First, it's my suspicion that within the Supreme Court, the right wing members (at least some) have grasped that their partisan/ideological project has profoundly damaged the reputation of the Court and thus American political stability.
Second, that all the voices that have long been claiming or suggesting that Merrick Garland was a toothless figure represent a juvenile and simplistic tendency to expect/demand instant gratification even in matters of extreme complexity.
Late in the summer of 2020, forests across the western United States were on fire. In that year alone, California experienced six of the twenty largest fires in its recorded history, including the North Complex Fire, which killed sixteen people and burned more than 300,000 acres. Further north, the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires merged near the Oregon-Washington border, ultimately burning more than 600 square miles (an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island) and killing five people. Across the West, more than 10 million acres burned—the second-highest annual figure since record-keeping began—incurring $18.9 billion in economic losses and firefighting costs.
In the febrile atmosphere of the looming presidential election and nationwide racial justice protests, the fire crisis pushed some Oregon reactionaries into action. Rumors quickly spread that Portland-based anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter organizers were setting fires to punish their rural (white) enemies and then looting evacuated areas. These rumors were boosted across social media and by a QAnon “drop,” leading militia members to set up armed checkpoints to search for arsonists. While the militias failed to turn up any antifa arsonists, they did offer a kind of social response—albeit paranoid, violent, and exclusionary—to the effects of climate change. It’s a response that risks becoming more common as the ecological crisis deepens.
The scope and urgency of the wildfire crisis in the U.S. West are forcing communities and governments to respond, but the ultimate form of the response is yet to be determined. Milton Friedman infamously quipped that “when [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Gaps in state action have left at-risk communities to formulate their own theories about the causes and consequences of socio-ecological breakdown, and as the far right surges across the rural West, it is leaving plenty of warped ideas “lying around.” Strange mutations and alignments are starting to take shape among different factions of the right, including Trumpist Republicans, libertarian localists, and eco-fascists, against this backdrop of punishing environmental change—and in many cases they are starting to take power.
The roots of this problem are far-reaching: more than 100 years of intensive logging and wholesale fire suppression have made forests denser, more homogenous, and more dominated by non-fire-adapted species, decreasing their resilience. These changes are magnified by the effects of climate change, including drought, extreme heat, insect infestations, and high-wind events. With the belated recognition that improved management practices are urgently needed, state and federal resources are beginning to flow to forest restoration, which involves thinning and controlled burning. But these interventions are not coming quickly enough to keep pace with the crisis, nor in ways that support transformative reinvestment in forest communities. Long-term declines in the logging industry have left both the land and people in vast swaths of the country abandoned by the state and by capital, and a huge mobilization of resources and labor will be needed to start undoing more than a century of damaging forestry practices.
A green industrial policy for the rural West could invest in sustainable industries and high-quality jobs, while building on the existing knowledge and skills of rural communities. Such an approach must also involve initiatives to strengthen Indigenous resource governance and support the ongoing revival of traditional management practices that have been criminalized since Spanish colonization. A progressive green industrial policy that delivers material improvements to rural communities is a necessary condition for battling the far right across the West.
Incendiary Conditions
Megafires that cover more than 100,000 acres are now so common they are no longer tracked as exceptional events by the National Interagency Fire Center, and 30 million homes in the United States are at risk from wildfires. This fire regime both reflects and produces alarming environmental conditions, including a historic drought that has dried out cities, farms, and forests; smoke that chokes skies throughout fire season; the billions of tons of CO2 released by fires; and local effects like mudslides, degraded water supplies, and the loss of habitats for vulnerable species.
These ecological conditions are coupled with the grim social realities of rural deindustrialization, real estate speculation, and environmental change. California has lost more than three-quarters of its saw mills since the 1980s, and logging jobs across the West have declined by 40 percent since 1997. Much of the rural West has become significantly more unequal than it was fifty years ago—a process that accelerated dramatically amid the economic carnage of the 2008 financial crisis, and then again as white-collar migration driven by pandemic remote work turbocharged rural gentrification. Many rural communities are suffering from the social problems that come with deindustrialization: economic precarity, addiction, and exposure to the criminal justice system have all been exacerbated by the structural reorganization of rural political economy.
