Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and the Road We're On

Well, Boris Johnson has popped his head from the freezer and apparently seen his shadow, guaranteeing Britain another five years of bullshit. Faced with a tanking economy, scathing international ridicule, and no support from his party, the British public nevertheless gave him the electoral mandate which, until now, he has lacked. As a longtime Anglophile, I care about this sort of thing. But I suggest other Americans should care, too.

Because American and British politics have a history of moving in tandem. Margaret Thatcher’s election preceded Ronald Reagan’s, and their two hand-picked successors, John Major and George H.W. Bush, collapsed almost simultaneously. Bill Clinton coined the term “special relationship” to describe his liaison with Tony Blair, a relationship that continued with George W., cementing American perceptions that the two major parties are more similar than different.

Most important, the Brexit vote came just months before Donald Trump won the Presidency on a technicality. Neither Trump nor Britain’s Conservative Party won a straight majority (which is pretty common in both countries), but both nations have a first-past-the-post election system that means a weak candidate can strategically half-ass their way into an overwhelming legislative majority, which Johnson’s Conservatives did yesterday.

(For Americans, and others unfamiliar with the British system, the Prime Minister isn’t exactly like the President. Queen Elizabeth remains Britain’s nominal head of state, though no monarch has publicly contradicted Parliament since Queen Victoria. The PM is an elected Member of Parliament, who gets further elevated by Parliament itself. This means the PM is usually the head of the majority party, and therefore rarely faces meaningful opposition from the legislature.)

So, follow me here. Britain looked at a government with unpopular policies, a history of racism, and demonstrations of both criminal intent and widespread procedural incompetence, and said: sure, we’ll have some more of that. This should worry Americans already concerned with the Trump administration’s visible lawlessness. The English-speaking world is apparently ensnared in some multinational cultural moment where anything goes, as long as aging White people permit it.

I don’t say “aging White people” flippantly. In Britain and the U.S., the longstanding demographics are changing quickly, as former majorities are increasingly displaced by immigrants. Bruce Cannon Gibney writes that, at present, White Baby Boomers outnumber all minority voting blocs together in America, but their youngest members currently qualify for AARP discounts at most restaurants and grocery stores. And when they die, Whites will slip into the plurality.

Immigration from Latin America, in the U.S., and from the former Empire, in Britain, have changed both countries’ voting and cultural profile. Not that the heritage has disappeared; William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe won’t lose their status in the near future. But we cannot trust that the “normal” aggregate citizen will, in coming years, look like me. I think that’s great. Others consider that an assault on everything they treasure.

Many voters respond by aggressively rejecting the outside world. Donald Trump ran on a platform of undisguised racism, economic policies that kick the weak, and promising to quit international alliances that have secured America’s political and moral leadership since World War II. And he won. So Boris Johnson ran that same platform on steroids. Britain’s economy has been dwindling since the Brexit vote, and British voters apparently don’t mind.

America’s economy is apparently more fraught than Britain’s; our current growth rate mostly depends on who you ask. Trump’s greatest accomplishment is, apparently, to not submarine the boom economy he inherited from the previous administration. But his racism, his profiteering from office, and his undisguised disdain for democracy remain on public display. I truly fear, if something doesn’t change soon, we’ll see the electorate next year shrug and continue unperturbed.

I don’t say this flippantly. Just yesterday, the same day the British electorate returned Boris Johnson to power despite his historically unpopular policies, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee announced his intent to shepherd Donald Trump to a third term, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. This President’s apostles have taken their hero, who is, remember, an admitted sexual harasser and probable rapist, and elevated him to the status of secular Messiah.

I'll be on @seanhannity 2nite @FoxNews at 9pm ET and will explain how @realDonaldTrump will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that's why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) December 12, 2019

Throughout my lifetime, the pattern has been clear: America and Britain aren’t the same, but they move on substantially parallel tracks. And the current track calls for the electorate to return a leader whose policies are massively unpopular, but who is personally somehow well-liked, to power, despite demonstrated incompetence in office. We who believe America has a moral mission in this world should take this as open permission to panic.