Which is more fucked up? The United Kingdom or the United States?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
We are probably the more fucked up.
But the UK is probably the more fucked.
The UK is more effed up. We have more diversity and ways to cope and are already part of a united entity. Troubled as it is right now, it was pretty darn good when Obama was in office. It will be good again when the Narcissist-in-Chief is out of office.
I think you’re too confident. Removing Trump is necessary but in no way sufficient. The asshole judges Trump and McConnell have installed will be giving us Trumpism from the bench for the next 40 years.
Couldn’t agree more. So far the only check on Trump has been the courts.
My grandchildren’s generation will still be negatively affected by the court packing with hardcore “conservatives.”
We might be just because we are more dangerous to the world.
Isn’t “all of the above” an option?
“Hold my beer,” said whichever one you didn’t pick.
The UK is currently in the lead, as they are seriously considering a complete overhaul of their entire economy, society, culture, and nation, without actually having a plan on how to do any of it.
The USA is bound and determined to catch up with them, however, and we have a “can do” attitude when it comes to screwing things up. FUBAR is something we are very good at doing.
For me, this remains the best analysis of the Brexit phenomenon, even though the writing was done nearly four months ago. Here’s the explanation in prose form:
“The thing is, the best way to understand Theresa May’s predicament is to imagine that 52 percent of Britain had voted that the government should build a submarine out of cheese.
Now, Theresa May was initially against building a submarine out of cheese, obviously. Because it’s a completely insane thing to do. However, in order to become PM, she had to pretend that she thought building a submarine out of cheese was fine and could totally work. “Cheese means cheese,” she told us all, madly.
Then she actually built one. It’s shit. Of course it is. For God’s sake, are you stupid? It’s a submarine built out of cheese.
So now, having built a shit cheese submarine, she has to put up with both Labour and Tory Brexiters insisting that a less shit cheese submarine could have been built. They’re all lying, and they know it. So does everybody else. We’ve covered this already, I know, but it’s cheese and it’s a submarine. How good could it possibly be? Only she can’t call them out on this. Because she has spent the past two years also lying, by pretending she really could build a decent submarine out of cheese.
So that’s where we are.”
That’s frickin brilliant (as a Brit might say). Except you left out the last sentence which may be the most brilliant of all:
“On balance, I this analogy works fine, perhaps except for the submarine and cheese parts, which need a little work.”
My favorite bit from this was:
“Cheese means cheese,” she told us all, madly.
I can’t imagine an ultra-important legislative campaign slogan stupider than “Brexit means Brexit”.
Yes indeed! I remember reading that, it must have been linked on some blog somewhere. You are right, it remains the best analogy.
It would have made much more sense to have voted in favor of a cheese airplane. (But not out of Swiss, for obvious reasons.)
I’ve seen this before. It must have been written by a Brit since the humor is so brilliant.
We are. At least they got health care.
Full no deal Brexit will give the conservatives a reason to slash all spending and get the do over the GOP has dreamt about. They will lose their health care. We might get to watch a Brexit Spring in England.
The UK is not like the US at all. There are the “yobs” that are like our MAGA bros but there is no significant constituency for destroying the NHS, which does need reform. But, if they crash out of the EU they will suffer because it is a densely populated island that depends upon imports of basic necessities.
The U.K. is. The damage caused by Brexit is much deeper and more comprehensive and more difficult to undo than Trump and the Republicans have caused here. And there really is no one in the British political class who is looking good, except maybe the Speaker. But he has no political future. Now, if Trump is re-elected with Republican control of both houses, we may very well end up more fucked up. For the time being, we seem to be in comparatively better shape.
The US is far, far, far worse condition than the UK.
The infrastructure in the UK is magnificent by US standards despite all of their never-ending complaining. Their schools educate children. They don’t have mass killings with automatic rifles. They complain about knife murders on national newscasts. They’ve cut car accident deaths by 20% by modernizing their ambulance and Trauma systems (and having really tough driving standards.) Their biggest challenge (aside from Brexit) is obesity and chronic disease, but they are doing something about it, like reversing stupid diet advice. I could go on all day…Life is so much better there, even in the poorest areas.
Most importantly, neither Labor, nor the Tories, nor the Lib Dems as a party are rotten to the core.
Yes, there is deepening racism and they are completely head in the sand over the Russian threat. Brexit is going over a cliff – but the bones and body are strong and the patient may survive.
