April 11, 2020

For the past four years, the story goes, Britain and America have been on remarkably similar political journeys. The twin revolutions of the Brexit referendum and the rise of Donald Trump played out in a dizzying succession of bitter, acrimonious clashes, less between right and left than between populist nationalists and elite globalists. Those transatlantic echoes have grown harder to hear since Britain formally left the European Union in January, ending a yearslong, bad-blooded row over whether to give effect to the 2016 Brexit vote.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic has silenced those echoes, suggesting that the countries’ fates are no longer intertwined—or perhaps never were, at least not quite in the way we thought.

If Covid-19 has been a physical examination for the body politic of both countries, it is the one whose prime minister is currently hospitalized by the virus that has a far cleaner bill of health. Whereas the pandemic has underscored the depths of America’s polarization and partisanship in the age of Trump, with an indiscriminate outside threat failing to yield much political unity, the virus has proved the sturdiness of the most trusted institutions in Britain, where distinctions between Leave and Remain, left and right, have faded as the health crisis has deepened.

Read more:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/11/coronavirus-uk-us-brexit-trump-177924