Britain’s Ominous Portent for Democrats

Some would argue that one cannot draw parallels between the politics of the United Kingdom and the United States. Different facts and circumstances apply the argument goes, yet I believe there are parallels that need to be heeded, especially since the motivations of the pro-Brexit forces in the UK and Trump's base are very similar.  What are these? First, there is an abiding hatred of foreigners and non-whites.  Second, there is a contempt for globalization and those they consider the elite - often those who are educated and take a more progressive view.  Third, there is a misguided desire to restore a past that can never be recreated.  The age of the globe circling British Empire will never return, nor will the 1950's America and the white privilege that it embodied.  Given these and other parallels, a column in the New York Times argues that the disaster suffered by the Labor Party in the UK ought to be a wake up call for U.S. Democrats, especially those on the far left of the party.  Will they get the message, probably not, especially among Sanders and Warren supporters.  Here are column highlights:   

When Britain flummoxed and flabbergasted the world by voting in 2016 to leave the European Union, it seemed like a one-off: An unexpected gamble by a normally prudent country, but nothing that signified a profound shift beyond the United Kingdom and Europe.

Donald Trump’s election a few months later proved otherwise. Brexit was a portent, not a fluke. The British electorate may have been incautious, but it was ahead of the trend. The desire, however misplaced or ugly, to “take back” control of a country from supercilious political elites was a global phenomenon, not a local event.

Don’t think it can’t happen again, in much the same way.

That’s a lesson Democrats ought to draw, quickly and clearly, from the thumping victory Boris Johnson won for the Conservative Party on Thursday. As recently as September, some left-wing pundits and politicians were glibly writing off Johnson as a “failed prime minister,” peddling a “fantasy” of a renegotiated Brexit and facing “political disgrace” after losing his majority in Parliament.

Today, . . . . the Tories have their largest majority since 1987, and Labour has sustained its worst defeat since 1935.

How did he do this? In four ways, each of which has parallels with Trump.

First, Johnson was fortunate in his political foes. He ran against the most avowedly leftist frontbench the Labour Party has put forward since the early 1980s. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn proudly calls himself a “socialist.” He rails against a “rigged system” that supposedly exists for the benefit of a handful of billionaires. His campaign promised free college, dramatic increases in health spending, a hike in the minimum wage, massive infrastructure spending, new taxes on the rich, and a “new green deal.”

Sound familiar? It’s the Warren-Sanders manifesto, only with £ rather than $ signs attached.

Second, Johnson was forward looking. He ran as the candidate of Brexit — not, as Theresa May had, as its reluctant and dutiful custodian, but as its persevering and happy warrior. Brexit wasn’t just about unyoking the U.K. from the E.U. It was also a statement of British self-belief, self-reliance and capacity for self-rule.

If impeachment — which I support as a matter of constitutional duty but fear on political grounds — winds up helping Trump get re-elected, it will be for similar reasons. That is, Democrats got so wrapped up in trying to bring the president down by legal and legislative means that they forgot to bring him down by ordinary political ones. The main job of any competent opposition is to fight the next election, not relitigate the past.

Third, Johnson was attuned to the moment. The prime minister is an ideological opportunist, not a purist. This upsets his critics on the right, who dislike some of his big-spending promises. And it confirms the view of his critics on the left, who see his political plasticity as being of a piece with his moral plasticity.

What matters more is relatability, reliability and results. Does the candidate get people like me? Will he keep his political promises? And has he achieved something that directly and tangibly benefits me?

This is Trump’s calling card, as it is Johnson’s. Are there equivalent figures on the left in the U.S. or U.K. willing to shake free from their party’s increasingly tightfitting, ideological straitjackets?

Finally, Johnson has benefited from critics whose mode of analysis is that anything and everything he does is dumb, dishonest, wretched and ruinous. Lately, they warn that he will bring about the end of the country itself. Similarly in the United States, some anti-Trump pundits have been forecasting economic decline and doom for three years straight as the economy continues to grow and unemployment plummets.

Bad things can — and, inevitably, will — happen. In the meantime, what we have is a trans-Atlantic case of boys crying wolf. Does it ever occur to the critics that, by constantly inferring or predicting the worst about either man, they make their less-than-worst moments look good, and their good ones seem positively great?

Like Johnson, Trump is a formidable incumbent. To oppose him with Corbynite candidates and progressive primal screams is to ensure his re-election.

To me, much to the likely screams of left wing Democrats, I suspect the columnist is right on target. 

Trump and Boris Johnson on the Brink

Johnson with Trump - two liars and utterly unfit leaders.

