This is a fine time to be British. Indeed, to be proud to be British.
You would not, to be sure, think so from the last week in London — as the House of Commons humiliated Prime Minister Theresa May by throwing out her plan for Brexit on Jan. 15 by 432 votes to 202 — an unprecedented rejection. The next day, the Labour Party moved that her government had lost the confidence of the House — a maneuver defeated only narrowly, by 325 votes to 306.
The British, and foreign, news media would guide you to seeing the events as pure, destructive chaos. In an article for CNN, Stephen Collinson writes of the United States and the United Kingdom that it's "hard to believe that two such robust democracies, long seen by the rest of the world as beacons of stability, have dissolved into such bitter civic dysfunction." Hard to believe only if you see democracy as the smooth management of affairs by an elite. This is what democracy looks like when a citizenry is grappling with fundamental issues — or should.