According to this nascent meme, today’s conservative grassroots holds strong echoes of earlier radicalism on the left. The Tea Party movement that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama’s birth certificate is, in this view, more than just the latest herpetic outbreak of Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid “pseudo-conservatism.” It is a reincarnation of the New Left and 1960s counterculture. The Tea Partiers, it is becoming fashionable to argue, are the heirs not just of the John Birch Society and the young Barry Goldwater, but also of Students for a Democratic Society and the young Abbie Hoffman.

If this analogy smells suspect, it’s for good reason. Yet it appears to be gaining traction, especially among a certain breed of moderate with confused understandings of Tea Party conservatism, the New Left, and ’60s counterculture. In late February, Michael Lind wrote a Salon piece in which he claimed, “The tea partiers are the hippies of our time…In Glenn Beck, the countercultural right has found its own Abbie Hoffman.”

Although Hoffman was never a hippie (he called flower children “glassy eyed zombies” and passed through the civil rights and antiwar movements on his way to founding the Youth International Party in 1968), and Beck is neither exuberant nor radical (he is a sexually repressed Mormon businessman who exemplifies modern crackpot reaction), Lind’s strange comparison nonetheless found an admirer in David Brooks of the New York Times. Last Friday, March 4, Brooks expanded on Lind’s thesis in a column titled “The Wal-Mart Hippies.” Echoing Lind, Brooks writes that, much like 1960s leftwing radicals, the Tea Partiers want “to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.” He called Lind’s comparison of Beck to Hoffman “astute.”

“Obtuse” would be a better description, says Paul Krassner, a founding member of the Yippies and a friend of the late Abbie Hoffman. “Whereas the Yippies saw through the propaganda machine, the Teabaggers are soaked in it,” explains Krassner. “We were active in a time of abundance, they are active in a time of economic catastrophe; so we fought villains and they fight scapegoats. Abbie Hoffman was a seeker of justice; Glenn Beck rationalizes injustice. Abbie was hysterically funny; he made people laugh and think simultaneously. Beck promulgates hysteria; he exploits the fear that he helps create. To link them as part of the same tradition is sixties bashing at worst and sloppy journalism at best.”

Brooks is a particularly sloppy practitioner of ’60s bashing. He opens his piece by declaring, “About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment [we] call the New Left.”

This chronology places the New Left’s creation in 1970, around the time the movement peaked and imploded in a spasm of factionalist nihilism. The year of the New Left’s birth was actually 1962, when Tom Hayden, then an undergraduate, conceived and coauthored “The Port Huron Statement.” This document and the new generational liberalism it symbolized did not aim, as Brooks claims, to destroy the establishment. It merely asked probing and fundamental questions about American society and the obligations of citizenship in what was then a deeply flawed and incomplete democracy.

No comparable document marks the creation of the Tea Party movement. In place of the “Port Huron Statement” and the proto-New Left works of scholars like C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman and William Appleman Williams, the Tea Partiers have “Santelli’s Rant,” Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed and Glenn Beck’s “We Surround Them” Fox special costarring Chuck Norris.

In their rush to present a catchy frame for understanding the Tea Party, Lind and Brooks fail to think through the other half of the equation. Most flagrantly, Brooks treats the New Left and the counterculture as interchangeable phenomena. Although they increasingly overlapped as the decade wore on, they represent distinct wings of the 1960s. Listing the differences between the New Left and the Tea Party Right, Brooks writes: “One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.”

Leaving aside the fact that the famous concert in upstate New York was not a New Left event, the differences between Woodstock and Wal-Mart are not exactly minor. There is a vast and defining gulf separating the acts of screwing in the mud on acid, and bargain shopping for a new plasma screen on which to watch Fox News. Brooks is clearly proud of his term “Wal-Mart Hippies” (which he recently repeated during an appearance on the “Colbert Report”) but the phrase is oxymoronic. There is little meaningful commonality between a youth movement based on the quest for authenticity, beauty and release, and a largely geriatric one based on anger, ignorance and fear.

But back to the New Left. Unlike Tea Party conservatism, the New Left from its earliest stirrings to its final crack-up was an intellectual movement, based not just on deeds and street protest, but also on books and ideas. It incubated during the late 1950s and early ’60s on the state campuses of Wisconsin, Michigan and California, inspired by historians, social scientists and activists-theorists on the non-Communist left.

