In the postindustrial wasteland, the working class embraced an old Etonian mouthing about unleashed British potential.
Donald Trump, in his telling, could have shot somebody on Fifth Avenue and won. Boris Johnson could mislead the queen. He could break his promise to get Britain out of Europe by Oct. 31. He could lie about Turks invading Britain and the cost of European Union membership. He could make up stories about building 40 new hospitals. He could double down on the phantom $460 million a week that Brexit would deliver to the National Health Service — and still win a landslide Tory electoral victory not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in 1987.
The British, or at least the English, did not care. Truth is so 20th century. They wanted Brexit done; and, formally speaking, Johnson will now take Britain out of Europe by Jan. 31, 2020, even if all the tough decisions on relations with the union will remain. Johnson was lucky. In the pathetic, emetic Jeremy Corbyn, the soon-to-depart Labour Party leader, he faced perhaps the worst opposition candidate ever. In the Tory press, he had a ferocious friend prepared to overlook every failing. In Brexit-weary British subjects, whiplashed since the 2016 referendum, he had the perfect receptacle for his “get Brexit done.”
Johnson was also skillful, blunting Nigel Farage’s far-right Brexit Party, which stood down in many seats, took a lot of Labour votes in the seats where it did run, and ended up with nothing. The British working class, concentrated in the Midlands and the North, abandoned Labour and Corbyn’s socialism for the Tories and Johnson’s nationalism.
In the depressed provinces of institutionalized precariousness, workers embraced an old Etonian mouthing about unleashed British potential. Not a million miles from blue-collar heartland Democrats migrating to Trump the millionaire and America First demagogy.
That’s not the only parallel with American politics less than 11 months from the election. Johnson concentrated all the Brexit votes. By contrast, the pro-Remain vote was split between Corbyn’s internally divided Labour Party, the hapless Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party. For anybody contemplating the divisions of the Democratic Party as compared with the Trump movement’s fanatical singleness of purpose, now reinforced by the impeachment proceedings, this can only be worrying.
The clear rejection of Labour’s big-government socialism also looks ominous for Democrats who believe the party can lurch left and win. The British working class did not buy nationalized railways, electricity distribution and water utilities when they could stick it to some faceless bureaucrat in Brussels and — in that phrase as immortal as it is meaningless — take back their country.
It’s a whole new world. To win, liberals have to touch people’s emotions rather than give earnest lessons. They have to cease being arid. They have to refresh and connect. It’s not easy.
Facebook reaches about one-third of humanity. It is more powerful than any political party — and it’s full of untruths, bigotry and nonsense. As Sacha Baron Cohen, the British actor, said last month of the social media behemoths: “The truth is that these companies won’t fundamentally change because their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage.”
That’s the story of Brexit, a national tragedy. That’s the story of Johnson, the man of no convictions. That’s the story of Trump, who makes puppets of people through manipulation of outrage and disregard for truth. That’s the story of our times. Johnson gets and fits those times better than most. He’s a natural.
“Brexit and Trump were inextricably linked in 2016, and they are inextricably linked today,” Steve Bannon told me. “Johnson foreshadows a big Trump win. Working-class people are tired of their ‘betters’ in New York, London, Brussels telling them how to live and what to do. Corbyn the socialist program, not Corbyn the man, got crushed. If Democrats don’t take the lesson, Trump is headed for a Reagan-like ’84 victory.”
I still think Trump can be beaten, but not from way out left and not without recognition that, as Hugo Dixon, a leader of the now defeated fight for a second British referendum, put it: “There is a crisis of liberalism because we have not found a way to connect to the lives of people in the small towns of the postindustrial wasteland whose traditional culture has been torn away.”
Johnson, even with his 80-seat majority, has problems. His victory reconciled the irreconcilable.
- His moneyed coterie wants to turn Britain into free-market Singapore on the Thames. His new
- working-class constituency wants rule-Britannia greatness combined with state-funded support. That’s a delicate balancing act. The breakup of Britain has become more likely. The strong Scottish National Party showing portends a possible second Scottish referendum on independence.
This time I would bet on the Scots bidding farewell to little England. And then there’s the small matter of what Brexit actually means. Johnson will need all his luck with that.
As my readers know, I am a passionate European patriot who sees the union as the greatest achievement of the second half of the 20th century, and Britain’s exit as an appalling act of self-harm. But I also believe in democracy. Johnson took the decision back to the people and won. His victory must be respected. The fight for freedom, pluralism, the rule of law, human rights, a free press, independent judiciaries, breathable air, peace, decency and humanity continues — and has only become more critical now that Britain has marginalized itself irreversibly in a fit of nationalist delusion.