Declining standards of living, with little apparent prospect for improvement, have created conditions in which the right thrives. Across the United States, far-right organizations, protests, and political violence have been on a sharp upswing since 2008. They accelerated again after the Trump election: incidents of right-wing political, racist, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ violence (which have included the explicitly eco-fascist mass murders in El Paso in 2019 and Buffalo in 2022) have all spiked since 2016. More recently, there has been a marked rise in armed protests across the West, with mobilizations against pandemic public health measures morphing into support of stolen-election conspiracy theories. As outright political violence has increased, so has apologism for that violence within the mainstream right.
Support for Republicans has risen in many rural Western counties over the past twenty years, coinciding with the party’s drift rightward. According to data from the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, the West has a particularly high concentration of state legislators who belong to right-wing social media groups. Common themes in these groups include portrayals of regional big cities as policy failures and dens of iniquity, rejection of state authority in some areas (like public health and environmental regulation) alongside full-throated support for repressive state functions such as policing and border enforcement, and ubiquitous calls to “save America” or to put “America first.”
The Far Right in the Forests
The January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol has become the iconic image of far-right mobilization, but the year before, right-wing activists had already tried, in some cases successfully, to breach state capitols or governors’ mansions in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. There has also been a flurry of environmentally tinged far-right outbursts over the past decade, including the Bundy family’s standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, which culminated in the occupation of the Malheur wilderness area in Oregon in 2016. More prosaically, far-right candidates have won numerable government offices, from county sheriff seats to governorships, putting important levers of power in the hands of libertarians, Christian dominionists, QAnon fabulists, and militia members.
Nostalgia plays an important role in the far-right imagination, and there is no doubt that communities in the West (and elsewhere) have genuinely lost economic freedoms as industry has declined. These losses are stacked on top of others, including environmental regulations that are experienced as austerity. We can broadly characterize these events as reverberations of the closure of frontiers. In this case, the closure is the end of what Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore call “cheap nature.”
For 250 years, the U.S. social compact rested on the availability of cheap land and abundant resources for settlers and their descendants, which stood in lieu of a robust welfare state. The history of the cheap-nature frontier in the West started with Indigenous genocide and the direct exploitation of timber and minerals, and was later characterized by sprawling suburbanization and dependence on cars. But this frontier has been squeezed economically and by environmental policy since the 1970s. Its last vestiges are disappearing as the ecology itself degrades. The overarching response of the right has been to attempt to push back by reopening land for resource exploitation (through privatization) while limiting who has access to the proceeds by, for example, restricting immigration.
The far right thrives on the belief that things can only get worse. Unfortunately, decades of federal public-land policy and developments in regional and global political economy have provided plenty of evidence that this is the case. In turn, the right reaches the conclusion that waning forms of privilege have to be violently maintained and policed.
Last October, a right-wing sheriff in Oregon arrested a U.S. Forest Service “burn boss” whose prescribed fire treatment had charred a rancher’s fence—an incident that signals a simmering conflict between authoritarian localism and federal authority. Similarly, a giant New Mexico fire that was touched off by a controlled burn gone bad last summer will be used as evidence that the federal government is either incompetent or actively hostile to the rural West and that communities must “take back control” and seal themselves off from outsiders. As the effects, if not the causes, of climate change become of greater concern on the right, it becomes more likely that we’ll see the weaponization of emergency. And if reactionary figures are in control of local and federal government, we could easily see anti-government militia members turning into paramilitary foot soldiers to enforce emergency measures against the villains du jour.
Narrow Responses to the Wildfire Crisis
The wildfire crisis is so dire that even reactionary state officials agree on the necessity of action on forest restoration. There is virtual consensus on the need to reduce forest densities and restore more diverse forest conditions, but these measures are not being implemented quickly enough to keep pace with the crisis. The conservative approach is essentially to devolve land management authority to states that have less robust labor and environmental protections, shift the focus to fire suppression, and roll back environmental protections in order to fast-track private logging and other forms of extraction—usually carried out by precarious workers (many of them migrants) with few job protections.