The same was true across the pond, where the British New Left coalesced around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the journal Studies and Left Review. This transatlantic movement may have spawned Little Red Book-waving posers and slogan screamers, but it also nurtured a new generation of serious critics and scholars, from the philosopher Michael Walzer to the historian Gabriel Kolko.

No comparable firmament exists within 100 miles of the Tea Party movement. Even the late New Left at its most anti-intellectual constituted a veritable Enlightenment compared to what passes for political discourse in the Tea Party scene. The new conservative grassroots was born into the arms of Roger Ailes and nursed on Dick Armey-scripted email alerts. In place of pioneering history, social science and investigative journalism, Tea Partiers consume endless quantities of religious pseudo-history and warmed-over conspiracy theories spooned out by baby-food sites like NewsMax and FreeRepublic. If the Tea Party movement has a Bible, it is not Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, but Cleon Skousen’s illustrated work of Mormon Dispensationalism, The 5,000 Year Leap; if it has an in-movement journal, it is nothing on the level of the New Left’sRamparts, or even National Review, the guiding publication of an earlier conservative insurgency; rather, it’s whatever is on AM talk-radio.

But for Brooks, both movements are similarly delusional and quixotic. He writes:

Members of both movements go in big for conspiracy theories. The ’60s left developed elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks – theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky. In its short life, the Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters.

No one who has spent any time with the Tea Party crowd or read a book by Noam Chomsky in the last 20 years could have written this sentence. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky, he is no conspiracy theorist. One of the most frequent criticisms leveled at Chomsky from the left is that his work is “insufficiently theoretical”-i.e., it does not provide easy, overarching narratives. Chomsky is careful to describe his densely sourced works as “institutional analyses”-analyses that are strikingly devoid of “shadowy networks” or conspiratorial rhetoric. Anyone who doubts the absurdity of Brooks’ comparison is encouraged to read Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarins back-to-back with Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.

Still, Brooks remains convinced that “the similarities [between 1960s radicals and the Tea Partiers] are more striking than the differences.” Like Lind, Brooks argues that “Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor.”

This comparison, too, depends on having little engagement with either today’s Tea Party protests or 1960s protest culture, particularly its most creative elements in the form of anarchist street theater groups like the Motherfuckers, the Diggers and the Yippies. “[These late '60s-era groups] were genuinely creative, subversive and radical,” says J.P. Harpignies, author of Political Ecosystems and a veteran of both the New Left and the counterculture. “They also lived in tenement apartments without money or mainstream political or media allies. This is hardly the case with those populating Tea Party protests marked by racist signage and the support of wealthy demagogues, giant corporate-funded think tanks and a conservative media establishment led by Fox News.”

Where the Tea Partiers are ideologically confused to the point of incoherence, the Yippies and Co. were by and large well-read leftists with anti-authoritarian beliefs they could cogently defend. As for their “extreme statements,” the Yippies were trying to shock people. The Tea Partiers, by contrast, don’t understand why eyes widen when they speak of the president’s Kenyan citizenship, the Communist Czars who once ruled Russia or FEMA concentration camps. They just think they’re talking plain Palin-style common sense.

Today’s New Right is not yesterday’s New Left. Glenn Beck is not Abbie Hoffman circa 1970. If anything, he is Hoffman’s Yippie partner turned Yuppie greed head, Jerry Rubin, circa 1980. Nor are the Tea Partiers “Wal-Mart Hippies” or “Wal-Mart New Leftists.” They’re Wal-Mart Birchers. It’s on that side of the 1960s their forerunners stood on at the time, and it’s on that side they remain.

Beck photo by Gage Skidmor

Brooks photo by 16 Miles of String

August was a cruel month for America’s neo-Nazis.