Have to agree with MtAiryGrl. Not only does GB have the NHS, which in addition to equity in health care is very good at supporting innovation in medical treatment and has administrative costs of about 3.5% in contrast to 30% in the US, but they also have a great rail network that can get you anywhere quickly and comfortably, good roads, affordable public universities. The quality of the public schools enables people to begin university already having under their belts much of what would pass for a college education in the US.
Despite Brexit, the parliamentary system is capable of passing sensible legislation with a minimum of fuss. To take an example from my field, special education, the US has an unwieldy, impossible long statute overburdened with procedural requirements and short on substance. Deference to stakeholders and lobbyists assures that it can be amended only by accretion. In contrast, the British parliament (under Cameron!) modernized the special education system in 2014 by refocusing it around kids and families and embodying best research-based practices.
Plus, there are the pubs and great local beer.
I have a British drivers license (tested on a manual transmission) and the training and testing requirement was much tougher than the US.
I’ll give you no argument about health care and gun control being far better in the U.K. Infrastructure over all is probably better than in the US, but it’s hardly magnificent by any standard. Education both here and there is good, if you have money. Not good if you don’t. Living conditions in the poorest areas of say, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, are very tough.
I’ll argue that the Tories and Labour and the Unionists are rotten to the core. The Lib Dems are merely irrelevant.
Brexit will make Britain poorer, more isolated, much less important and much more vulnerable. Finance will move out of London. The EU and everyone else will have less incentive to invest and more incentive to take a hard line on trade. The situation in Northern Ireland will deteriorate. Scotland’s interest in independence will strengthen. British governments have been pushing austerity for years, in relatively good times. The bad times coming will mean much more drastic austerity, which will be felt in infrastructure, health care and education..
Because of Britain’s shrinking role in the world economy, relatively small population, and lack of resources on a major scale, a future government with good plans and policies may be unable to accomplish much because of the constraints of an international system that has figured out it can ignore Britain.
The US, as always, has a much bigger margin for error because of geography, size, population, resources. We need that margin now. At least we’ve got it. Britain doesn’t.
If you are walking down a dark street late at night and you see two really fucked up motherfuckers…one on one side of the street and one on the other…coming towards you, one a great big youngish motherfucker and one a little, tiny old motherfucker…which one are you gonna try to deal with first?
Riiight!!!
The weakish one.
I’ll tell you this…
If the UK crashed and burned…economically, politically, in terms of some kind of “revolution” or whatever…there would be serious consequences around the world.
But compared to what would happen if the U.S. crashed and burned!!!??? Which is essentially what Trump is threatening to do if he wins in 2020?
Child’s play.
A “realignment” as opposed to Armageddon.
Which is more fucked up?
The BIG one!!!
AG
What shocks me about Britain is everyone knows the Russians were behind the Brexit upset and yet politicians are afraid to say anything about it. There’s a referendum that has more than six million signatures and is growing fast for another referendum which would likely reverse the whole nightmare and yet there’s no pressure on politicians to offer up that referendum. All the pressure runs the other way, to push through some piece of shit Brexit. Frankly, I don’t get it.
All of them Katie.
Probably running neck and neck. The UK declined as a major world power a good while back. Brexit will consign to the economic and political backwater for the foreseeable future. The US is still a major world power but in decline. Individual-1 and those who enable him will hasten that decline. Some will see that as a good thing. I am not so sure. The US has and had many faults, but the forces that will replace the US are not going to be ones that are more humanitarian or democratic. Those who need to think otherwise in order to satisfy whatever ideological hangup they have are probably not even worth talking to at this point.
As for the UK, I still hold out some faint hope that sanity might prevail, if only because I am friends with Eastern European nationals who are rightfully worried about their future if Brexit does indeed happen.
No question, the US. I lived in GB for much of the 1980s during Thatcher’s terrible rule and have closely followed the whole Brexit debacle.
David Cameron’s decision to ask the country to vote on a referendum “to stay or go” was a big mistake. He should have understood that the nationalists all across Europe were on the rise and, frankly, the really conservative “Little Englanders” have always hated the EU. There’s a reason the UK was among the last of the Western European nations to join the EU (then EEC) along with Eire and Denmark in 1973. But, of course, they never joined the Euro, which was actually smart.
Anyway, should the UK crash out of the EU, there will be serious hardship and Scotland will almost certainly exit the UK (they may do so anyway). I personally think the UK will go with a Customs Union. But they will survive.
The US, OTOH, being a superpower, is well on its way to becoming an oligarchic kakistocracy if we don’t get rid of Trump. The stakes for the survival of the republic are far higher than they are the UK.