The current liberal alternative to the far right—a “Big Green” NGO approach to forest management carried out through public-private partnerships and carbon offsetting—simply isn’t up to the task, especially given the current low-road trajectory of much forestry work: most jobs are poorly paid, seasonal, contingent, and high risk. Even more troubling is the fact that, as researcher Alex Amend puts it, “mainstream environmentalism has shown itself to be vulnerable to ‘fascist creep’”: far-right approaches to ecological crisis have been adopted by otherwise left-leaning environmentalists, along with concepts that echo the racist, xenophobic roots of the original conservation movement.
The retrograde, exclusionary tendencies of liberal environmentalism fuel the “jobs vs. environment” deadlock that has long plagued North American environmental politics. The forests of the U.S. West have been a particularly entrenched battleground in this conflict. During the infamous “Timber Wars” of the 1980s and ’90s, environmentalism became a scapegoat for the ongoing ailments of the timber industry and the attendant abandonment of working people. In turn, there is still substantial hostility among many grassroots environmental groups toward any timber extraction.
Policymakers in Washington, D.C., and Western states are finally beginning to reckon with the magnitude of the wildfire crisis. But for decades, “fire borrowing”—the practice of paying firefighting costs by drawing from elsewhere in the Forest Service budget—eroded funding for forest restoration. New funding models and additional investment through the Federal Wildfire Crisis Strategy, the Inflation Reduction Act, and state appropriations all represent small steps toward safer forest landscapes and communities. More funding aimed at landscape-wide restoration—around $5 to 6 billion per year—is needed to make a meaningful dent in the restoration backlog across the West. And that is without considering the investments in housing, transportation, job training, and healthcare that are needed to stabilize and revitalize rural communities.
Rural Ecosocialism
A left approach to the wildfire crisis would prioritize ecological repair through investments in rural landscapes and communities under the banner of forest restoration. This restorative framework would not produce a new frontier to be exploited but would instead support the care work required to heal and sustain life. This means supporting ecological health while rejecting the nostalgia and xenophobia that the right serves up in place of material answers to material questions.
This is a critical challenge and a worthwhile fight—not only because the stakes of the wildfire emergency are so high but also because overcoming the stalemate of the long Timber Wars would be a critical win in the larger struggle for green industrial policies. Improved land management policies would be a powerful proof-of-concept for a Green New Deal in rural communities across the country that have been used, abused, and abandoned by capital—and often by the state as well. Green industrial policy could mobilize people and resources to care for forests that may be facing irreparable change while creating hundreds of thousands of long-term, well-paid jobs—not only in “woods work,” but in manufacturing, energy, transportation, and a variety of sectors that utilize biomass removed from overstocked woodlands. This kind of program would require pro-worker policies that support sustainable industries, long-term employment, and safe working conditions.
A holistic industrial policy for ecological forest management would include investment from public infrastructure banks to use the waste products of forest restoration to support new rural industries—such as biomass energy generation, which can power new manufacturing capacity for advanced wood products. Workforce development policies and programs could create career pathways for formerly incarcerated firefighters (who represent the most diverse segment of the firefighting workforce) and prioritize tribal enterprises and worker-owned cooperatives. In all these areas, effective democratic governance of land management is critical to ensure that the manifold benefits of forest restoration and reduced fire risk accrue to everyone in forest communities, but particularly to those who have been harmed by previous regimes of forest management. This is important both as a matter of equity and as a political objective to alleviate conditions that contribute to far-right drift.
The crisis in rural communities also presents possibilities for community-driven development that links social and ecological health. For instance, in 2009, federal legislation aimed at encouraging dialogue between groups that had long been at odds with one another facilitated the formation of forest collaboratives in which loggers, environmentalists, tribes, and community leaders can work toward community management of forests with multiple goals in mind. Some environmental groups have pointed to the undue influence of logging interests in these collaboratives, enabled in part by the Forest Service’s model of funding restoration work through timber sales. But relationships and collaborative practices developed within these groups, when supplemented with additional resources for rural community and economic development, could help create conditions for building coalitions in support of green industrial policy.