We begin with the arm-banded anti-Semites of the National Socialist Movement. If you aren’t familiar with the NSM, think of the uniformed Nazis of the Skokie scene in The Blues Brothers. Like George Lincoln Rockwell’s old American Nazi Party, the NSM loves to dress up and go on parade. Known within the global movement as America’s “Hollywood Nazis,” their campy obsession with costumes and titles is part Degrassi Junior High drama class, part adolescent fantasy inspired by too many viewings of Nazi sexploitation flicks like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

The group made headlines last month for holding their national meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina. Greensboro is about as loaded a place as you can find in the history of neo-Nazism in America. In 1979, the city ran with blood during a confrontation between protesters and an alliance of American Nazi Party/KKK members that resulted in the death of five anti-fascist labor organizers. (Ten others were wounded). This time around, the only violence inflicted was on the cars of two NSM activists. The first incident occurred downtown, when a small NSM caravan cruised past 200 protesters. Writes a local correspondent for Infoshop News:

Halfway through the rally a three-car caravan of Nazis thought it would be fun to drive by the rally and greet us with a Nazi salute. A 50-person chase ensued, resulting in [a] back window being kicked out and glass bottles being thrown at both the car and its passengers, creating a very unpleasant situation for Nazis dumb enough to show up on the streets of Greensboro. Two out of three vehicles made it through the traffic light leaving their friends behind to suffer the consequences. The Nazis, frightened and insecure, called on the police. The rally continued and a large group of antifascists stayed downtown into the night, successfully keeping Greensboro safe and quiet.

The weekend ended with a Mack truck decorated with NSM decals being vandalized in the parking lot of La Quinta Inn. All windows were smashed out. Success all around in keeping the streets Nazi-free, containing the NSM in a small space hiding behind the police, and witnessing Greensboro rally together against fascism in all its forms.

The humiliation in Greensboro continued after NSM activists slithered back to their computer rooms. Days after Greensboro, someone sent 600 private NSM emails to Wiki Leaks. Two years worth of dirty khakis, flapping in the breeze for the world to see. The internal emails consisted mainly of childish internecine food-fights and parental reprimands from party leadership. Typical was this exasperated plea from NSM “Commander” Jeff Schoep: “When Col. Bishop and I have to play babysitter, and talk to people about drama, it makes us, all of you, and our Party look foolish.”

Indeed it does. But not as foolish as this little scandal from 2006.

If August was a bad month for the costume-and-pomp end of the neo-Nazi spectrum, it was worse for the much grittier world of white-power prison gangs. A district court judge in Los Angeles announced in late August that area medical centers have declined a transplant request by the leader of the prison-based Aryan Warriors gang. Ronald “Joey” Sellers, imprisoned on racketeering and murder charges, suffers from late-stage liver failure caused by hepatitis. Sellers is a major figure within the Aryan Warriors hierarchy, which hands down orders for racially motivated attacks on other prisoners often resulting in serious injury and death.

Combining elements of both the above stories is the ongoing drama of the former NSM leader Bill White, current chairman of the American National Socialist Workers’ Party.

White is the most notorious tool in the Internet-based neo-Nazi subculture. For years he has been posting the home addresses of anyone who crosses him, or who makes a juicy target for the unhinged readers of his old website, the once heavily trafficked Overthrow.com.

Last year, this practice finally caught up with White. Chicago police threw him in prison on charges of encouraging violence by posting the name, address and telephone number of a Chicago jury member that helped convict a fellow white supremacist. In August, a judge dropped the charges, citing White’s “free speech.” But he didn’t walk. He was transferred to Virginia, where he stands accused of threatening a human rights lawyer, a newspaper columnist, a New Jersey mayor and several others by email, telephone or online. A bond hearing is scheduled for September 10. Whether released before trial or not, White’s lawyers plan to make the same free speech defense that worked in Chicago.

For me, White’s case is personal. I’ve been on the receiving end of his “free speech,” and I hope he gets enough hard time to write his own Mein Kampf.

Back in 2006 I worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s quarterly magazine, Intelligence Report. While there I covered White’s role in the near-implosion of the National Socialist Movement. I also wrote about his long history of causing trouble for far-right groups and inability to handle authority. White responded with an Overthrow.com article entitled, “Jew Journalist Publishes Lengthy Attack On NSM And ANSWP.” The article included my photo, name, and address. But that’s not all. He also posted the names and addresses of my parents and younger sister.

