Readers here know that I’m not timid about griping about Barack Obama’s decisions when I think they’re misguided, but it seems like every time I peek over at politics in Europe I immediately remember how much worse it can be, and that on a grand scale Obama’s mistakes aren’t all that enormous. In a nutshell, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has already led his country back into recession, something opposition Labour Leader Ed Miliband hasn’t been able to take much advantage of since he’s busy destroying his own party to come up with a deficit plan that will never pass or even come up for a vote. The latter would be as if Republicans responded to 2008 by offering to hike the corporate tax. Obama can’t help but look like FDR compared with either of these two, in terms of leadership chops.

But perhaps we shouldn’t judge our British friends too harshly. What’s interesting is that I (and I think most other lefties) tend to look upon the UK’s political system with great envy. Conservatives that are tolerant, intelligent, and sensible! A center-left party that includes some actual socialists and left-wingers! A working class that votes its interests! A deep antipathy toward the sort of loud, aggrieved culture warrior sensibilities that have been entrenched for decades here! I think that most left-liberals would loudly welcome any of those in our own system. But the flip side of an actual centrist consensus in the UK (as it was here when we had one in the 1950s and 1960s) has been a super-powerful political establishment that actively tries to mute political disagreements that they want muted, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In America that was what allowed Vietnam to come about and expand in scope, and in the UK now it’s austerity–different issues, but the same dynamic. Miliband has been hammered hard by the establishment for not “taking the deficit seriously,” even though he’s not in the government–in fact, “oppose” is in his job title–and it’s unclear why he should take the deficit seriously if he would rather emphasize other things. The best political logic here would be to spend every second talking about unemployment and recession, over and over. But he’s not doing it because the system has decided it won’t accept his silence on the issue, and it’s powerful enough over there to make him do it, basically. Our system is hardly a great exemplar of wise, informed government, but in some ways it could be much worse. People pining for the old days of centrist consensus ought to think on this a bit.

Once again, this awesomeness: