[ad_1]
The former consigliere of Trump, Steve Bannon, has a new project. He wants to rally the whole of the European far right to take down the EU – and he is founding an organization, called the Movement, to try to get there. The basic idea of the Movement, Bannon told the Daily Beast, is to try to provide policy, polls and strategic support to right-wing parties across the continent on the eve of the European Parliament elections of May 2019. The goal is to turn the EU legislature, historically an organ of consensus, into a battleground that the far right can use to undermine the coherence of the whole European project
"The month of May is extremely important". Stupid. "It's the real first face-to-face meeting between populism and the Davos party – it will be an extremely important moment for Europe."
All of this sounds scary! But as usual with Bannon, it's more bark than bite. There is really a kind of pan-European far-right bloc that is forming, centered on leaders like the Hungarian Viktor Orbán and the Italian Matteo Salvini. The growing influence of these politicians really threatens the coherence of the European Union.
But the idea that a largely disgraced American political strategist will be the person to unite them in a scary move – with only a handful of staff members and unclear funding – is debatable at best. The breathtaking attention that this has generated in the press is more reflective of how Bannon has built a mythology around himself than of the current state of European politics.
Reasons for skepticism towards the Movement
Bannon has long dreamed of a right – wing international uprising against the globalist "establishment". He sees the world in broad ideological terms, placing a pro-migration and pro-trade elite against a global middle class that believes deeply in the virtues of nationalism.
"We believe – strongly – that there is a worldwide Tea Party movement," he said in an interview in 2014. "I think you see a global reaction to a centralized government, whether this government is in Beijing or whether this government is in Washington, DC, or that this government is in Brussels. "
Europe is a natural place to try to turn these dreams into reality. Right-wing populism is rising across the continent: it has given us Brexit and anti-migration leaders in countries like Austria, Italy and Hungary.Nationalist parties in different countries are expected to theory have trouble cooperating – but they share a common enemy in the European Union, which facilitates the free movement of people across the continent.These parties could benefit from greater coordination in their anti -migration and anti-EU; is not crazy to see why this would help to have an organization dedicated to this alone.
But is Steve Bannon the guy to do it? This is a man who, according to most accounts, was overwhelmed by his rivals within the Trump administration – like Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn – and expelled as a result of a phone call rude to leftist journalist Robert Kuttner. He then returned to Breitbart in 2017, briefly, before being quoted saying something insulting about Trump in Fire and Fury – which caused him to lose his Breitbart job and its main source of funding, conservative billionaires Rebekah and Robert Mercer
As a result, Bannon runs on a tight budget: according to the Daily Beast, Bannon plans to hire "less than 10 full-time employees" within the Movement in the run up to the 2019 European elections. This includes "a survey expert, a communications person, an office manager, and a researcher."
Bannon himself does not necessarily plan to be a full-time student; He intends to spend "50%" of his time in Europe in the run-up to 2019 elections. That's because he has other projects: He works simultaneously on a cryptocurrency project that will provide, in his words, "tokens of utility for the populist movement."
So, let's be clear: Bannon founds an organization to influence the European elections – of which he has no experience – with a small staff and no external sources of funding announced, while experimenting with the start of his own version of Bitcoin.
We Must not Indulge in Bannon's Self-image
Steve Bannon has always imposed himself as a super-supervisor of world history. He told Michael Wolff that "darkness is good," adding, "Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan, that's power."
But when you dig into the substance of the work of Bannon, things start to crumble. He co-wrote the first edition of the Muslim ban on Trump's administration, but granted so little attention to the details of the implementation of the policy that the administration was forced to cancel the Bannon version and rewrite it. His grandiose ideological vision is centered on a false and visionary idea of the "four turns" of history theory that a true historian described as a "crazy".
In his public rhetoric, Bannon speaks so broadly, with so little attention to detail, that his ideas often end up being substantial or inconsistent. Look, for example, at this recent interview with Nicholas Farrell of the Spectator. Here is what he said when asked about the Italian elections:
I have to be very careful. Nick, we are in a world war, that's right. It goes from Japan and the Philippines to the Korean peninsula all over the world. It's been ten years since it started, it's just starting. What is happening in Italy is a defining moment.
Wait, what? What connects the left-wing president of South Korea, the center-right Prime Minister of Japan, and the autocratic populist Filipino Rodrigo Duterte, apart from the fact that they are all in Asia ? What's one of the political conflicts in one of these countries has to do with the Italian election or anti-immigrant European populism more broadly?
Who knows! But this gives Bannon the appearance of a radical vision and a brilliantly agitated mind, which is the real goal. In the end, it is the goal through which "the Movement" should be considered – a Bannon vanity project – until proven otherwise.
The European Right is a real and important force, a major sign that the liberal consensus of the post-Cold War era is in trouble in the same way as Donald Trump's first victory. In either case, however, it seems that Bannon has hitched his star to a rising political force rather than being the guy who was at the origin of his rise (remember that he was the third person at the head of the Trump campaign). think of him as a profound political and intellectual modern thinker. But the little that he has done, either inside the White House or outside, suggests that he deserves this status. We should not give it to him.
Source link