The West is not the only place where socio-ecological breakdown, rooted in decades of environmental degradation and state abandonment, is fueling reactionary politics. From fisheries in New England to Midwestern farmland and areas struck by water crisis in the Southeast, the contradictions of the end of cheap nature are reaching critical levels. The Green New Deal and other visions for ecosocialism have largely focused on cities, giving less attention to non-human nature and rural places. But workers in forestry, agriculture, and other rural industries occupy a pivotal position at the intersection of social and ecological systems. It is critical for the left to articulate a strategy that mobilizes the place-based knowledge and experiences of working-class rural communities to address their needs. If we don’t, the right will.
Fighting Fire and Fascism in the American West
...Rumors quickly spread that Portland-based anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter organizers were setting fires to punish their rural (white) enemies and then looting evacuated areas. These rumors were boosted across social media and by a QAnon “drop,” leading militia members to set up armed checkpoints to search for arsonists. While the militias failed to turn up any antifa arsonists, they did offer a kind of social response—albeit paranoid, violent, and exclusionary—to the effects of climate change. It’s a response that risks becoming more common as the ecological crisis deepens...
Senior Tories tell Boris Johnson and allies to ‘shut up and go away’
Privileges committee is preparing to sign off what is expected to be damning report into former PM’s conduct
Aubrey Allegretti Senior political correspondent
Boris Johnson and his allies have been told by senior Conservatives to “shut up and go away” as the privileges committee prepares to sign off what is expected to be a damning report into his conduct.
MPs on the committee are understood to have received threats from members of the public over the weekend, following Johnson’s decision to stand down as an MP after being told they had concluded he deliberately misled parliament over Partygate.
Some MPs loyal to the former prime minister who sought to sway the committee’s decision are also said to be at risk of being investigated for a separate contempt of parliament.
The seven-strong committee, which has a Tory majority and Labour chair, will regroup at 11am on Monday to finalise the conclusion to their year-long inquiry. They are likely to speed up the the publication of their report, with the details of their findings made public as soon as Wednesday.
While Johnson cannot be sanctioned with a suspension now he has resigned, the committee could recommend that he be refused a pass offered to ex-MPs allowing privileged access to parliament.
Such a move would be in the power of the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, and it has been recommended before by a parliamentary watchdog. An independent expert panel proposed the sanction for former speaker John Bercow in its report on bullying which was published after he stepped down as an MP.
Some of Johnson’s allies are said to have urged Tory members to write to the privileges committee in a bid to influence its conclusions. The Guardian understands several MPs have held talks on the possibility of tabling a motion with a view to holding them in contempt of parliament.
Tim Loughton, a Tory MP and former minister, said Johnson should “shut up and go away” and branded his allies a “mob”. A government source added: “The witch-hunt narrative is held by a sad rump of Boris worshippers, whose numbers are small.”
In a bid to distance Rishi Sunak from his predecessor-but-one, the energy secretary Grant Shapps said “the world has moved on” from Johnson. He suggested that Johnson was wrong to claim No 10 had promised all the MPs he nominated for peerages would be approved, saying: “Occasionally Boris wouldn’t be all over the detail.”
Shapps said MPs on the privileges committee should be allowed to “get on with their job” and played down Johnson’s potential future in the Conservative party, telling Sky News: “I’m sure he’s got many other things he wants to get on and do.”
All weekend, Trump supporters have flooded media channels with accusations that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice to use as a political cudgel against former president Trump, whom they characterize as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
On Thursday the Department of Justice indicted Trump on 37 counts of hanging onto classified national security documents, deliberately hiding those documents from his lawyers and the government after a subpoena, lying about them, and showing them to people without security clearances and without any need to know about them.
