US President Joe Biden and Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson shake hands ahead of a meeting of The North Atlantic Council during the NATO summit in Madrid on June 30, 2022. Photo: AFP
The UK and the US have recently been overwhelmed by waves of political turmoil, and various negative events in political circles have been frequently reported. The event that has grabbed the most attention is UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday agreeing to resign after a wave of staffers quit their posts.
The no-confidence vote among Conservatives in early June suggested that Johnson has become very unpopular in his own party. Resignations from more than 50 ministers in recent days indicate he has become utterly isolated. "Another important trigger is his poor performance in diplomacy, especially the increasingly tense UK-EU relations, and improper handling of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has resulted in soaring inflation. Complaints about Johnson among ordinary British can be heard everywhere. His internal and external difficulties are the fundamental cause of his decision to resign," said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator.
In the US, Britain's closest ally, some politicians are still focusing on the 2020 election results. A grand jury investigation into Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia is still ongoing. The Republican Party of Texas in June adopted a resolution that rejects President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.
The direct trigger of the current political chaos in Britain and the US is the incompetence of its elected leaders, which has drawn widespread criticism from the public and officials. But their plight cannot be addressed by changing their leaders, as the root of the mess is structural. On a global scale, a rising East and falling West has been an unstoppable trend. The West represented by the UK and the US is indeed on the decline, and the decline in quality of their leaders is just a manifestation of this.
Furthermore, their so-called democratic political system also plays a big role in creating the political chaos both countries are seeing. "The primary problem in their system is political parties taking turns in power. In this system, the relations between the parties are not cooperative, but cut-throat," Song said, "In many internal and domestic affairs, the parties even set traps for each other, resulting in these affairs ending in a mess and becoming unresolvable."
Once elected, the ruling party tends to break promises they made to voters during election campaigns. As an inevitable consequence, the public in the UK and US have lost confidence in their leaders.
Democracy in itself is a good thing. It is one of the universal core values and principles for all human beings. But the democracy of the UK and the US is a bad thing. Their democratic practice is a mess, resulting in democracy being marred beyond recognition.
The US vigorously promotes itself as a "beacon of democracy," an example worthy of emulation by other countries. This is just a narrative Washington has fabricated to consolidate its hegemony and leadership across the world, which is being proved to be increasingly absurd through its own practice.
US and UK policymakers have failed to focus their energy and resources to fix problems at home and meet the needs of their own people, but have been busy creating disputes, chaos and crises abroad to divert attention away from them. This, once again, demonstrates how terrible their democratic practices are, and has resulted in the emergence of irresponsible political lunatics. This practice of extending their political lives through shifting crises has only resulted in an endless accumulation of domestic problems, which in turn harms themselves. The democracy in the US and the UK is a joke. It is an inefficient, fake democracy that consumes national resources.
Democratic practices in the US and the UK have tarnished the name of democracy and disappointed people's expectations of it. It is democratic practice filled with confusion and risk.
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