Amy Chua, “Political Tribes” (w/ J.D. Vance)
Amy Chua discusses her book, “Political Tribes”, with J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy” at a Politics and Prose event at Sixth and I on 2/26/18.
There Are Really Two Distinct White Working Classes
One is solidly Republican and will stay that way; the other leans Democratic. And then there are the in-betweeners.
At Nancy Pelosi’s news conference last week, a reporter asked her about Joe Biden’s comments on his congenial dealings in the senate of the 1970s with the Southern Democrats James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge, who were both staunch opponents of Civil Rights legislation and racial integration:
There’s been a back‑and‑forth between Vice President Biden and some of the candidates. Do you think that it is helpful to the party to sort of fight that fight over who best represents the party when it comes to sensitivities about race?
“That’s not what this election is about,” Pelosi answered in a severe tone. “This election is about how we connect with the American people, addressing their kitchen table needs.”
Reporters continued to press Pelosi: “What do you think about Vice President Biden’s words, referencing his work with segregationists and talking about his idea of civility?”
She shot back: “I have answered that question, and that’s all I’m going to say.”
The intensity of the exchange shows how determined key Democratic leaders are to keep the party focused on the bread-and-butter issues of jobs, health care and financial stability and to shore up the gains the party made in 2018, especially among whites.
Pelosi’s response illustrates the deep fear among the same leaders that the agenda could shift to issues of race and immigration. These are issues that a cadre of newly elected progressive members of Congress including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — as well as Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, all with warmly enthusiastic followings — have brought to the fore. Race and immigration are just the issues Donald Trump and his Republican allies want to place front and center in 2020.
Underlying this is the recognition by many Democratic strategists of the continuing political centrality of less highly educated white voters. Marginal shifts in partisan balloting by the white working class have been a crucial determinant in the outcome of elections since 1968.
This non-college white constituency — pollster shorthand for both the white working class and the white middle class without college degrees — makes up a massive bloc of the electorate, with estimates ranging from 48 percent of the entire electorate in 2016, according to an analysis by Catalist, a liberal voter research group, to 54 percent, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
Pete Brodnitz, founder and president of Expedition Strategies, a Democratic polling firm that has performed studies for the Democratic House Majority PAC, wrote by email that in 2018 he found that the white working class could be divided into five political categories:
- reliably Democratic, 33 percent;
- lean Democratic, 7 percent;
- true independents, 10 percent;
- lean Republican, 7 percent; and
- reliably Republican, 44 percent.
How each of these categories voted in 2016 shows the importance of these distinctions. In a poll of battleground House Districts, Hillary Clinton carried the reliably Democratic base by a solid 67-point margin (78-11) and the lean Democrats by 61 points (64-3). She lost the true independents by 16 percentage points (21-37). Trump won overwhelmingly among the lean Republican whites (73-12, a 61-point margin) and the solid Republicans by 84 points (88-4), according to the data collected by Expedition Strategies working with Normington/Petts, another Democratic polling firm.
“In almost every way, white non-college Democrats and white non-college Republicans are nothing alike,” Michael Podhorzer, the political director of the AFL-CIO, emailed in response to my inquiry.
Polling conducted by GQR, a Democratic firm, for the AFL-CIO, found that among the Republican white working class, 79 percent identify as Christian, two thirds of whom are evangelical or born again. Among the Democratic non-college electorate, 44 percent said they were Christian, and one third of them said they were evangelical or born again.
The Democrats are much younger, according to Podhorzer: 22 percent are Gen Z or Millennial compared with 12 percent of working class white Republicans. The Democratic members of the white working class are 59 percent female and 41 percent male, compared with 51 percent female, 49 percent male among Republican non-college whites.
Perhaps most important, the white non-college Republican and Democratic constituencies differ radically on policy and political beliefs.
Take favorability ratings of
- Obamacare,
- Black Lives Matter and
- Medicare for all.
Among working class white Democrats, the ratings are uniformly positive, according to AFL-CIO data: 89 percent, 80 percent and 85 percent. Among their white Republican counterparts, the ratings are uniformly dismal: 5 percent, 9 percent and 18 percent.
What this data shows is that Democrats should have little trouble retaining the support of members of the white working class who identify as Democrats, but they will struggle mightily to win over their Republican counterparts.