Trump and his loyalists insist the indictment makes the United States a “banana republic,” by which they appear to mean a country with a corrupt ruling elite that uses the machinery of government against political opponents (though the historical meaning of that term actually is much more complicated). Sometimes in the same breath they call for arresting members of the Biden administration in retaliation; on the Fox News Channel on Friday, personality Greg Gutfield added First Lady Jill Biden as a potential target after Jesse Watters called for arresting “all of them, [former House speaker Nancy] Pelosi, too.”
There are a number of problems with their characterization of what is going on.
First of all, Biden’s Department of Justice has operated as it is supposed to: independently. While Trump apparently tried to use the department for his own political ends—we learned just last month, for example, that the Department of Justice kept an investigation of the Clinton Foundation open for almost Trump’s entire term, although prosecutors thought the rumors about the foundation were bogus from the start—Biden has gone out of his way to emphasize that he will not interfere with the Justice Department.
To underline that independence, after Trump announced his candidacy for president last November—an early announcement many thought was an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the two federal investigations that touched on the former president, thus deliberately moving those investigations outside the department. The special counsel is Jack Smith, and those investigations are the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the documents case currently in the news.
Still, the indictment came not from Smith, but from a federal grand jury of ordinary American citizens in Florida who reviewed evidence and determined that there was probable cause to believe that Trump committed crimes and should be tried for them. Trump’s defenders are trying to blur this reality by saying it was Biden who charged Trump, when it was really the members of a grand jury.
Trump supporters’ evidence for Biden’s corruption is that the Justice Department has indicted neither President Biden nor former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for what they claim are similar offenses. (It hasn’t charged Republican former vice president Mike Pence, either, but they are not talking about that.) The crucial difference in all three of those cases is that Biden, Clinton, and Pence did not try to hide the documents found in their possession and they cooperated fully with the Department of Justice to return them. (In addition, in Clinton’s case, most of the 110 emails that contained classified information did not bear classified markings.)
As Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post notes, Trump was not charged for illegally keeping any of the 197 documents he returned. He was charged only for ones he kept, lied about, showed to other people, and hid.
Republicans who are trying to pick up Trump’s voters, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are not defending Trump but are instead trying to argue that the Democrats are discriminating against Trump. “Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president?” DeSantis asked.
That line of reasoning is swaying Republican primary voters, 88% of whom, according to a CBS News poll, say the indictment was politically motivated, although 24% of them agree that the loose handling of the documents was a national security risk. Trump and key supporters are playing to that base, using thinly veiled calls for violence. Meanwhile, Republicans who are likely hoping this will sink Trump are either dodging questions about the issue or, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, remaining steadfastly silent.
But for all the focus on the politics of this moment and the apparent attempt to rally the Republican base to violence, this is a legal case. Trump is accused of serious crimes that endangered—and likely continue to endanger—our national security, which means the safety of every American.
His alleged criminal activity endangers the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in charge of imagery, maps, and intelligence concerning them), the National Reconnaissance Office (in charge of space-based surveillance and reconnaissance), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
It is notable that the two Republican presidential candidates who have served as U.S. attorneys—Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson—have both spoken out against Trump over it. So has Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who told Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel today: “I think the counts under the Espionage Act, that he willfully retained those documents, are solid counts… I do think we have to wait and see what the defense says, and what proves to be true, but I do think that…if even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning.”
Trump is reportedly having trouble finding lawyers to represent him in this matter, with Marc Caputo of The Messenger reporting today that one federal criminal defense lawyer he contacted in the Southern District of Florida said: “The problem is none of us want to work for the guy…. He’s a nightmare client.”
While committed Republican partisans seem to believe Trump is a victim, according to the CBS News poll, 38% of likely Republican primary voters do, in fact, believe Trump endangered our security—and national security, after all, is the primary job of the president.
Smith said on Friday that the department would seek a “speedy trial,” and if that indeed happens, the American people will hear Trump’s own lawyers and aides—for all the witnesses are his own hand-picked team members—testify under oath about Trump’s behavior. Under similar conditions, the testimony of Trump’s people before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol effectively countered Trump’s propaganda. That Republican leaders see Trump as vulnerable is evidenced by how many candidates are already in the presidential race.
