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By Ousting Boris Johnson, British Tories Show How They Are Different From American Republicans [1]
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Date: 2022-07-07
One way to judge how low American political culture has fallen is to compare the U.S. to the one country it is traditionally most politically similar to — Great Britain.
When England (not the rest of the UK) voted for Brexit in 2016, the same year that Donald Trump was elected in the United States, and then when it elected Boris Johnson — with his right-wing populism, his appeal to traditional left-wing voters in England’s post-industrial north (their equivalent of the Rust Belt) and his disheveled mop of bright yellow hair — to be Prime Minister in 2019, many observers worldwide assumed that Britain and the United States had once again veered politically in the same direction, much like when Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both elected on similar political platforms in the 1990s, as well as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The simple fact of the matter is that while politics in the U.S. and the U.K. is far from identical, it has a tendency to rhyme. Donald Trump even called Boris Johnson “Britain Trump” (exhibiting his usual eloquence).
However, today, the U.K. demonstrated how different its political culture truly is from the one in the United States. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in the fight of his political life over scandals that wouldn’t have even registered in Donald Trump’s America — holding parties in Downing Street (the British White House) during COVID lockdowns, then appointing someone who was a serial sexual molester (of adults) to high office, and lying about what he knew about that person.
Notably, the most common reason cited by British Tories for abandoning their leader was the lying.
Can anyone imagine American Republicans doing something similar? Donald Trump told 30,573 lies while in office.
Let’s not forget that the GOP establishment had at least two golden opportunities to get rid of Donald Trump — and install none other than Mike Pence (someone who should have been perfectly acceptable to them) in his place. Both involved scandals much deeper than those that led to BoJo’s political death across the pond.
In December 2019, the House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump for asking the President of Ukraine (who would go on to become the 21st Century’s Winston Churchill) to interfere in U.S. politics by launching a bogus investigation of Joe Biden’s son, and threatening to cut off U.S. military support to Ukraine if he refused to accede to the request. Trump’s actions leading to his impeachment were nothing short of high treason — intentionally subjugating the national security interests of the United States to his own personal political interests, and intentionally inviting the interference of a foreign country in a U.S. election. Nonetheless, 52 out of 53 Republicans in the Senate voted Trump “not guilty.”
Later, in January 2021, the House impeached Trump again for attempting to overthrow the result of the November 2020 election, and launching a violent mob to attack Congress and murder its leaders (including Pence). That mob, had it managed to get to the U.S. Senators inside the building, would no doubt have murdered many of the Republican Senators themselves, including Mitch McConnell — but 43 out of 50 of those same Senators nonetheless voted Trump “not guilty.”
Needless to say, through those votes, 86% of Republican Senators showed themselves to be spineless, pathetic cowards who didn’t even put party over country — they put a deranged, narcissistic megalomaniac (who was already on his way out the door) over both party and country.
Had Boris Johnson asked Volodymyr Zelensky this year to launch a bogus investigation of Keir Starmer or his family, and threatened to cut off British arms shipments to Ukraine if he didn’t, he would be out of office in a heartbeat, and likely facing criminal investigation just as quickly. Same goes for if he responded to the current political crisis by whipping up a crowd of his deranged supporters and inviting them to physically assault the Houses of Parliament.
The United States, in other words, is nothing like the United Kingdom. The Republican Party, as an institution, is nothing like the British Conservative Party. And both of those are sad facts for America.
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