This divide leaves the small percentage of the white working class whose views put them in the middle ground between left and right up for grabs and likely to determine the outcome in 2020.
The AFL-CIO survey suggests that the roughly 10 percent of non-college whites who do not identify with either party may be reachable for Democratic candidates, but there are big hurdles.
For one thing, these self-described independents do not side with mainstream Democrats on the kinds of incendiary issues that President Trump loves to promote.
The AFL-CIO study examined four categories of voters: all Democrats; non-college white Democrats; independent non-college whites; and Republican non-college whites.
The survey asked, for example, whether voters agree or disagree with the statement “Social and economic problems in this country are largely due to individuals across races and origins refusing to work and expecting handouts.”
All Democrats, including white non-college Democratic respondents, took liberal stands, sharply disagreeing with the statement by 62 points (78-16) and 56 points (76-20). Independent voters in the white working class were in favor by 11 percentage points (52-41), and Republican respondents were solidly in agreement, by 72 points (84-12).
On a similar racially freighted question — “Social and economic problems in this country are largely due to certain groups failing to work hard and play by the rules” — Democrats disagreed by large margins, while independent white non-college voters showed greater conservatism, agreeing 54-36; Republican non-college whites strongly agreed, 79-12.
The accompanying graphic shows the pattern of opinion on three additional questions measuring what sociologists call “anti-black affect.”
A Partisan Chasm on Race
Less-educated white Democrats largely agree with Democrats overall, but the views of independents and Republicans are the reverse. Percentage of respondents to a 2018 survey who agreed or disagreed with these statements.
AGREE: White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.
ALL DEMOCRATS
83%
76
DEM.
WHITES WITH
NO COLLEGE
29
IND.
17
REP.
AGREE: Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for African-Americans to work their way out of the lower class.
ALL DEMOCRATS
73
69
DEM.
WHITES WITH
NO COLLEGE
24
IND.
8
REP.
DISAGREE: Ethnic groups like the Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.
ALL DEMOCRATS
57
49
DEM.
WHITES WITH
NO COLLEGE
14
IND.
4
REP.
The next accompanying graphic illustrates hostility toward immigrants — or acceptance.
Democrats Stand Alone on Immigration
Percentage of respondents who disagreed with these two statements.
DISAGREE: Increase border security by building a fence along part of the U.S. border with Mexico.
ALL DEMOCRATS
80%
DEM.
82
WHITES WITH
NO COLLEGE
IND.
28
REP.
3
DISAGREE: Deport undocumented immigrants to their native countries.
ALL DEMOCRATS
56
DEM.
55
WHITES WITH
NO COLLEGE
IND.
14
REP.
1
The AFL-CIO survey demonstrate why liberal Democratic leaders like Pelosi are resolved to stand clear of some of the issues that divide their party from independents. At the same time, it shows why Pelosi and others want to focus on so-called kitchen table issues.
On health care and economic matters, there is far more overlap between the views of Democrats as a whole and independent white working class voters.
Support for a tax on wealth in excess of $100 million tops 90 percent among Democrats, while white working class independents support such a proposal 59-25.
A proposal supported by Democrats of all stripes — “Having the government produce generic versions of lifesaving drugs, even if it required revoking patents held by pharmaceutical companies” — has the backing of non-college white independents, 56-25.
By two to one, white independents agreed with two liberal populist statements: that “social and economic problems in this country are largely due to a handful of wealthy and powerful people rigging the rules to their advantage” and that “social and economic problems in this country are largely due to a handful of wealthy and powerful people dividing us against each other so they can take more for themselves.”
Two proposals backed by some of the Democratic presidential candidates — Abolish ICE and Medicare for All — do not sell well among white non-college independents, who opposed the two initiatives by 71-15 and 48-31.
Podhorzer argues that in the 2020 battleground districts and states the contest will be fought over the 13 percent who are swing voters, a group he calls “partisan bystanders.” He described them as “voters who either have a very negative view of both parties or do not have strong feelings about either party. These voters favored Democrats in the 2018 midterms by 11 points after favoring Trump by 6 points in 2016.”
According to Podhorzer, almost half (46 percent) of the partisan bystanders are “white non-college, so this group, especially white non-college women, is going to be a battleground for both campaigns.”
Podhorzer makes a key point: In his view, this 13 percent is receptive to Democratic appeals because they
are looking for answers to the basic economic challenges they face. That issues like health care are much more important to them makes sense given that just about everyone who cares about issues like immigration has already picked sides and won’t be moved.”
