When it comes to British politics, my go to guy is John Derbyshire. It’s not that he has a granular knowledge of every bit of maneuvering that is the staple of political coverage. It’s than he is properly skeptical and he gets the larger trends that have defined Britain for the last century or so. His roundup up of the UK election results is a nice summary of what happened and, to a lesser degree, what it portends.

When it come to European politics, including the UK, I enjoy Andrew Stuttaford. I don’t really think he fully grasps the nature of the global corporatists in the managerial class running Europe, but he is suitably outraged by what’s going on and does a great job underscoring the issues for those too afraid to read my blog. Here’s his latest and in the comments an exchange between Andrew and me.

That’s the warmup material.

My own view is the election, to the surprise of the people in charge and their attendants in the media, was about the national question. Specifically, will the English continue to have a nation of their own. Part of that is immigration and that’s what UKIP brought to the debate. Another part is England’s relationship with the Continent, the promise of the Tories to hold a referendum. Finally, the very idea of what it means to be British, English and Scottish, raised by SNP.

No one in charge, of course, wanted to talk openly about any of these issues, but the people in the streets did want to talk about them. Politicians go where the votes are and inevitably the parties all found a way to stake out their position. The most obvious is SNP, which may be the most cynical party in human history, but they ran on Scotland being for Scots, while Labour and Lib-Dems ran on formless internationalism, a sort of faculty lounge techno-fascism.

I say the SNP is cynical because if you read their position papers, they appear to be deliberately deceptive. The first graphs are all haggis and sheep buggering like a proud Scot. Then it devolves into academic jargon cheering on internationalism and multiculturalism. I suspect they know people only read the first two paragraphs.

Maybe it just sort of happened that way as the flag waving started to carry the party beyond their wildest imaginings. That’s not uncommon. We see this with candidates. When the crowd roars, it’s hard not to notice. Perhaps SNP sort of stumbled into becoming a weird fascist party that preaches international corporatism and good old fashioned patriotism. How they intend to square those is a mystery. Regardless, they made national identity a central issue of the campaign.

On the other side, UKIP made immigration a central issue. It was originally assumed that the Tories would suffer as a consequence, but it seem they may have benefited. The people looked at their options and ruled out the internationalists, Lib-Dem and Labour, in favor of the nationalist. The Tories may be weak tea, but they can be fortified. UKIP simply has too many weirdos for the average Brit. UKIP, inadvertently, dragged the Tory party into the nationalist camp.

That’s the first lesson of the election. Given a choice between the formless international corporatism offered up by Progressives across the West and even a mild form of traditional patriotism, the latter trumps the former and by large margins. Just imagine if Cameron was something other than a shallow twit who reminds most people of Piers Morgan.

What has been laid bare in Britain is the great divide is no longer between free market traditionalists and cosmopolitan socialists. No one is a Marxist anymore and everyone is some form of socialist. The competition these days is between parties claiming a better skill at running the welfare state. They quibble over minor aspects of the tax code and various nuances of the bureaucracy, but they agree on all of the big economic issues. Across the West, all parties have embraced managerial socialism as their economic model.

The great divide now is over culture and country. One side is post-national and post-cultural. The other is patriotic and rooted in the traditional culture of the country. You see this divide emerging everywhere in the West, outside of the US where the GOP keeps insisting it is 1978. The great political fights in the West will be waged between those with little or no loyalty to their host country and those who define themselves by the national and ethnic identity.

I think one reason this is blossoming in Europe and not in the US is the fact that Europe already has a lot of immigrants from alien cultures. Mexican carpenters sort of look like Italians, they go to church and generally fit into Western norms. Algerians and Pakistani Muslims clearly don’t belong and they are increasing making that clear to everyone. With a few million Africans poised to join them, the sense of urgency in Europe is greater than in the US.

There’s also the weird cultural ticks of Americans. We have romanticized immigrants and turned them into objects of worship. We also have a racial culture that makes it hard to say bad things about anyone not an albino. Further, both parties have embraced the American empire where the rest of the world is treated as provinces.

That’s the other lesson. What works in the UK is not necessarily going to follow in the US. Watch British TV and you see an unabashed parochialism that would be horrifying to American TV producers. Immigration policy in America must be discussed in economic terms, not cultural terms, at least for now.

On the other hand, American politicians look to Europe and they have felt the rumblings. The fact that Obama’s party is in revolt over his nation wrecking TPP plan is a good sign. They may not want to follow their analogs in the UK into the abyss. The GOP is going through an identity crisis that will be worked out in their presidential primary. For the first time in a long time, there’s hope.