A Tale of Two Nightmares

"It's Like Poetry, It Rhymes."

July 4th, 2024 was two very different days in two Anglosphere nations, The United States and The United Kingdom. In the US, the usual ghost dancing was about as the celebration of its independence from the British Crown with memes asking “what the f*ck is a kilometer” to solemn reminders we are so far from the political, philosophical, and religious traditions of the nation’s founding that Independence Day was more and more of a funeral dirge than anything else. Pride in being an American remains at record lows, with an increasingly atomized native population thoroughly dispossessed as a majority and now well on its way to being replaced bar an active of supreme political power. Yet for many in America who share my politics or at least interest in what’s going on in the world, in the midst of grilling burgers, eating ice cream and lazily handling explosives many minds were on our friends across the pond.

July 4th was also the general election, and while the energy and desire to punish the Conservatives with the attempted meme magic of #ZeroSeats, I could see the results in the late afternoon here in Texas as to what was going to happen. Toilet seats were to be reinstalled at Number 10, and that the “natural party of government”, the Tories - had been routed in a landslide for Labour. Sir Keir Rodney Starmer will be the next Prime Minister of His Majesty’s Government, with over 400 seats in Parliament despite only getting a third of the popular vote. If there is something that the Anglosphere does have in common that we can all collectively bitch about, it is about the structures of our democracies.

As the Tories inevitably limp on, most assuredly due to scaring the hell out of pensioners, investors, and finger wagging on about the dangers of their destruction in the Daily Mail and Peter Hitchens’ columns - I am reminded that there are indeed safe seats in plenty of democracies. #ZeroSeats could never work in America as our system is just that gerrymandered, not to mention nowhere near as transparent when it comes to our voting systems. Doesn’t matter that Reform had over 4 million votes, best the system can do is 4 seats in Parliament. Doesn’t matter that Trump had managed to pull off one of the most impossible tasks as a president running for re-election, getting even more votes than he did when he first ran, the system said no.

Prior to yesterday’s election, I said on The Digital Archipelago, a weekly live show I co-host with

Gio's Content Corner.

that I was keenly interested to see how the election would play out as it is often that where goes England so goes America. In 2016, The Brexit Referendum happened in August right before our elections which definitely painted the mood for a populist revolt against the destruction of the UK via immigration and lack of sovereignty from being a member of the European Union.

Morgoth

’s recent essay on this subject is the best breakdown on it, which I’ll link here.

As The European Right Surges, Britlibs Most Affected

This wave of sentiment both at the polls and online is what led to both the United States and the United Kingdom, seeing a middle finger emerge from the heartland and from places that aren’t so featured on the tourist maps of Britain, queueing at the ballot box to tell both the system and voice of cosmopolitan elites in London and New York to politely go fuck themselves, we’re going our way. Naive? Absolutely, but for a moment in August and on Election Night 2016, it felt like a great weight had been lifted off of our shoulders. The nightmare would finally come to an end, when in fact that the nightmare was effectively just beginning.

What happened with Brexit and the Trump’s first term in office effectively saw a soft coup from the civil service. Bureaucrats, lawfare, and outright disobedience and lying from the intelligence agencies, the military, and other parts of the American Executive Branch that it was effectively impossible for Trump to get anything done with his team, and was sabotaged even before getting into office with allegations of Russian collusion and losing loyalists like Gen. Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon. The Tories weren’t exactly pro-brexit either, and the back and forth on that very issue from Prime Minister to Prime Minister - from Theresa May to the historic election of Boris Johnson showed how the democratic mandate, the will of the people had been subverted time and time again until once again the pressure release valve could be turned with “Get Brexit Done” in 2019. Such hopes and optimism, with defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and winning seats in parliament that hadn’t voted Tory in either decades or at all, only for him to be later removed in a slurry of crisis and backbiting that led to Rishi Sunak’s rise to being the head of state without a single vote from the people and the continuation of Britain’s immigration crisis along with other woes. The world watched covid come about, the perfect crisis emerged to see Trump go as governors and other officials across America worked in coordination on reporting, changing of election laws without the legislature’s approval, coupled with an “Insurrection” Trump was forced out of office with faith in American institutions and its civic religion of “Democracy” all but meaningless to half the country.

