The vicissitudes of British democracy have suddenly become more entertaining than the Ashes. As Boris Johnson blunders from one folly to the next, defrocking party rebels, goading the opposition’s ‘surrender monkeys’ and broadcasting threats that he cannot deliver, his pratfalls have made him seem less like a Churchillian saviour snatching victory from the jaws of defeat than a Miltonic Satan – “vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair” – desperately trying to rally his exhausted troops.
The speed at which the Tories have disabused Johnson of his delusions has shown that parliaments can still stand up to an impulsive leader, even when the political atmosphere is suffused with all-or-nothing attitudes. Although Johnson acts like he has a mandate he remains unelected and was in fact appointed by less than a fifth of one percent of the population. The Tories who have turned on him know this and are rightly ashamed by his vulgarity. Two days ago, Sir John Major described the dissent which had led to him – and twenty other Conservatives – being stripped of party membership as a corrective to “the views of a Prime Minister influenced by a political anarchist, who cares not a fig for the future of the party I have served all my life.”
The contrast with America’s conservatives could not be starker. During three years of comparable chaos the GOP has surrendered nearly all of its moral responsibilities and done so in the most abject manner. A few years ago the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, wrote in the Washington Post that he “used to think Trump was an eleven-year-old, an undeveloped bully [but] … I was off by about ten years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval, and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him.” If anything, the GOP’s spinelessness has only made this diagnosis worse. In a recent survey of Trump’s Twitter feed, Susan Glassner points out that a year ago he was ranting about “publicity-seeking Lindsey Graham,” and calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “loser.” Both men are now among his most reliable boosters. Ted Cruz, whose father and wife were mocked by Trump during the 2016 campaign, now hosts rallies for the president and extols his “achievements on behalf of ordinary Americans.”
A key difference between the moral supinity of the GOP and the dissent of Britain’s Tories is due to the latter’s appreciation of what representative democracy ought to entail. Populists have propagandized the idea that a simple majority vote should be the final verdict on any political question but historically this idea is an anomaly. In fact the institutions of representative democracy were explicitly developed as a means of brokering settlements when parties seemed most irreconcilable.
As Ian Buruma, former editor of the New York Review of Books, recently noted: “The idea of the state representing the will of the people is a French Jacobin notion, which has always been rejected by British conservatives, starting with Edmund Burke. There is no such thing as the people in a parliamentary democracy, let alone one popular will or one single popular voice.” Instead of an all-levelling vox populi, representative democracies seek an equilibrium in which: “Politicians are chosen to represent different interests, which can then be debated in Parliament in the hope of arriving at solutions through compromise.”
Under Trump compromise has become a dirty concept, something that “losers” are content with, so the GOP has become correspondingly illiberal, radicalized by its leader’s ignorance of and impatience with the democratic process. By contrast, the political drama in Whitehall shows that some politicians are still capable of mounting a rearguard action against facile populism, and pursing the unglamorous horse-trading of workable compromises rather than blindly following their boorish leader into a political abyss of his own making.