The question is how much damage the fight for control will do to the Republican Party, especially in light of the fact that Smith’s other investigation, the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet been concluded. There is reason to suspect those congress members involved in that effort might have been spooked by just how thorough the investigation of the documents case turned out to be.
Guided by President Biden, the Democrats are refusing to comment on the indictment, likely in part to undermine the argument that it is about politics and also because they recognize that many Americans are just tired of drama.
Overall, though, they seem determined to redirect people’s attention to the reality that the Biden administration and the Democrats are actually governing according to the principles of a democracy. Frustrating as this tactic is to partisans, scholars who study how to restore democratic norms in a faltering democracy suggest that emphasizing those norms is crucial.
When he hurriedly left the prime minister’s official residence, Palazzo Chigi, for the last time on 16 November 2011, Silvio Berlusconi looked like a humiliated man. Italy’s finances were in trouble, with international investors betting against the country’s treasury bonds; prosecutors were on his heels due to the infamous “bunga bunga” scandal, which involved an underage sex worker; European allies Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel had made their displeasure with him public. Few would have guessed at the time how much future politics would follow Berlusconi’s populist template.
Berlusconi has died at 86 – he had been in hospital in Milan, undergoing treatment for a lung infection. Yet look around, and you can see his legacy everywhere. In fact, the years that followed Berlusconi’s exit from office vindicated his political style, which combined extreme personality politics, a skilful use of visual media and an unashamed demagogy – all to tap into voters’ disillusionment and cynicism about the status quo. It is hard to think of another politician more prefigurative of politics to come.
Many rightwing populist politicians who were dominant in the 2010s have been compared to Berlusconi, the first among them former US president Donald Trump. Like Trump and well before him, Berlusconi insisted on the fact that he was not a career politician but rather a successful “self-made entrepreneur”, who had decided to enter politics to save his country from leftism. Like Trump, Berlusconi owed his success to his extraordinary use of TV, which, in his case, was made easier by the fact that he owned most of the country’s private TV channels. And finally, very much like Trump, Berlusconi took the political scene by storm by ignoring all the norms of institutional courtesy and politeness, preposterously presenting himself as a victim of judges and electoral authorities, while never shying away from the most vulgar and sensationalist tactics to capture public attention – including his famous penchant for sexual jokes.
Berlusconi embodied what Antonio Gramsci described as the Italian people’s “taste for the operatic”, with his rallies and TV interventions featuring moments that would have befitted a variety show. In terms of political content, though, he was simply a neoliberal: his revolution was one of cutting taxes and red tape and deregulating labour. In fact, he is best seen, historically, as the link between neoliberalism and populism.
In Italy, Berlusconi was instrumental in allowing the far right to enter mainstream politics, forging alliances with the separatist party Northern League and with the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale party, from which the party of the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is descended. (Meloni first came to the limelight by serving as the minister of youth in the last Berlusconi government.)
Curiously, with hindsight, the shift of Italian politics ever further to the nationalist right has made Berlusconi appear relatively moderate. Yet his constant attack on workers, his reported links to the mafia, his manipulation of the legal system, his disastrous economic policies that have accelerated the country’s industrial decline, and his celebration of extreme individualism all set the conditions for Italy’s current reactionary turn.
A key element of his success, which has been mimicked by rightwing populists worldwide, was his ability to transform accusations against him into fuel for his survival. Berlusconi’s career was famously dotted with prosecutions for mafia-related, corruption and tax-evasion crimes. In response, he adopted a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, he vigorously insisted that he was innocent, the victim of communist judges – the most persecuted person in human history. On the other hand, for the benefit of his more disingenuous supporters, especially those from a business class often engaging in illegal or borderline practices, he often winked at the fact that his behaviour was not all that pristine, but whose is?
The echoes with Trump’s current legal tribulations in the US are clear – and don’t augur well for those who think the former president’s fate will be sealed by one more indictment.
In Italy, Berlusconi’s rise was made possible by the fatigue that Italian liberal-democracy cultivated in ordinary people, ever since the Tangentopoli corruption scandal of the early 1990s. In other countries, rightwing figures have preyed on similar sentiments of disillusion towards politics that does not seem to advance the interests of anyone but the elite.
