I try to follow both US and UK politics relatively closely to help me understand how different systems and situations affect the way nations encounter and try to solve challenges. There's an interesting difference that just occurred to me.

In my opinion, both nations suffer right now from incompetent leaders who won electoral success by appealing to groups of voters who were upset at a perceived loss of status in a world that is growing more connected and making fits & starts at addressing legacies of colonialism.

In the USA, demographic change means that the part of the population that's more comfortable with those changes is probably slightly larger than the part that isn't, but our electoral system blocks majoritarian government (by design) in ways that shift power to the latter group.

So you see a lot of debate about the merits and pitfalls of majority rule and warnings about what happens when a minority is able to thwart the will of the majority for an extended period of time.

In the UK, however, so much of the ongoing crisis is a result of Brexit, which was mandated by a referendum that the ruling Tories pushed for because they couldn't settle the issue within their own party. There, the majority of the country wanted to pull back from connectedness.

This push is putting the minority of the British population that is nonwhite and/or from other parts of the world at risk, so from that part of the world I see warnings about the dangers of majority rule and the need to protect the rights of smaller groups.

I think a healthy democracy requires a balance - tyranny of the majority and tyranny of the minority are both tyranny - but it's good to think about which way the pendulum is swinging in different places. (end thread)