THE ATLANTIC: The Rise and Fall of Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage

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It’s their ideological similarities, however, that could spell trouble for both of them. “They have an exaggerated sense of how many people actually bought into their core agenda,” Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester and a research investigator at the independent think tank U.K. in a Changing Europe, told me. He noted that while both men were able to successfully leverage a contentious wedge issue—nationalism—to unite different groups among their respective electorates and catapult themselves to the top, they didn’t necessarily earn enough widespread support to stay there. “Ultimately their influence does have some relationship to their electoral power. Farage got himself on the agenda because he was pulling votes from the Conservatives; Bannon catapulted Trump to the top through a series of upset primary wins. So the same mechanism that put them up can pull them down—and is already pulling them down, it seems.”