Republican Virtue, Interrupted: A Conversation with Frank Buckley
Vote Loony, The Time Is Now
As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to give the Let’s-Make-It-Up Clause a full workout, let’s talk about something completely different: the upcoming elections. Not ours, eighteen-plus months hence—the Brits’. The campaign over there has been under way, in a serious fashion, for six weeks or so; it’ll be over in less than another fortnight.
The rather more compressed time frame of elections over there suggests (to anyone except campaign consultants and “democracy” enthusiasts) that Britain’s parliamentary system is superior to our presidential-plus-primary system, at least on this margin. The question whether parliamentary government is generally better has been the staple of a vast body of literature—including, recently, my colleague Francis H. Buckley’s emphatic defense of his native Canada’s parliamentary system.