The U.S. suffers greatly from the demise of federalism and it’s insane that anybody would want to copy it. People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.
Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.
Or, an Empire.
The EU is decidedly not that, however. Perhaps this article was published 10-20 years too soon, and one day in the future an Imperial American (or French) bureaucracy decides that it's time to bring the friends across the pond closer into the orbit of the Imperial State.
Joking, of course. The problems within the United States today (where I am made to care about the goings on in States not my own) are of course the same problems this hypothetical Empire would face.
This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves. Politics is how groups of 2 or more people make decisions; in order for humanity to advance we have to believe we can work together despite our differences.
> People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.
Both States would suffer greatly because of lessons we learned while we were governed by the Articles of Confederation.
> Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.
There really are no homogeneous cultures--for example Sweden has 25 provinces with "their own cultural identities, dialects and folklore" [1].
The reason Congress has ground to a halt is the George W. Bush administration killed the Republican party by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and presiding over the financial collapse of 2008, but rather than adapt it doubled down on its (admittedly successful) politics of demagoguery, using wedge issue after wedge issue to divide the electorate while also pursuing anti-democratic electoral strategies like gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. This lead to leaders who succeed not by appealing to a majority of all Americans, but by proving their bona-fides to a small subset of increasingly radicalized voters on the right (Republican primary voters), largely by "not compromising their values" to work on legislation with the Democrats and instead obstructing and grandstanding. An unfortunate byproduct of this is there's no longer any governing expertise or even impulse in the party, so even when they're in the majority Republicans have a difficult time providing effective governance.
But that's just Congress, and I wouldn't say we've not implemented major policy reforms--the Supreme Court (an intensely anti-democratic institution dominated by the far right and largely appointed by non-representative Senate cohorts) is working hard to reshape the US.
Anyway, Christians would say we're all God's children. I don't know why people on the right are so taken with this idea of balkanization and segregation (I, of course, have some ideas), but it's not the path forward.
[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emo_Philips#Die,_heretic!
This is provenly false, as countries do stabilize when small at around a few million or so and people no longer feel the need to split up more.
Its just dumb to try to argue that there is no optimal country size, so trying to make it smaller will only lead to single person countries, that is clearly not true in reality.
Another thing that disproves this is long lived empires. Japan's been around what like, a millennia and a half? Rome was almost around a thousand years, etc.
(Are you gonna argue Japan's a monoculture? Definitely not! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan)
And this whole article is nonsense because literally no politician anywhere, in Canada or the EU, has suggested this union...
That is largely because the right has split into populist right and centre-right parties though.
Sure they are. No election for about 4 years. Left wing party with 100% of the actual power.
“Membership is primarily made up of middle-class professionals and the party's composition has a higher proportion of university educated members than the other major political parties of the United Kingdom.”
These folks are far afield of the traditional Labour working class base, many of whom have defected to Tories or Reform. They are what we’d call the “Acela Class” in America.
Luckily for Labour, they don’t have to make any policy concessions to these voters.
That’s what I meant when I said nationalists have rendered ruling parties impotent even when they can’t outright win the election. Similar things have happened in Germany and France. In Germany, it took the right splitting and a stoplight coalition of greens, neoliberals, and socialists to cobble together a majority. In France, it took a coalition of communists, socialists, and centrists. It’s hard to actually govern when the winning side has little in common other than opposition to nationalism.
And any leftist/centrist coalition is fragile, relying on infighting among the right. If Tories became a strongly nationalist, anti-immigration party, they could probably win. Same thing for CDU. That’s already happened in the U.S. GOP.
But the UK doesn't really follow that trend. Labour isn't a coalition, it's a unified party with a large majority that can do what it wants. It's deeply unpopular but that doesn't translate to weakness.
Left-wing parties got 62% of the vote.
They would call it centrist "practical" "adults in the room" or whatever, while those 'left' behind simply see it as a slide to the right.
It looks like they want to be more like the Democrats in the US who are roughly where the UK conservatives used to be before everything shifted rightward.
(Of course left/right is a simplification we can substitute ordinary folk vs vested interests).
Your analogy is fatally flawed.
Ask a Democrat where they stand on gun control. Ask a Tory.
Ask a Democrat where they stand on nationalisation of George Washington University Hospital. Ask a Tory where they stand on the privatisation of St Thomas' Hospital.
The "a million fewer votes" is technically true, but misleading. It's entirely driven by lower turnout, not lower popularity. Despite "a million fewer votes", Labour's share of the popular vote actually went up from 32.1% to 33.7%.
No UK PM in modern times have had as little electoral support.
Labour aren't impotent due to the 'excellent' nature of our system, they have all of the power.
And as much as Musk blathers, there won't be an election for several years.
And Labour aren't a coalition, it's one party. It's the right that would be fragile if it decided to coalesce.
Reform took from Labour as well, there's no guarantee that an extremely fragile Tory-Reform coalition would work.
Plus Reform have almost no seats, they'd need something way more formal than an a coalition - they'd need to agree not to stand in the same seats.
If the voting priorities changed then not only would Reform get more seats, but so would the actual left wing parties.
In short, you haven't got a damn clue what you're talking about.
That’s the point! Labour can win the election under the UK’s rules but at the end of the day the Labour government is immediately unpopular it doesn’t have the support of anything close to a majority of voters.
“Coalitions” exist in politics regardless of the election rules. In the U.S., parties have to form internal coalitions. In Germany, parties need to form coalitions between multiple parties. In the UK and Canada, a party can win a majority of seats without anything approaching a majority of voters, but that’s not sustainable. Nationalism eviscerated the traditional Labour base, which is why they lost in a landslide in 2019. In the long run, a party can’t government with a sub-30% approval rating. What’ll likely happen is that you’ll get a game of ping pong where Labour just gets voted out in the next election.
Labour won 3 terms in office and got elected repeatedly with Blair on similar rating:
https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/cf_images/2007...
And that's assuming these ratings last to the election and aren't a reflection on one thing, the budget. If the real economy improves then his approval rating will too.
Opinion polls already have Labour and Cons at an even tie with Reform UK doubling their overall popularity in just 6 months.
All this to say I wouldn't want to suggest that the trend towards nationalist politics ended with a Labour majority but rather that the Conservative Party wasn't sufficiently nationalist enough to entice public sentiments away from Reform UK
Just what the EU needs! We don't have enough loss of buying power yet, let's accelerate that some more until we're the third world asap.