"The Anglophile Drama": How the U.S. and U.K. are partners in chaos - by Ben White and Aubree Eliza Weaver

This happened when populists like 
Farage and Trump called for Brexit

A little thought bubble as we head into the weekend and the short Thanksgiving week. Morning -Money" spent some time over the last several days in Washington and New York with a variety of executives who are sifting through the 2018 midterm election results and trying to make some sense of the path of U.S. politics.

Many are trying to figure out where America is headed with a growing schism between a metro-area dominated, more highly educated electorate trending toward the Democrats and smaller town and rural voters sticking with President Donald Trump and the GOP and embracing the president’s hardline trade and immigration policies and his culture war appeals.

Consensus among these executives (and frankly among anyone else) is that American politics is a directionless wreck with no path forward on anything from health care to education to retirement savings to climate change and gun violence and long-term fiscal deficits. One British banker mused about how he’s never seen the U.S. so screwed up or derelict on the world stage.

Then he stopped himself almost immediately to say how the U.K. really wasn’t any better with no consensus on how to deal with Brexit, a potential end to Prime Minister Theresa May’s tenure, a civil war inside the Conservative party and a plunging pound. It remains largely unclear in the U.K. whether May’s softer Brexit plan will somehow survive or no deal will emerge leading to a hard Brexit or a new referendum will take place to reverse Brexit entirely.

Tensions in the U.S. and U.K. are different in many ways but they share commonalities of fractured politics and deep divisions on fundamental identities as either insular and nationalistic or more globally integrated and diverse. We got no revelatory insight in these conversations beyond a morbid sense that only grave and immediate crisis that cannot be ignored will jolt either nation into clarity. And maybe not even then.

Happy thoughts for your Friday!

Read more: How the U.S. and U.K. are partners in chaos - POLITICO