Brexit has become a culture war of the kind that is much more familiar from the

kind of American experience of guns and abortion then somehow become lined up

with Republican and Democrats rather than people's political

identities being so much about economics and now it's increasingly based around values.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

I'm going to do something very risky for my opening monologue today,

which is to try and give you some sense of what's going on in Italy but of course that changes every day and I'm

recording with a good number of days before the episode is released so probably by the time you're

hearing this it has all turned out to be wrong. But here the basics. About a

and a half ago different populist parties including the far right

League and the five-star movement which has its political roots on the left took about two-thirds of the vote in the Italian elections.

The five-star movement and the League ended up forming a kind of ideologically strange coalition,

which seemed to demonstrate at the time that being a populist is a more important political marker than

whether you are on the left or the right.

That populists can work surprisingly well together

across ideological differences

because they are united in an enmity to some of the institutions of the current order and

liberal democracy more broadly.

Now despite predictions of the imminent collapse of the government that accompanied it

over the way through and despite predictions particularly that voters would get sick of the

far-right leak, these two parties have mostly kept their support.

The only thing that happened, as it tends to happen, is that Mateo Salvini, the leader of the far right league, has rapidly

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