It is somewhat ironic that in the same week Donald Trump and the UK's Boris Johnson - each of whom has political sought power by pandering to the ugliest elements and racist bigotries of their respective country's populace -  have hit a potential brick wall this week.  For Johnson, it was the British Supreme Court's ruling that his suspension of Parliament was illegal and that Johnson had lied to the Queen, and for Trump it was the launching of a formal impeachment inquiry trigger by Trump's apparent withholding of military aid approved by Congress as a lever to extort that nation into launch a bogus investigation of one of Trump's biggest rivals, Democrat 2020 nominee front runner Joe Biden.  Trump's behavior was akin to that of a crime boss making threats a piece at MSN looks ate Trump's willing accomplices - while Johnson's was that of a proliferate liar (a trait Trump shares) which has triggered growing calls for his resignation.  In both cases, the ultimate test is whether the rule of law will prevail or, instead, whether lying bullies prevail and both countries in turn slide towards authoritarianism.  A column in the New York Times looks at this aligning of the stars to see two unfit leaders face serious blow-back.  Here are excerpts:

To see them together in New York, the two charlatans, after all their nationalist-revival shenanigans, encountering the quiet force of the law was an exquisite thing. I am not sure I have ever experienced Schadenfreude in purer form.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying President Trump had “seriously violated the Constitution” and a formal impeachment inquiry would therefore begin. Lady Hale, the president of Britain’s highest court, telling Prime Minister Boris Johnson that his advice to the Queen to prorogue Parliament was “unlawful, void and of no effect.”

That two dignified women delivered the messages on the same day to these brothers in boorishness — men-children who have made a mockery of the special relationship between Britain and the United States — seemed particularly apt.

Trump, according to the reconstructed transcript of a July 25 call, tried to get the Ukrainian president “to do us a favor” by speaking with his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, along with Attorney General William Barr over potential dirt that might sully Joe Biden, a leading Democratic candidate in the 2020 election. Johnson maneuvered to railroad through a British exit from the European Union on Oct. 31 via the suspension of Parliament for several weeks. The machinations were of a piece with the manipulative habits of the two egos in chief.

The law is not malleable or optional. It is what stands between civilization and barbarism, democracy and despotism. Just ask the youth of Hong Kong, who know what extradition into the lawlessness of dictatorial China would mean.

President Trump’s bluntest expression of his view of the Constitution to which he swore an oath was this: “Article II allows me to do whatever I want.”

It does no such thing. The framers, through checks and balances, were intent on limiting power, not unfettering it. They knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely. America did not go through a revolution to recreate in the new world the monarchical diktat of the old.

Richard Nixon took a similar view of the powers of his office. “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” he said. Things did not end up too well for Dick.

Trump has never understood what his oath of office meant. How could he? This man was the product of two things: his family business, where no constraint on his authority existed, and contractors were there to be stiffed; and a reality TV show that prized outrage, indulged his megalomania, and gave viewers a high by mainlining cruelty. Accordingly, Trump chose to play Chicago politics with Ukraine, as if a sovereign nation at war on its eastern border with Vladimir Putin’s Russia was there mainly to be squeezed for his re-election campaign. He has trashed the press, judges, the Federal Reserve, members of Congress — anyone or anything that stood up to him. He has set up operations at the White House as a shambolic exercise in terror. His cabinet fawns, as Saddam Hussein’s once did, scrambling to find loftier expressions of adulation that might delay execution. I don’t know if the impeachment inquiry serves what must be the fundamental goal of Democrats: to remove Donald Trump from office as soon as possible. . . . It has little chance of leading to his removal because, even if the House charges Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors, the Republican-controlled Senate is highly unlikely to vote to convict him.

All of this worries me, but in the end I don’t care. The balance has been tipped. Nobody can accuse Pelosi of rashness. She has been deliberate. She said, “No one is above the law.” That principle must be cardinal.

Trump’s assault on truth, the press, institutions, civility, and the law has been relentless. His unfitness for office has been so glaring as to be breathtaking. As Stephen Burbank, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote, “There comes a time when strategic political calculations must yield to principle if pragmatism is not to entail complicity.” He continued, “The impeachment process is integral to the architecture our founders created for the preservation of democracy.” For Congress to ignore what Trump has done would be to set a dangerous example for future generations.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we have witnessed two men making audacious claims to power and suffering resounding rebukes from two separate but equal branches of government that made clear the executive is not above the law — in Britain from its highest court applying an unwritten constitution, in the United States from Congress exercising its constitutional prerogatives.

An important lesson is this: It takes independent institutions to make the law meaningful and hold the executive to account. That is why dictatorships, or illiberal systems like Hungary’s, seek to suppress them.

Let's hope that if the House issues articles of impeachment an adequate number of Republicans will put the Constitution and democracy over Trump and their own re-election desires.