Bill White himself poses no threat. He is a sniveling little Internet geek, the neo-Nazi equivalent to a fantasy game dragon-master. At 32, he is most likely a virgin. He is flabby and a coward, on his own incapable of hurting a small, domesticated mammal. But when he posts information about his “enemies,” White is daring his readers–those bigger, bolder and stupider than he–to do something. He’s been implicitly inciting violence for years. When he gets out of prison, he’ll keep doing it. Eventually, it is going to get someone killed. The Roanoke judge who hears Bill White’s case should do the country a favor and keep him in a cage. There he can live out his fantasy and be an Aryan Princess to a heavily tattooed 250-pound Aryan Warrior.

But given White’s long history of lashing out at authority when placed in a subordinate role, the gang would be wise to knock out his teeth before they take turns fucking his face.

Back in May, Germany’s domestic intelligence service issued a report that echoed a previous warning by America’s Department of Homeland Security. The allied agencies shared a concern: an increase in threatened and actual violence emanating from the far-right fringes of their respective democracies.

The summer of 2009 has more than justified these warnings. Here in the States, there have been two fatal shootings by members of far-right groups or movements, as well as a general rising mood of violence accompanying the national debate over, of all things, health care policy. In Germany, the summer has seen a rise in violent crime and organizing efforts by proto-fascist groups like the black-clad street group, the Autonomous Nationalists.

But it wasn’t street thugs who made a cameo in what was by far the most dramatic act of far-right violence in Germany this summer. In July, a supporter of the National Democratic Party stabbed a pregnant Egyptian woman to death in a Dresden courtroom. Before the fatal attack, the assailant had loudly declared his loyalty to the NPD and promised that its rise to power would solve the country’s problems. The Saxony-based party holds seats in two state parliaments and is currently canvassing for next month’s federal elections scheduled for September 27.

Like their fellow neo-Nazi parties around the world, the NPD has a peculiar way of canvassing; one that sometimes involves beating people of color in public. On Monday, three NPD members assaulted a 46-year-old non-white British national in front of his family in Hamburg. According to a report in the Times of London:

“Police said that the 46-year-old man was with his wife and four-year-old son at a bakery stall when the men approached him and handed him a flyer for the National Democratic Party. When the man ripped the pamphlet up his attackers pushed him against a glass window and one man punched him while another sprayed pepper spray in his eyes. Three suspects, who have not been named, have been arrested and are being investigated on suspicion of causing bodily harm.”

“News of the attack came on the same day that German prosecutors brought charges against a man accused of hanging a blood-drenched pig’s head and a banner denying the Holocaust at a Jewish cemetery in the city of Erfurt.”

The Hamburg assault hopefully caps a month of German headlines involving the NPD. In early August, a senior party official attempted to establish a “youth camp” in a rural hotel in Lower Saxony. The property was raided and quickly shut down by authorities, but the brazen flouting of German law heartened neo-Nazis around the country. Party activists then began the systematic harassment of a Christian Democratic candidate, Zeca Schall, who emigrated to Germany from Angola in 1988. According to Spiegel Online:

“The NPD released a press statement suggesting they would like to hold “direct talks” with Zeca Schall, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. In the statement, the NPD also said they would like to “encourage” Schall … to return to his homeland and start a new life there. They said that a local should be doing his job. Schall is responsible for issues of integration — that is, issues involving immigration and multi-culturalism — for the CDU in Thuringia. As a result of the NPD’s statement and what were construed as barely veiled threats, local police have been posted near Schall’s house in his hometown of Hildburghausen.”

With some polls suggesting the NPD will make gains in September’s election, Zeca Schall may not be the only German sleeping poorly in the coming months.

Earlier this month, 33-year-old KKK activist and FBI fugitive Micky Louis Mayon was arrested in Tel Aviv on a tip from Interpol. Mayon had been on the Feds’ 100 Most Wanted list since leaving the country to escape arrest in November of 2007. He was promptly shipped back to the U.S. and persecuted for a series of violent crimes.

In April, former KKK Grand Wizard and current globetrotting freelance anti-Semite David Duke was detained in Prague, Czech Republic, on charges of denying the Holocaust, for which he faced up to three years in prison under Czech law. Duke was in the city promoting the newly released Czech edition of his book, “My Awakening,” which along with denying the Holocaust explains how a cabal of Jews run and destroy the world. Duke was subsequently deported from the country, but the case against him and those who invited him was not dropped.

