In Britain's elections, as in American ones: We'll awake "to find one of these horrors in charge."

Photo credit: The Economist article.

I was asked, "How is Donald Trump viewed throughout your travels?"

To be honest, it didn't come up.

There were instances of anti-Trump in graffiti-rich Ljubljana, and a couple of folks in Slovenia mentioned Melania Trump, born in 1970 during Yugoslav times in the Slovenian city of Novo Mesto (near the border with Croatia). She grew up in a town called Sevnica and began her modeling career prior to Slovenia's independence in 1991.

It's worth noting that had Melanija Knavs grown up in any of the other communist countries in east-central Europe where the orthodoxy was more rigid than Yugoslavia's relatively less restrictive Titoist variety, she probably wouldn't have had a head start in the late 1980s. Interestingly, her father was a member of Slovenia's atheistic League of Communists, but had his children secretly baptized Catholic.

In short, I find the institution of "First Lady" very strange, and Melania far more interesting than Donald, but to each their own.

Meanwhile in Great Britain, a dismal election campaign is about to conclude, and The Economist is flustered. The Liberal Democrats won't win, and yet consider the possibilities for lesser parties in a parliamentary system to influence the outcome, an option we're denied by the American fixation with a two-party system that exists nowhere in any statutory or constitutional sense.

That's why I detest the two-party system more than any single representative of it, including Trump -- and yes, I'd almost surely vote Labour.

Our election endorsement: Britain’s nightmare before Christmas ... A divided country faces an election that will tear it still further apart (The Economist)

British voters keep being called to the polls—and each time the options before them are worse. Labour and the Conservatives, once parties of the centre-left and -right, have steadily grown further apart in the three elections of the past four years. Next week voters face their starkest choice yet, between Boris Johnson, whose Tories promise a hard Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Party plans to “rewrite the rules of the economy” along radical socialist lines. Mr Johnson runs the most unpopular new government on record; Mr Corbyn is the most unpopular leader of the opposition. On Friday the 13th, unlucky Britons will wake to find one of these horrors in charge ...

Liberalism, radicalism, our ineffectual Democrats, Gahan's public housing Kool-Aid and Hoosier Action -- not necessarily in that order.

Loudest damn crickets I can recall.

It's probably not impossible for liberals to morph into radicals, though it surely can't happen until liberals are ready to sacrifice an element of material comfort for the sake of whatever revolution we're talking about. Being a radical means you might win, and you might lose; either way, something changes.

Is Donald Trump Turning Liberals Into Radicals?, by Sarah Leonard (New York Times)

On Nov. 9, 2016, millions of Americans woke up with a crushing sense that something was terribly wrong with their country.

Donald Trump’s election inspired such moral revulsion and political outrage that by that afternoon, parts of the American electorate had taken to calling themselves “the resistance,” evoking the guerrillas who took to the hills and fought the Nazis during World War II. Just a day before, many of these same people were enthusiastically casting their ballots for a centrist Democrat; suddenly they were self-styled revolutionaries.

The day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration saw enormous protests across the country that incorporated a panoply of groups and interests. For those of us on the left, the millions of protesters in pink hats and the dads toting funny signs was a promising sight: Could this be the moment that liberals were converted into radicals?

This point cannot be stressed and repeated often enough: "Inequality’s staggering growth shows no signs of stopping."

Mr. Trump — like right-wing populists across Europe — rode into power on waves of discontent with unaccountable globalization and growing inequality that have increased even under liberal and social-democratic parties. As the French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated in “Capital in the 21st Century,” inequality’s staggering growth shows no signs of stopping. And it’s pulling democracy apart at the seams; no one but the rich feels represented.

The failure of the Democratic Party to reverse this over the past 40 years can’t be overstated, which is precisely why the resistance cannot just be about getting Democrats elected.

Especially here in New Gahania, where the words "Democrat" and "resistance" are diametrically opposed concepts. Want to know why I chose not to block Kool-Aid?

Because if I did, there'd be no more Floyd County Democratic Party infomercials.

Local Democrats apparently are unaware of staggering inequality, because if they were, more than a handful of the better informed among them would be holding Dear Leader's personality cult to the fire, because for an allegedly Democratic mayor to be waging war against affordable housing and the community's less fortunate isn't tremendously democratic, is it?

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Agoraphobia with a peniaphobic chaser, or the drunkenness of a sociopath's power.

Returning to Leonard's essay, we are referred to a phenomenon of interest in this context.

