Anne Applebaum: Britain's Spot of Tea Party
Here is a riddle: What would the Tea Party movement look like if it were British, privately educated and had once worked as a ski instructor in Austria?
The answer: It would look like Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party -- and possibly the beneficiary of the biggest revolution among British voters in decades. For those who don't follow these things, the Liberal Democrats are Britain's historically insignificant third party. In its current incarnation, the Liberal Democrats date from the late 1980s, when the Labor Party was a near-Marxist monolith, the Tories were the party of Margaret Thatcher, and there was a lot of space in between.
Since then, the Lib Dems have taken some odd turns, sometimes championing quirky local causes, sometimes floating to the left or the right of the political spectrum, often leaving the center ground that they once claimed for their own. Now, after years of drift, Clegg has suddenly found for the party a position that works. Instead of ideology, he offers an option: If you are sick of Labor, if you can't bring yourself to vote Conservative, if you are bored of the two-party system itself -- then vote for me....
This would mean, for the British, an unthinkable, revolutionary change. Most European countries vote according to rules of proportional representation, as a result of which their parliaments contain several parties and the government is often a coalition. Britain, like the United States, has "first past the post" voting: a two-party system and, usually, a one-party government -- albeit Britain's has far fewer checks and balances than that of the United States....
Maybe these dire threats will win back voters by the end of next week. But at the moment, it seems that the man on the Clapham omnibus, like his Tea-Partying colleagues across the Atlantic, is perfectly happy to vote for the end of politics as we know it. The faster the better, please.