In some respects, the AFL-CIO poll provides ammunition to the Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group.
Jonathan Cowan, president and co-founder of Third Way, argued in an email that:
Going forward to 2020, there are lines that Democrats can’t cross if they want to win nationally and hold the House and gain in the Senate. Medicare for All is one of those lines. But there are others like abolishing ICE, a guaranteed federal job, and certain climate proposals that ignore the economic circumstances of the interior of the country.
A Third Way survey of Democratic primary voters, conducted in May by David Binder Research, found that calls to abolish ICE in particular are problematic. In fact, Democratic presidential candidates are backing away from their earlier support of the idea, despite the horror show that is happening on the border right now.
The Third Way poll found that Democratic voters of all stripes prefer a candidate who promises to expand employment opportunity to one who would guarantee everyone a government job; and these voters prefer a candidate who would ensure “that every student who enters college can finish with a degree” to one “who supports free 4-year college for all students.”
In the case of health care, the Third Way survey of Democratic primary voters found that a plurality, 42.9 percent, preferred a candidate “who wants an annual cap that limits the costs people pay while making sure everyone has insurance coverage” while 35.2 percent prefer a candidate “who wants to pass a single-payer, Medicare for All government-run plan.”
Both Democratic and Republican strategists are putting all of these findings under a microscope because in a highly competitive election, seemingly small shifts can determine the outcome.
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Take the difference between Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016 and the performance of House Democratic candidates.
In 2016, all non-college whites went 60-34 for Trump over Clinton, while voting 58-38 in favor of Republican House candidates, according to Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts and senior researcher at the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
This may seem insignificant, but if Clinton had been able to match the margin of Democratic House candidates, not only would she have picked up 2.9 million votes nationwide, she would have won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined total of 383,000 votes instead of losing them by a total of 79,646 votes.
One interpretation of Democratic success in taking control of the House in 2018 suggests a strategy of moderation, while using animosity to Trump to boost turnout in hard core Democratic constituencies, including among minorities, young voters and single women. If the 2018 House give hints on the type of voters who offer the best targets for 2020, it is worth recalling that more than three quarters of the newly Democratic seats are in centrist districts.
According to data provided by Third Way, the new Democratic districts are predominately upscale, with higher than average percentages of well-educated, well-off whites and lower than average percentages of less-well-off whites.
However, the demographics of these districts mask the significant gains Democrats made in 2018 among non-college, less affluent whites. This becomes clear in an analysis of the 2018 election by Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist.
“There has been a lot of attention paid to the Democratic victories in suburban areas, but we find that Democratic gains were actually largest in rural areas,” Ghitza wrote:
These gains weren’t enough to get over 50 percent and win seats in many rural districts, so they have escaped much of the mainstream election analysis to this point. These changes are nonetheless important, particularly because they were large in many of the Midwest battleground states that will no doubt be important in 2020.
Ghitza provided further support for the Democratic strategy of going after white non-college voters by noting that 2018 Democratic gains were “largely driven by voters who voted for Trump in 2016 and voted Democratic in 2018.”
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It is no wonder, then, that Pelosi is not the only party leader warning Democrats to be wary of the danger of focusing too much on social and cultural issues in the heat of the primaries. Such counsel also comes from African-American Democrats.
Take Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who suggested to the Washington Post last week that there should be less attention paid to Biden’s stumble on race: “African-Americans are worried about the safety of their families. They’re worried about jobs. They’re worried about health care, diabetes, cancer, and they’re worried about how to pay for kids’ college.”
Richmond was joined by Representative John Lewis, who said he didn’t think Biden’s remarks were “offensive,” before adding, “During the height of the civil rights movement we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the Klan — people who opposed us, even people who beat us, and arrested us and jailed us.”
The Rev. J.M. Flemming, president of the Greenville NAACP, told the Washington Post:
“I’m not going to let anybody sidetrack folks that I know about who are looking at Biden, when we ought to be looking at the things said by Trump. Nobody is making anybody out to be a perfect person, but what Trump is doing, for me, that’s far worse.”
The concerns of African-Americans, in this view, are substantially the same as the concerns of the millions of white working class voters who remain open to Democratic candidates — or at least they coincide in critically important ways.
The fate of the Democratic Party in 2020 hangs on this premise and on a united resistance to Trump’s malign strategy of divide and conquer.
Steve Bannon Is a Fan of Italy’s Donald Trump
He’s crisscrossing Europe because he believes it’s a bellwether for the United States. The scary thing is he could be right.
