A moment for democratic hygiene
And for perspective too: however bad things have been in Britain, they're worse elsewhere.
It is election day in Britain and independence day in the United States of America. A new dawn beckons in the former; a calamity in the latter. This much has been obvious, in both cases, for quite some time. In Britain, the Conservative party has never recovered from getting what it wanted; in the United States, smug delusion now imperils the republic itself.
Or, to put it another way, British politics is increasingly out of step with its international peer group. A period of comparative normality beckons. It will not be without its share of difficulties but, for the first time in nearly a decade, the United Kingdom is in a happier place than most other countries in the G7. Britain is tilting to the centre-left just as other nations are tipping right. And not just right but to the far and, in some cases, extra-constitutional right. Sir Keir Starmer is going to find himself an outlier.
This British election has been a ponderous affair. From its earliest stages it was clear the ruling Conservative party was fighting a defensive, rearguard, action. The Tories gave up early - and prudently - and nothing much has happened since to persuade voters that this is anything other than the biggest CHANGE election in decades. Starmer’s victory may even eclipse Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide. The papers are wondering if this will be the Conservatives’ biggest defeat since 1832 or merely since 1906. This, you may feel, is a distinction without a significant difference.
It is true that Labour will arrive in Downing Street un-freighted with expectation. There are some signs that Labour’s support has weakened in the final few days but no indication this will do anything other than trim the size of their mighty parliamentary majority. For, again, the die was cast before Rishi Sunak became prime minister two years ago. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss sealed the deal for Labour and Starmer has avoided committing the kinds of errors that many of his own supporters would have dearly loved him to make. There have been few rash promises and even fewer concrete spending commitments. When your opponent is losing his mind, why bother distracting attention away from that?
So voters are intent on dishing out a punishment beating that even some Tories now concede is wholly-merited. The new government will have its work cut out but I fancy it will be a happier business than is presently expected. Starmer has been underrated for a long time and I suspect that remains the case.
Professionally, of course, there is a lot to be said for having new people to kick around. Novelty brings its own reward and, in truth, we’ve all tired of the current mob notionally in charge. After a certain point, you just have to acknowledge that you’ve had more than enough of them. Personally, it’s been hard to summon enthusiasm for the kicking business since Boris Johnson left the circus. Liz Truss did as she promised, moving fast and breaking things, and then, well, then the jig was well and truly up. Sunak’s tenure in Downing Street has been little more than a prolonged waiting period that ends, at last, at 10pm tonight.
Across the water, of course, things are now even worse. In France, President Macron continues his long-running experiment to determine whether you really can be too smart for your own good and in America - Jesus Christ - things really are falling apart.
It has been interesting - I think that’s the word, right? - to see mainstream, respectable, American newspapers finally catching up to the implications of their own reporting. Not that there was anything especially bold or brilliant about that reporting for it has long been clear that the Democratic party risks following the Republican party off a cliff. A different kind of cliff, to be sure, but a precipitous fall nonetheless.
In February - February! - the New York Times editorial board published a leader headlined The Challenges of An Ageing President. Their advice, as noted here at the time, could hardly have been better calibrated to help Joe Biden lose the election. According to the Gray Lady:
The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. He needs to be out campaigning with voters far more in unrehearsed interactions. He could undertake more town hall meetings in communities and on national television. He should hold regular news conferences to demonstrate his command of and direction for leading the country.
I think we now know that dog will not hunt. As I noted:
That is an invitation to disaster. Leaning into your greatest weakness is not a great idea. Doing so in ways which will inevitably reinforce that weakness is doubly brave. The more voters see Biden the more they can be sure that he is too old, too doddery, too infirm to manage another four years in the Oval office.
The recent calamitous debate - really, no other word will do - merely confirmed this. The Democratic party cannot hide Joe Biden from view but nor can they allow him to be seen. Heads you lose; tails the other guy wins.
There is no escape from this. Even if you think Biden can still just about manage the business of being president now, no-one can sensibly believe he will be fit to occupy the Oval Office for the next four years. Voters know this and asking them to forget or ignore what they know is a fool’s errand. It can’t be done, even if you are rash enough to still think it should be tried.
That Trump is demented in far more dangerous ways - and a clear threat to the republic - is neither, for the moment, here nor there. He is a more vigorous presence on the campaign trail and that, I am afraid, matters. Nor, for the time being, does Trump even need to say or do anything. He need merely show American voters the video of Biden’s debate “performance”.
Primary culpability for this reckless and shocking state of affairs lies with a Republican party that has sold itself to a charlatan would-be dictator. That cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Yet the Democrats must also own their own responsibility for helping to create the circumstances in which a Trump return is not just plausible but also, for the time being, probable.
All of this, again, was both foreseeable and foreseen. It is a reminder that ego (Biden) and weakness (the party as a whole) can conspire with fatal consequences. You, being a sensible person who can see what is happening, might think that the Democratic movement might have learned something from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg fiasco but people like you do not run the Democratic party or the Biden White House.
And so, here we are. The betting markets - which are not everything but not nothing either - already suggest Kamala Harris is as likely as Biden to be the Democratic nominee in November. This is the sort of revolver that, once placed on stage, has to be fired.
There are obvious risks there, not the least being that Harris is underwhelming herself and, at present, polls badly when matched against Trump. But a brokered convention - while appealing from a purely journalistic perspective - is hardly any better. So, does it have to be Harris? I rather suspect that, at least right now, it does.
The more you think on all this, the more reprehensible it becomes. Trump is a genuine threat to American democracy and the western alliance. Yet Democrats have behaved in ways that suggest - in terms of revealed preferences anyway - he is not actually as significant a danger as they allege. For if he was, you would not insist that a plainly past-it 81 year old is the only thing standing between something like normalcy and catastrophe. But that is what they have done.
Again, the first helping of shame must be owned by the Republican party but there is more than enough of the stuff for Democrats to have their share too.
Set beside all this, our little election here in the United Kingdom is both a pleasing moment of democratic hygiene and a depressing outlier in the current tide of human and political events.
If nothing else, though, this may serve as a check on the exceptionalism that has played too great a part in our own domestic discussions in recent years. National hubris is always unattractive but its partner, national self-abasement, is scarcely any more attractive. The UK has endured plenty of difficulties in recent years, many of them self-inflicted, but it is not, and has not been, uniquely prone to disappointment. The myopia of much of the liberal left is as tedious as its right-wing counterpart. Not everything is worse here and this election, notwithstanding the frustrations and challenges that will surely test and sometimes overmatch the new government, is a useful moment at which to remember that.
Excellent. One of your best.
A brilliant and thoroughly depressing summary of the US political scene