Over the last couple of years, the long-term political parallels between the U.S. and the United Kingdom seem to have come unstuck. It’s a political-science truism that the two largest Anglophone democracies — both rooted, at least in principle, in the common law tradition and near-universal voting rights — tend to function as mirror images of each other, however approximately. Maggie Thatcher came a few years before Reagan, but they were closely allied and historically linked as figureheads of the triumphant New Right. Skip ahead a decade and Bill Clinton’s New Democrats preceded Tony Blair’s New Labour as avatars of the technocratic neoliberalism that promised to rule forever after the “end of history.”
What we see today, some years after the end of history came to a crashing end, looks very different at first glance. I would argue that the parallel still holds, in that the fundamental crisis of democracy afflicting both countries is strikingly similar. It’s tempting for Yank commentators to beat our breasts and proclaim that at least our elder siblings in Blighty are providing some accountability for the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, while the unhinged fascist regime in Washington plows straight through them like an Arctic icebreaker. That may be true, to a boring and limited extent, but it isn’t even close to the whole story. As to which of these formerly house-proud democracies is more badly damaged, that feels like a coin-flip.
