Liz Truss lasted about three Scaramuccis as prime minister of the United Kingdom before she resigned on Thursday. Her sin was fairly simple. She introduced an economic plan that was designed to satisfy libertarian think tanks and fans of Ronald Reagan rather than anything workable. This kind of nonsense can pass muster in the United States thanks to the U.S. Dollar being the world’s reserve currency, which means we can seemingly go as far into debt as we want without the markets panicking. The U.K. doesn’t have that luxury, so there’s a limit to how many favors they can do to the fabulously wealthy.
Truss was ousted by her own party because her ideological overplay was looking likely to end the Conservative party as a viable operation. Surveys indicated that hundreds of Tory members of Parliament could lose in the next election, whenever that might be held, and so they took swift action to protect themselves. They might still suffer that grim fate, but at least they didn’t walk like lambs to the slaughter.
It would be nice if two things that seem to function in the United Kingdom also worked in the United States. First and foremost, the people could really punish the Republicans when they fuck up and tank the economy. I don’t mean by simply electing a Democratic president, as they did in 1992 and 2008 when the economy turned sour. I mean by scores of safely conservative seats suddenly going bright blue because people realize the GOP is run by incompetent ideologues who are bringing the country to ruin. It looks like something closer to the opposite is about to happen, and then we’ll have Trussites running half our government.
Secondly, it would be nice if Republicans would toss out leaders who are transparently incompetent instead of rallying around them and lowering the standard of acceptable leadership and performance in office. The reason they don’t, I suspect, is because nothing can touch them in their safe seats except someone even more extreme from their right flank.
I will say this, though. If anything can get Joe Biden reelected, it’s a Republican-led Congress in 2023 and 2024. They will do all they can to fuck things up just as thoroughly as Liz Truss screwed the pooch in Britain, and then it just becomes a matter of if they’ll ever get blamed for it. It worked for Harry Truman in 1948 and Bill Clinton in 1996, and I could see it working again for Biden. Or not.
We obviously can’t become a parliamentary system, no matter how appealing that might be.
But there are 650 seats in the Commons. There are 435 House seats. The population of the UK is 67M. The US is 330M.
You can only gerrymander so much if you have much smaller districts. The Commons IS gerrymandered, but it isn’t gerrymandered to the point where MPs are legitimately insulated from popular opinion.
Increase the size of the House. It’s legal and it only requires a majority to do so. Set the size of every CD as the size of the population of the least populous state.
In a better universe, we scrap the Senate and Electoral College, and have a House made up of about 2000 Representatives. Then just make a Supreme Court appointment18 years, with 2 appointments per 1 Presidential term.
That alone would decrease the likelihood of outright fascism. Which is why it will never happen.