When President Joe Biden declined the Democratic nomination on X a few weeks ago, my first thoughts were of England. Party regicide, until now alien to American shores, has been a feature of English politics for centuries. Now that Speaker Emerita Pelosi is effectively bragging that Biden was pushed out in a party coup, it’s worth reflecting on our cousins’ experiences with regicide and how this new phenomenon will affect our politics. 

The Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli remarked that “assassination has never changed the history of the world” after the slaying of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. His party, which abandoned his wisdom in countless ways, ignored this advice in 1990. The story of Margaret Thatcher’s downfall is well known, and, in many ways, the accounts of political savagery aimed at Thatcher seem quaint. But the process by which Thatcher was dethroned, and the seeds of euroskepticism planted by her dramatic downfall, are not dissimilar to what’s unfolding in the American body politic.

First, there is the conundrum of who should follow the ousted leader. Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s one-time cabinet member, famously plunged the political knife into Thatcher’s front. Expecting to become prime minister, Heseltine organized the cabinet coup that dethroned the Iron Lady. But the resentment for Heseltine among the Conservative Party faithful and pro-Thatcher MPs was palpable. John Major, the mild-mannered accountant, would take the reins of government instead. Heseltine’s remark upon resigning from the cabinet in 1986 came to define his four-year spat with Thatcher: “I knew that he who wields the knife never wears the crown.” 

Unlike Heseltine, however, Nancy Pelosi does not even seek it. Taking Seymour Hersh’s reporting at face value (a dodgy proposition, granted), it is clear that a combination of parliamentary forces, donors, and ex-party leaders forced the sitting president of the United States out of the campaign. Pelosi, the most powerful speaker of the House in American history, has effectively reduced the presidency to a “creature of the legislature” and crowned an heir with a remarkably similar resume to her own. In this, Pelosi has de facto altered the United States Constitution. 

But what of our protagonist, our modern Macbeth? Kamala Harris may yet wear the crown, but can she change the course of history? Perhaps in the short term. John Major and his ilk were able to integrate Britain further into Europe. A succession of stridently neoliberal governments, notably Blair and Brown’s New Labour, would reshape Britain. By David Cameron’s ascension and subsequent coalition with the Liberal Democrats, there was little concern that Thatcher’s growing opposition to further European integration would resurface as a viable political threat to the neoliberal project. But Cameron’s machinations discounted the course of history, and Britain set itself free from European bureaucracy with the 2016 Brexit vote. Neoliberal actors in Britain managed to slow history, but they were unable to bring it to an end.

The subsequent convulsions in the Conservative Party, and by extension Great Britain, are what we can reasonably expect in our own politics. Devoid of leadership, the Tory Party has fractured and stands to be eliminated if it is unable to unite around popular organizing principles. But the crisis isn’t contained to the Tories; it’s a blight on the nation itself. Britain has suffered six prime ministers in eight years while losing their beloved head of state. Charles III, recently diagnosed with cancer, exacerbates and seems to reflect the seemingly intractable British crisis. Reform UK’s and the Green Party’s significant share of the vote but minute representation in parliament is placing pressure on the “first-past-the-post” system that is credited with Britain’s consistent center-right tack. Britain’s military might is long gone, and outside of the City of London, England is devolving into an economic backwater. PM Starmer’s promise to restore centrist stability collapsed within weeks of the beginning of his premiership as the consequences of neoliberal immigration policy exploded onto Britain’s streets.

Kamala Harris’s task, like Starmer’s, is to triple down on the failing neoliberal policies that have led the West to this moment of collective crisis. Harris has been tasked with placing the forces of global realignment back into Pandora’s Box. As president, she will face the prospect of major power conflict on every inhabited continent except Australia, the emergence of BRICS and other threats to Western financial hegemony, and a domestic population that, in part, views her as a usurper. She will face this moment of crisis with the power and legitimacy that was made available to Rishi Sunak and Theresa May—that is, none.

At a moment of crisis that requires the full power and will of the American executive, the nation faces the prospect of being led by a creature of Nancy Pelosi’s legislature. Harris, who will in every way be held hostage by the whims of donors, agency heads, and congressional leadership, will be the constitutionally weakest American president since Buchanan. Like Buchanan, she will be condemned by history to oversee a confluence of crises over which she will exercise little control but nonetheless receive much condemnation for.

Thus the tragedy of Kamala Harris.