From Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump, from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson. Such have been the parallel courses of Western civilization's closest allies, distinguished defenders of freedom and leading lights of democracy. The Fall. If misery loved company, then so too did similarly aligned electorates outsource their native intelligence to demagogues, dunces, quacks and dissemblers.
A growing number of the House of Trump's subalterns have been dismantling their former asylum plank by plank — some, willingly; others, under subpoena or reduced-sentence plea deals. Now comes the selfsame demolition amongst the enablers of Prime Minister Johnson; which is to say, the most egregious enabler there was, and generally the most egregious is followed by lesser ones.
Enter Dominic Cummings, a kind of Bannon to Boris' rise, and later the prime minister's top adviser.
Yesterday, speaking before a parliamentary committee, he deconstructed Johnson's national stewardship — a massive rubble, he said, of "chaos, confusion and incompetence" (NYT). As in America's White House, Downing Street's indifferent demagogue wholly mismanaged the pandemic and left behind countless unnecessary deaths. In fact Cummings swore "he had heard Mr. Johnson say he would rather see 'bodies pile high' than take the country into a third lockdown." The prime minister was "unfit for the job," said Cummings, who unsuccessfully attempted to encase Johnson in a circle of more enlightened policymaking. We know that story quite well.
As reported by the Times, the only gap between Trump and Johnson's malmanagement that I could see was that the Englander might have "skipped Covid meetings to work on a long-delayed book about Shakespeare." Shake-who? the Donald would ask, just as he had to ask his one-time presidential chief of staff, on the their way to the island memorial, what Pearl Harbor was all about. I kid you not.
Swinging back to this post's introductory paragraph, what I found most absorbing about Cummings' testimony were these paraphrased words: "[He] said there was something wrong with a political system that produced Mr. Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, as the two contenders for prime minister in the 2019 election."
The U.S. and U.K.'s political systems differ, of course, and here we lack Britain's level of leftist lunacy (though not for a lack of trying). Yet both, essentially, are representative democracies. And a mere four score ago both were led by statesmen of vision, intelligence and courage. Shadows and more than shadows of these historic characteristics mostly followed — until 2016 and 2019. Both electorates transmogrified into laziness, stupidity and recklessness, installing in power the worst possible premiers.
Not, I must add, because of economic hardships, as sundry studies have confirmed. No, the precipitous slides into absurdity came about because of humankind's primitive prejudices about skin color, tribal accents and cultural variations. That, while both nations considered themselves the most advanced in the world.
Which leads us to ask: At the most fundamental level, have we even begun to crawl out of the primordial slime?