Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t

American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK, these two phenomena are perceived as identical twin expressions of an alarming ‘populism’, whereby the animals take over the zoo. I’m one of the curiously few political voyeurs who think the American electorate’s preference for an incompetent president and the British electorate’s preference for leaving a power-hungry erstwhile trading bloc have little in common. Dizzying events in the UK this month bring out one vital distinction in relief.

In 2016, certainly Donald Trump’s unanticipated victory triggered an immediate consternation among America’s power brokers that rivalled if not surpassed the British elite’s indignation at the equally astonishing referendum result, which the worldwide intelligentsia also derogated as self-destructive and ignorant. From the get-go, many Democrats have seen Trump as an existential threat to their country’s political, economic and spiritual future. For Trump’s opponents, their nation’s very survival has seemed at risk, as well as the reputation of the country abroad; I myself worry that the damage Trump has done to the US internationally could be long lasting. So the American stakes are high.

Nevertheless, the 2016 presidential election result was not contested. No matter how ferociously Trump’s detractors reviled the man, no matter how fiercely they believed with all their being that this nincompoop was the worst thing to happen to their country in their lifetimes, no one seriously argued that the under-qualified beneficiary of electoral caprice should be prevented from assuming the office. No one launched a campaign to forcibly install Hillary Clinton in the White House anyway, because Trump supporters ‘didn’t know what they were voting for’. Unlike the UK’s narrow but still decisive referendum outcome, the American popular vote went for Hillary by about three million ballots, thereby stirring Democratic outrage and muting Trump’s appearance of having a mandate.