MILAN — Italy is a political laboratory. During the Cold War, the question was whether the United States could keep the Communists from power. Then Italy produced Silvio Berlusconi and scandal-ridden showman politics long before the United States elected Donald Trump. Now, on the eve of European Parliament elections likely to result in a rightist lurch, it has an anti-immigrant, populist government whose strongman, Matteo Salvini, known to his followers as “the Captain,” is the Continent’s most seductive exponent of the new illiberalism.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, has been close to Salvini for a while. That’s no surprise. Bannon is the foremost theorist and propagator of the global nationalist, anti-establishment backlash. He’s Trotsky to the Populist International. He sensed the disease eating at Western democracies — a globalized elite’s abandonment of the working class and the hinterland — before anyone. He spurred a revolt to make the invisible citizen visible and to save Western manufacturing jobs from what he calls the Chinese “totalitarian economic hegemon.”
Now Bannon is crisscrossing Europe ahead of the elections, held Thursday through next Sunday. He’s in Berlin one day, Paris the next. As he explained during several recent conversations and a meeting in New York, he believes that “Europe is six months to a year ahead of the United States on everything.” As with Brexit’s foreshadowing of Trump’s election, a victory for the right in Europe “will energize our base for 2020.” The notion of Wisconsin galvanized by Brussels may seem far-fetched, but then so did a President Trump.
Polls indicate that Salvini’s League party, transformed from a northern secessionist movement into the national face of the xenophobic right, will get over 30 percent of the Italian vote, up from 6.2 percent in 2014. Anti-immigrant and Euroskeptic parties look set to make the greatest gains, taking as many as 35 percent of the seats in Parliament, which influences European Union policy for more than a half-billion people. In France, Marine Le Pen’s nationalists are running neck-and-neck with President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-Europe party. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party has leapt ahead of the center-right and center-left.
Salvini, whose party formed a government a year ago with the out-with-the-old-order Five Star Movement, is a central figure in this shift. The coalition buried mainstream parties. He is, Bannon told me, “the most important guy on the stage right now — he’s charismatic, plain-spoken, and he understands the machinery of government. His rallies are as intense as Trump’s. Italy is the center of politics — a country that has embraced nationalism against globalism, shattered the stereotypes, blown past the old paradigm of left and right.”
For all the upheaval, I found Italy intact, still tempering transactional modernity with humanity, still finding in beauty consolation for dysfunction. The new right has learned from the past. It does not disappear people. It does not do mass militarization. It’s subtler.
- It scapegoats migrants,
- instills fear,
- glorifies an illusory past (what the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “retrotopia”),
- exalts machismo,
- mocks do-gooder liberalism and
- turns the angry drumbeat of social media into its hypnotic minute-by-minute mass rally.
Salvini, the suave savior, is everywhere other than in his interior minister’s office at Rome’s Viminale Palace. He’s out at rallies or at the local cafe in his trademark blue “Italia” sweatshirt. He’s at village fairs and conventions. He’s posting on Facebook up to 30 times a day to his 3.7 million followers, more than any other European politician. (Macron has 2.6 million followers.) He’s burnishing the profile of the tough young pol (he’s 46) who
- keeps migrants out,
- loosens gun laws,
- brandishes a sniper rifle and
- winks at Fascism —
all leavened with Mr.-Nice-Guy images of him sipping espresso or a Barolo.
His domination of the headlines is relentless. When, during my visit, a woman was gang raped near Viterbo, his call for “chemical castration” of the perpetrators led the news cycle for 24 hours. Like Trump, he’s a master of saying the unsayable to drown out the rest.
“I find Salvini repugnant, but he seems to have an incredible grip on society,” Nathalie Tocci, the director of Italy’s Institute of International Relations, told me. No wonder then that the European far-right has chosen Milan for its big pre-election rally, bringing together Salvini, Le Pen, Jörg Meuthen of the Alternative for Germany party and many other rightist figures.
A nationalist tide is still rising. “We need to mobilize,” Bannon told me. “This is not an era of persuasion, it’s an era of mobilization. People now move in tribes. Persuasion is highly overrated.”
Bannon gives the impression of a man trying vainly to keep up with the intergalactic speed of his thoughts. Ideas cascade. He offered me a snap dissection of American politics: blue-collar families were suckers: their sons and daughters went off to die in unwon wars; their equity evaporated with the 2008 meltdown, destroyed by “financial weapons of mass destruction”; their jobs migrated to China. All that was needed was somebody to adopt a new vernacular, say to heck with all that, and promise to stop “unlimited illegal immigration” and restore American greatness. His name was Trump. The rest is history.
