioritize the European Parliament, choosing to focus their resources and send their best candidates to domestic parliaments instead.

That has allowed fringe groups like the British National Party to sneak into the Parliament, use its platform to reach a wider audience and access its funding opportunities. Far-right groups such as the United Kingdom Independence Party, Le Pen’s National Rally (then called the National Front) and the Alternative for Germany have also used the European Parliament to cannily expand their domestic reach.

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Politico: Europe’s far right doesn’t bear hug Steve Bannon back

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist last week unveiled plans to ramp up a Brussels-based foundation, named The Movement, to coordinate and advise right-wing populist parties campaigning in next spring’s European Parliament election. His plan is to help parties set up a right-wing “supergroup” within the Parliament that could attract as many as a third of the lawmakers after next May’s ballot, he told the Daily Beast. [...]

“Bannon is American and has no place in a European political party,” said Jérôme Rivière, a member of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party who recently met Bannon in London. “We reject any supra-national entity and are not participating in the creation of anything with Bannon.” [...]

But Annemans, who is also president of the Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom, a pan-European grouping, expressed concern that Bannon’s project could be a way to give jobs to his friends, such as former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Laure Ferrari, a French politician with close links to Farage. [...]

The League, according to a Euroskeptic MEP close to the party who didn’t want to be named, is working on “its own political project, own alliances,” building on partnerships with France’s National Rally, Vlaams Belang and Austria’s Freedom Party, as well as forging new ties to the Alternative for Germany and the Sweden Democrats.

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