Not long ago, if one were asked to name the world’s two leading democracies, the answer would probably have been the United States and the United Kingdom—the United States largely due to its power and the UK because of its long democratic traditions. Today, both of those countries are becoming an embarrassment to the cause. Indeed, they are both becoming a bit of a joke.
The hilarity begins with their leadership. In 2016, the Americans elected a buffoon as their president. A bigoted, misogynistic, vulgar, lying narcissist. And now it appears the Brits, or at least the British Conservative Party, (Read more…) going to elect a buffoon as the UK’s prime minister. Their odds-on favourite, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, is a nicer buffoon than the American president, and he has at least a good sense of humour, but he too has shown himself to be a bigot and an habitual liar. (And, curiously—apropos of nothing—he also has a weird head of blond hair.)
Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has largely abandoned its role as a world leader and decided instead to become a major mischief-maker. Trump intends to exit the Paris climate accords, thereby abandoning his country’s responsibility to do its part in combating global warming. He has quit the nuclear agreement with Iran while imposing brutal sanctions on the country thereby dramatically increasing tensions in the Middle East. He has engaged in a host of arbitrary trade measures, destabilizing world trade in the process. And he does all this ignoring, even alienating, America’s closest allies. According to Washington columnist George Will, Trump keeps his base happy “by breaking all the china.”
Britain hasn’t gone quite so wildly off the rails. It has focused on embarrassing itself by voting to leave the European union without the slightest idea about how to go about it or what it’s going to do when it leaves. And now, in the words of journalist and author Max Hastings, it “is about to foist a tasteless joke upon the British people—who will not find it funny for long.” As Boris Johnson’s former boss at the Daily Telegraph, Hastings knew Johnson well and has publicly called him a bully, a coward and a “a cavorting charlatan.” He states that Johnson’s elevation to prime minister “will signal Britain’s abandonment of any claim to be a serious country.”
We shall have to wait until 2020 to see if the United States will regain its claim to be a serious country. As for Britain …