In recent weeks, however, the prosecution against Duke has come to a standstill. According to the Romea news service:

Duke’s attorneys said previously that the American had no influence over the publication of his book in the Czech Republic because he does not own the copyright. Moreover, he wrote it in the USA, where it is not considered criminal, during the 1990s. [They] said criminal prosecution would therefore be impossible due to statutes of limitations. However, according to another legal opinion, Holocaust denial is a crime against humanity and is not subject to statutes of limitations.

Police are also investigating whether the publisher committed a crime in releasing Duke’s book. The publishing house Kontingent Press is behind its publication in the Czech Republic. Police have of course admitted that the publisher will evidently not be charged, as the book includes a preface in which the company distances itself from the content.

The successful prosecution of Duke would put an end to what have become frequent and profitable trips to the Central European country by the veteran extremist. Until now, those of Duke’s ilk have had little to fear from the Czech authorities — perceived permissiveness on whose part has led German neo-fascists to hold regular hate rock concerts on the Czech side of the border with Germany, which feature, among other things, speeches promoting Holocaust denial. But the penetration of extremist ideas into Prague’s most prestigious university, a professor at which sponsored Duke’s visit, would have marked a sobering low for the country. Just as it will if Duke is allowed back into the country after lying low for a while. Which would be par for the course.

To the extent that anyone noticed gains made by extremist parties in last month’s European Parliament elections, focus fell on the electoral surge by Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League, which shares ruling duties with Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party.

But an arguably more disturbing development occurred in Europe’s east: Hungary’s nascent extremist party “Movement for a Better Hungary,” aka Jobbik, won almost 15 percent of the vote, coming out of nowhere to earn three of the country’s 22 seats in Brussels. The Jobbik Party was founded in 2003 on a virulently anti-Roma (Gypsy) platform that encourages nostalgia for Hungary’s history of far-right parties stretching back to 1930s, including Gyula Gömbös’ Hungarian National Defence Association and the Arrow Cross movement, which received direct funding from Nazi Germany.

In 2007, Jobbik even founded its own paramilitary outfit, The Hungarian Guard, which wore fascist uniforms while marching through Roma neighborhoods. The Guard was (finally) banned last month by the government. In response, Jobbik party activists gathered on Budapest’s Elizabeth’s Square over July 4 weekend to protest. Not surprisingly, things turned violent. More than 100 protestors were arrested and 20 injured in clashes with police. Among those arrested was the party leader, Gabor Vona, a formerly of Hungary’s mainstream rightwing party, Fidesz.

What explains Jobbik’s rise and growing appeal? In a recent column for the Inter Press Service, Zoltan Dujisin points to the usual recipe of economic downturn, which has hit Hungary harder than most, and the fear of the mainstream parties to address popular outrage over alleged widespread Roma crime. Dujisin explains:

Jobbik began as a movement of right-wing university youths, and evolved into a party in 2003, betting on the Roma issue while avoiding the anti- Semitic clichés of other extreme-right parties. Unlike its far-right predecessors that had their base in Hungary’s larger cities, Jobbik’s anti-Roma rhetoric scored points in the countryside as well, especially in poor areas populated by the Roma. Besides uniting a previously factional extreme-right movement, Jobbik managed to rally support by presenting itself as beyond left-right divisions and campaigning against “Roma crime”, a topic absent from mainstream politics a mere 18 months ago…. Ironically, [the mainstream right’s] recent turn to the centre only helped push disillusioned rightist voters into Jobbik’s arms, to which must be added the surprising votes coming from traditional socialist strongholds.

It isn’t just in Hungary that anti-Roma sentiment is surging. It is a current that runs deep throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This is especially true in the Czech and Slovak Republics, where recent organized violence against Roma has produced record numbers of Roma seeking asylum abroad. (As a result, Canada last month announced it was considering reinstating visas for Czech and Slovak nationals.) For most of the post-communist period, the Czechs and Slovaks have been the poster-children for anti-Roma racism. Now, nearly 20 years after the fall of communism, they appear to have a challenger for the role.