THE ELECTION HAS GALVANIZED activists of all kinds. After Hillary Clinton’s poor performance with working-class white voters, many on the left have realized that this constituency deserves more of its attention. I spoke recently to Kate Hess Pace, who founded Hoosier Action in her home state of Indiana, a membership organization for working-class Indianans who, with the decline of unions, have few ways of influencing politics. The group has brought members to Washington to lobby their senators on health care, among other actions. Ms. Pace says that most of the people she talks to in Indiana don’t hate Democrats or Republicans, but “outsiders,” people in Washington who have caused their state’s decline.

Some new members of the resistance may have people they can turn to easily for guidance: their kids. The radical movements calling attention to inequality and racism well before Mr. Trump’s election — from Occupy to the movement for black lives to a growing interest in socialism to the Dreamers protests — have been driven by millennials. And these movements are eager to grow.

Indeed, we've already been introduced.

Meet WE ARE NEW ALBANY, and tell Jeff Gahan: No demolition of public housing without a plan to replace!

I’ll keep asking local Democrats about their cognitive dissonance. They’ll keep not answering. The Jeffrey's got the Kool-Aid, all right -- but I think the raging hypocrisy will begin nagging at those Democrats with a conscience. They're there.

They just need to regain control of Gahan's sinking ship.

The life and death of Charles Kennedy.

Kennedy in 1987 (photo credit to the Washington Post)

In 1988, I was fortunate to land my first and only "real" corporate job abstracting periodicals at the now long-defunct UMI Data-Courier in Louisville. I lived off my evening package store pay and bankrolled as much as I could to make what became a six-month stay in Europe in 1989.

During my tenure at UMI Data Courier, it transpired that our British and other English language publications from abroad (The Economist, The Spectator, New Statesman, even Punch) were increasingly shunted onto my stack of work by fellow staffers after it became known that the new guy rather enjoyed reading them, and more importantly, wasn’t troubled by the English essayist’s general habit of hiding the topic sentence somewhere other than the opening paragraph. We had quotas, you know.

Charles Kennedy, who recently died and has been eulogized as a somewhat tragic, Shakespearean political personage, would have been a mere stripling during the period of my abstracting career. We were just about the same age, after all, but he was already a Member of Parliament, destined for greater things -- some of which Kennedy achieved, as with his iconic speech in opposition to the UK joining George W. Bush's war against Iraq.

In the end, Kennedy was felled by drink, and I don't make the citation flippantly. Following are three links that tell Kennedy's story.

The Charles Kennedy Story, by Alex Hunt & Brian Wheeler (BBC News)

Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy led his party to their best ever election result in 2005 but, battling a drink problem, had to resign a few months later. After his death at the age of 55, here's a look back at the life and career of one of the most influential politicians of his generation.

Kennedy's alcohol problems can be seen in a larger context.

Charles Kennedy’s alcohol problem was also Britain’s alcohol problem, by Hadley Freeman (The Guardian)

For the past decade, Charles Kennedy was treated by too many people as little more than a joke. This is, and was, in no way a reflection on the reportedly delightful man himself or his excellent abilities as a politician. It might not be so comfortable for some to remember now, seeing as the coverage of his very sad and all too early death has been focusing on Kennedy’s many strengths, with much emphasis being placed on his stand against the Iraq war.

Yet until yesterday, I hadn’t heard much mention of this for 10 years. Instead, whenever Kennedy’s name has been invoked on topical news shows – by half-assed comedians, by too many members of the public – it has been followed by a joking reference to his drinking problem.

Note the title of this 1999 profile of Kennedy, written as he was about to assume leadership of the Liberal Democrats. His brief period living in Bloomington, Indiana during a time when Indiana University enjoyed a nationwide reputation as a "party" school makes me wonder whether any friends ever crossed paths with him.

Profile: Charles Kennedy - The liberal party animal, by Donald MacIntyre (The Independent)

(Kennedy) was president of the university union before winning a Fulbright scholarship to Indiana University where he went to do to a PhD - and teach - political rhetoric after a spell working as a seasonal radio reporter in the BBC Highland office in Inverness. He was at Indiana University when the Liberal/SDP Alliance candidacy for the seat of Ross, Cromarty and Skye came up. Among several people he consulted was his former colleague - and later the BBC's hugely respected Scottish political editor - the late Kenny Macintyre, who had been something of a mentor and had urged him to have a crack at it. His father Ian toured the constituency, the largest in Britain - "two million acres of mountain glen and moors" as Kennedy junior described it - with his son, playing the fiddle to attract the more apolitical to meetings. At one, in Skye, a wag urged him not to prolong his speech shouting: "Aye, we know who you are, now come on Ian give us another tune."

Kennedy won the election at the tender age of 23. He was only 55 when he died.

Perhaps sometimes, being precocious isn't the best design for life.