I am sure I could be criticized for glossing over much between the years and the details of many government’s and administrations, but I would be remiss that one can look to Britain and America and see just where things might be going, or if our paths might just diverge. Just as Sunak and Biden have made immigration worse, compounding our risks in wars both against Russia but as well as in the Middle East, a chance was offered to take a way out. Sunak and the Tories were faced with insurmountable odds of even staying alive in the midst right wing fervor, the return of Nigel Farage for a third time, from UKIP to the Brexit Party to now Reform. On top of the fact that the Tories have only actively made things worse on the issues that matter to Britons. Biden has done the same things, on scales that I cannot particularly comprehend with historical comparison from inflation to the depletion of our strategic oil reserve I can’t help but feel maybe this is the 1970s? We’re not necessarily in an economic war in the Middle East but our already weakened logistics sector has only been exacerbated by a third front opening with Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

So now as revelations come out courtesy of The Lotus Eaters’ interview with former PM Liz Truss, we saw a glimpse behind the curtain of what led to her removal from power. Similar such things occurred in the Trump administration, with American Foreign Policy officials “playing shell games” i.e., lying to the President about how many troops the US had in Syria. The United Kingdom saw the Bank of England and manufactured financial crisis oust Truss for Sunak, who was the former Chief Secretary of Treasury and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Doesn’t help that we saw so many outgoing officials in the Trump administration offer their advice to Biden’s transition team about what was actually going on, and the difficulties of being the “adults in the room” to the American people. Now we know that the “adults in the room” are anyone but the president, as the fight to replace Biden on the 2024 Democratic Ticket for president has led to some of the most open left-wing infighting in the United States arguably since 1968. Perhaps the irony is that both this year’s Democrat Party Convention and that year nearly sixty years ago are both being held in Chicago, but that is for another time.

The key difference in this tale of two democratic nightmares is that Rishi’s failure was effectively rebuked by the ballot box, both by over four million votes for Reform and Labour’s resounding gain in seats in Parliament. In the United States, the president as we have known even before the 2020 election was effectively if not outright non compos mentis, and if it wasn’t for Jim Clyburn’s victory in getting the Biden campaign to promise a “woman of color” for the VP slot his campaign would’ve died in the South Carolina Primary in 2020. Whereas the people had more of a say in the UK than the US (even then let’s not kid ourselves,) we’re witnessing a more top down attempt to remove Biden from Democratic Party Elites and Donors than we ever did from attempts unseat Biden during the 2024 Primary Season.

As our friend Auron MacIntyre (

The Total State

) writes in The Blaze,

An oligarchy installed Biden as president, never expecting him to fulfill the duties of the office. Biden started his term with at least some degree of awareness, but it has been clear for the last few years that he has not been running the show. The American people are completely unaware of who, in fact, is responsible for disastrous inflation, open borders, and endless foreign war, which is exactly how the ruling class likes it. Oligarchies prefer to avoid accountability, and Biden creates the perfect shield.

Now the knives are out after an objectively horrendous debate performance, with some Biden loyalists in the White House and in the Congress defending against attacks against Biden, or at the very least making sure Kamala Harris is not at the top of the ticket in 2024 or 2028 lest she take away their chance at future electoral prospects. It’s become more “obvious” that Biden was not doing well in terms of mental function, and for many of us on the right it’s been a question of “where have you all been?” Let’s not forget the headlines and op-ed’s in 2020.

Whatever may emerge out of this ongoing internecine battle within the Dems, the nightmare that will emerge as America’s demographics continue to change and with no end in sight to our border problem, we are also to witness with Starmer’s position on immigration as well. Even if he said he would do something about Net Migration, I doubt he will stop the “small boats” let alone do anything meaningful as he had already promised to scrap the Rwanda Policy Plan proposed by the Tories. Trump is still dealing with multiple other court cases even as the Supreme Court may have effectively thrown him a bone by simply staying out of it with any new sort of precedent in their recent ruling on presidential immunity.

What happens next, as Morgoth accurately reflects, is that The United Kingdom has been sentenced to effectively Ten Years of Hard Labour. Whether or not the British Right, either its mainstream or dissident counterparts have the constitution to endure is the same question posed by Solzhenitsyn to those who were sentenced as “Tenners.” In the United States, we too have seen our sentence, a punishment of civil service subversion of the American people, party apparatchiks running things while maintaining the facade of our democracy, clinging on to documents and ideas written by better men who would’ve shot us for treason long ago.

I can’t say if the adage about “where goes Britain, there goes America” will apply for our upcoming election in November, but even if Trump does get into office, with his more disciplined team and sliver of awareness of what it takes to deal with the problem, it is safe to say that for both of our nations the nightmare is only just beginning.