While we proudly prophesy that autocracies are the main threat to the “free world”, the two oldest democracies on the planet insist on showing us that our main enemy is within.
The elephant in the room is Donald Trump and Brexit, two political earthquakes that caused a kind of reduction to the absurd of democracy, blowing up its main conservative parties.
In the United Kingdom, it has resulted in social anger and the political weakness of its prime minister;
in the United States, in the "shameful" situation (Joe Biden
dixit
) of the House of Representatives, paralyzed by the revolt of a handful of ultras.
If there were any moral, it would be that when an atmosphere of excitement and radicalism is so voluntarily created, there is a risk that it will turn against the propagator, when the monstrous creature, our black swan, takes on a life of its own.
This would explain why neither Trump nor Boris Johnson have had the power to stop the race of political hysteria into which the radicals of their parties are abandoned, which they helped promote.
The promise to transform the United Kingdom into a tax haven, free from Europe's financial, environmental and social regulations, has today turned into canceled medical appointments, poor public transport and a wave of large-scale strikes that put the brink of abyss to the brand new government of Rishi Sunak.
The United Kingdom is a country traumatized by Brexit, deeply divided by the impact of that brilliant exercise in democratic charm that was the referendum, studied today in all political science books as a mechanism that can become the very antithesis of anything that smells like democracy
Its effect has been to zombify the political system, since it is, in effect,
a stupendous instrument for dissolving political responsibility (does anyone remember the avid David Cameron today?) and an unresolved enigma, since its promoters never explain how to turn the winning option into a norm, irreversible due to its binary nature.
These are some lessons from a referendum that has degraded, destabilized and isolated the chimera of the Global UK.
The excessive weight of the most radical wing of the Republican Party is also the result of the ideological collapse that conservatism is experiencing.
The closest example of the existential challenge of the
Grand Old Party
is again in the
Tories
British, although the truth is that democracies are beginning to abound where the most important challenges of our time (war, covid, climate change) do not generate any sensible response from the conservative political family.
Instead, paranoia about the great replacement by the migration threat, hate speech, unorthodox economic recipes of international institutions and a weakening of democratic standards through a dangerous form of attention-grabbing proliferate: the “vetocracy”.
And it should be remembered: when all the demons are taken out of the closet to achieve an electoral victory, it is sometimes impossible to put them back on the rack.
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