In Europe, Bannon said, the backlash brew included several of these same factors. The “centralized government of Europe” and its austerity measures, uncontrolled immigration and the sense of people in the provinces that they were “disposable” produced the Salvini phenomenon and its look-alikes across the Continent.
“In Macron’s vision of a United States of Europe, Italy is South Carolina to France’s North Carolina,” Bannon told me. “But Italy wants to be Italy. It does not want to be South Carolina. The European Union has to be a union of nations.”
The fact is Italy is Italy, unmistakably so, with its high unemployment, stagnation, archaic public administration and chasm between the prosperous north (which Salvini’s League once wanted to turn into a secessionist state called Padania) and the southern Mezzogiorno. Salvini’s coalition has done nothing to solve these problems even as it has
- demonized immigrants,
- attacked an independent judiciary and
- extolled an “Italians first” nation.
A federal Europe remains a chimera, even if the euro crisis revealed the need for budgetary integration. Bannon’s vision of Brussels bureaucrats devouring national identity for breakfast is largely a straw-man argument, useful for making the European Union the focus of all 21st-century angst.
The union has delivered peace and stability. It’s the great miracle of the second half of the 20th century; no miracle ever marketed itself so badly. It has also suffered from ideological exhaustion, remoteness, division and the failure to agree on an effective shared immigration policy — opening the way for Salvini’s salvos to hit home in a country that is the first stop for many African migrants.
Salvini grew up in Milan in a middle-class family, dropped out of university, joined the League in its early days in the 1990s and was shaped by years working at Radio Padania where he would listen to Italians’ gripes. “What he heard was complaints about immigrants, Europe, the rich,” Emanuele Fiano, a center-left parliamentarian, told me. “He’s run with that and is now borderline dangerous.”
The danger is not exit from the European Union — the government has come to its senses over that — or some Fascist reincarnation. It’s what Fabrizio Barca, a former minister for territorial cohesion, called the “Orbanization of the country,” in a reference to Viktor Orban, the right-wing Hungarian leader. In other words, insidious domination through the evisceration of independent checks and balances, leading Salvini to the kind of stranglehold on power enjoyed by Orban (with a pat on the back from Trump) or by Vladimir Putin. “The European Union has been ineffective against Orban,” Barca noted. Worse, it has been feckless.
Another threat, as in Trump’s United States, is of moral collapse. “I am not a Fascist but. …” is a phrase increasingly heard in Italy, with some positive judgment on Mussolini to round off the sentence. Salvini, in the judgment of Claudio Gatti, whose book “The Demons of Salvini” was just published in Italian, is “post-Fascist” — he refines many of its methods for a 21st-century audience.
Barca told me the abandonment of rural areas — the closing of small hospitals, marginal train lines, high schools — lay behind Salvini’s rise. Almost 65 percent of Italian land and perhaps 25 percent of its population have been affected by these cuts. “Rural areas and the peripheries, the places where people feel like nobody, are home to the League and Five Star,” he said. To the people there, Salvini declares: I will defend you. He does not offer a dream. He offers protection — mainly against the concocted threat of migrants, whose numbers were in fact plummeting before he took office because of an agreement reached with Libya.
The great task before the parties of the center-left and center-right that will most likely be battered in this election is to reconnect. They must restore a sense of recognition to the forgotten of globalization. Pedro Sánchez, the socialist Spanish prime minister, just won an important electoral victory after pushing through a 22 percent rise in the minimum wage, the largest in Spain in 40 years. There’s a lesson there. The nationalist backlash is powerful, but pro-European liberal sentiment is still stronger. If European elections feel more important, it’s also because European identity is growing.
As for the curiously prescient Italian political laboratory, Bannon is investing in it. He’s established an “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” in a 13th-century monastery outside Rome. Its courses, he told me, will include “history, aesthetics and just plain instruction in how to get stuff done, including facing up to pressure, mock TV interviews with someone from CNN or The Guardian ripping your face off.”
Bannon described himself as an admirer of George Soros — “his methods, not his ideology” — and the way Soros had built up “cadres” throughout Europe. The monastery is the nationalist response to Soros’s liberalism. There’s a war of ideas going on in Italy and the United States. To shun the fight is to lose it. I am firmly in the liberal camp, but to win it helps to know and strive to understand one’s adversary.