It’s a good bet that on July 4, the (noticeably smaller) Tea Party crowds were even whiter than the April tax-day events. This is because the first Tea Party protests were peppered with neo-Nazi activists handing out flyers like these, making any minorities present distinctly uncomfortable.

It’s not a shock that neo-Nazis would be attracted to the Tea Parties. Just as any anti-war protest will draw recruitment-minded anarchists and revolutionary communists, movements on the right draw the far more dangerous equivalents on the other end of the spectrum. Nothing excites neo-Nazi extremists in this country more than the site of angry white people screaming epithets against a black president, illegal immigrants, and social welfare programs.

If the Tea Party movement manages to regain its momentum, it will be interesting to see how its organizers handle the growing interest of far-right groups. Until now, Tea Party defenders have decried descriptions of the movement’s ranks as made up of “neo-Nazis, militias, secessionists and racists.”

And they’re right that the involvement of a few genuine extremists should not tar the quarter of a million people who have gathered to practice their First Amendment rights. But the tone of the two Tea Parties has been noticeably nasty, with personal and often racist attacks on the President.

Tea Party media boosters cry foul when this is pointed out, but deep down they know there is a heavy strain running through the ranks that easily slides into very dark territory. Glenn Beck, the syndicated radio and Fox News host who is a leading face of the movement, recently published a bestselling book that doubles as a sort of Tea Party manifesto. The book, Common Sense, opens with a disclaimer that the author does not support violence. In case his readers missed this call to “leave the muskets at home,” Beck repeats it in the book — five times.

If the Tea Party movement is interested in growing beyond the  angry white fringe of a shrinking Republican Party, people like Beck might want to consider a call for people to also leave the racist signage at home, along with the muskets. Otherwise, expect the neo-Nazi recruitment efforts to grow. This will make April’s DHS report on rightwing extremism more prescient, and conservative dismissals of its content even less credible than they already are.

Drawing notably less attention was Berlusconi’s remark, made less than two weeks after his wife filed for divorce, that “the Left’s idea [of] a multi-ethnic Italy… is not our idea.”

This was not a shocking statement coming from Berlusconi. His ruling party, The People of Freedom, contains the DNA of at least two defunct parties that contained neo-fascist strains, the National Alliance and the Italian Socialist Movement. Still, a statement with overtones of mass expulsion or worse deserved at least as much attention as Berlusconi’s offhand and much-discussed November remark that the new American president elect was “young, handsome and even tanned.” It’s one thing to confirm Berlusconi’s reputation as a boor; it is something else for a leading European politician — who maintains high-approval ratings despite a never-ending tide of scandal — to reject the reality of his country’s multi-ethnic present and future.

The disturbing comment was just the latest in a spate of controversies in Italy that have highlighted an acidifying backlash against immigrants among the Italian public and the country’s center-right political class. In May, Rome ordered the Italian navy to return to Libya more than 200 African boat people without allowing them a chance to apply for asylum, turning its back on standard EU practice. Around the same time, Milan’s regional secretary for the anti-immigrant Northern League gave a speech in which he floated the idea of creating “seats or carriages reserved for the Milanese” on public transport. In customary fashion, the prime minister excused his colleague’s remark as “a quip, a provocation.” The Northern League is Berlusconi’s partner in government and controls the Interior Ministry.

The promotion of segregated seating on buses arrived just in time for the one-year anniversary of the Northern Alliance’s last bright neo-fascist idea: the fingerprinting of Gypsy children as a way to curb crime and public begging. This idea was hatched last June following anti-Gypsy pogroms in Naples.

Heated immigration debates have been taking place throughout Europe for a long time. But the economic crisis has given many of these debates a darker edge, and Italy appears to be the European country closest to taking a very ugly turn, with the bounds of the acceptable ever widening. A recent Eurobarometer poll taken ahead of the recent European Parliament elections found that immigration is more of a concern in Italy than in any other European country. And despite the controversial ideas offered by the country’s ruling coalition, another recent poll finds that, among Western Europeans, Italians are least concerned about the growth of political extremism.

As Berlusconi’s coalition maintains strong support despite decrying his country’s multi-ethnic population, it’s hard not to suspect that the reason the EU’s most illiberal public isn’t worried about a culture of extremism is because they’re already soaking in one.