As long as politics is seen – sometimes with good reason – as a big “swamp” (to cite Trumpist rhetoric) of corruption and hypocrisy, the cynical politics that Berlusconi pioneered, and rightwing populists perfected, will continue to triumph. The only way to break this toxic spell is to reinfuse politics with a moral yet tangible mission that actually delivers concrete improvements for the citizenry. This is precisely what Berlusconi failed to do.
Many rightwing populist politicians who were dominant in the 2010s have been compared to Berlusconi, the first among them former US president Donald Trump. Like Trump and well before him, Berlusconi insisted on the fact that he was not a career politician but rather a successful “self-made entrepreneur”, who had decided to enter politics to save his country from leftism. Like Trump, Berlusconi owed his success to his extraordinary use of TV, which, in his case, was made easier by the fact that he owned most of the country’s private TV channels. And finally, very much like Trump, Berlusconi took the political scene by storm by ignoring all the norms of institutional courtesy and politeness, preposterously presenting himself as a victim of judges and electoral authorities, while never shying away from the most vulgar and sensationalist tactics to capture public attention – including his famous penchant for sexual jokes.
‘Trump can’t win’: Koch network releases ads targeting ex-president
The political network financed largely by billionaire Charles Koch is launching a wave of digital ads targeting former President Donald Trump.
The ads argue that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee next year, it will lead to President Joe Biden winning reelection.
Americans for Prosperity Action, a super PAC that received millions of dollars during the 2022 election cycle from the Charles Koch-chaired Koch Industries and the Koch-backed Stand Together Chamber of Commerce, gave CNBC a first look at some of the new digital ads.
Koch, who’s worth more than $60 billion, and his network notched several wins while Trump was in office, including tax cuts and the appointments of multiple conservative Supreme Court justices. The network traditionally backs Republican candidates.
But Koch’s group also had its differences with the former president, including on Trump’s trade war with China. Trump, likewise, ripped the Kochs in a 2018 tweet tirade, saying they’ve become a “total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade.”
One of the spots, titled “Only Way,” has a voiceover saying, “The only way Biden wins is if we nominate Trump again.” Another ad, called “No Thanks,” says, “Trump can’t win” and “we need new leadership.”
A third clip, named “Biden’s Secret Weapon,” says: “What’s Biden’s secret weapon? Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. Biden wins the White House and gets the House and Senate, too.”
Americans for Prosperity Action was active during the 2022 midterm elections and could be on the precipice of exceeding their historic spending spree last cycle. Federal Election Commission records show the super PAC so far this cycle has spent over $300,000 on independent expenditures opposing Trump and Biden.
The PAC finished the 2022 election cycle spending almost $70 million, with their three top candidates being former Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and former Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz. All three were also endorsed by Trump.
All of the Koch digital ads cite public polling that say how key voters don’t want Trump to be president again. Many of those same polls also show that many voters don’t want Biden to run for a second term, either. An NBC News poll taken in April shows that 70% of those polled say Biden shouldn’t run for reelection, with another 60% saying Trump shouldn’t run.
These ads, according to Americans for Prosperity Action spokesman Bill Riggs, are targeting voters in the key early primary and caucus states Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada. Riggs noted that the new ad buys come after Americans for Prosperity CEO Emily Seidel said in a February memo to staff and activists that it would support a GOP candidate for president other than Trump.
“We made clear in February that Washington is broken and our country is in a downward spiral because of it. To write a new chapter for the country, we need to turn the page on the past – and that requires new leadership,” Riggs said in an emailed statement. He added that the Koch-backed group has not made a decision on who it plans to support in the Republican primary for president.
Recent data from Morning Consult shows Trump with 56% of support in the Republican primary, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trailing with 22% of the vote.
The ads are also targeting voters at a tumultuous moment for Trump. He faces arraignment Tuesday in a federal criminal case over his retention of classified and top secret military and government documents. Trump has referred to the case as the “boxes hoax.”
