The right will backstab anyone naive enough to try to make a deal – both in the UK and the US

Theresa May and Nancy Pelosi are very different politicians, from different political parties, but they’ve both made the same mistake: thinking that there is give and take to be had with people who are only capable of taking

If Pelosi needed an example of how it’s going to play out over next couple of years, she need only look at Wisconsin (AP)

Sometimes I find myself looking across the Atlantic at the Democratic Party and saying: “Seriously?”

Nancy Pelosi’s impending re-election as speaker of the US House of Representatives, to the evident delights of Donald Trump, is a case in point.

Pelosi, whose opponents are struggling to find even a token challenger, is a veteran Democrat who previously held the role between 2007 and 2011, and has served as minority leader since then.

In some ways I admire her. She’s attained the highest political office of any female politician in American history, and become a hate figure for the hard right in the process.

Fox News hosts probably use her to frighten their children into behaving. “Now you just eat your greens or Nancy will come out from under your bed and force you to share your room with a brown person.”

But Trump’s support of her getting the job speaks volumes.

The problem with Pelosi is not so much that she’s a corporate Democrat, as the party’s feisty progressive wing would characterise her. It’s that she’s a traditional politician. She’ll square up to her opponents, snarl a bit, and then hunker down to try and do a deal.

She’s already talked about reaching across the aisle, saying that’s what the American people expect, even though it’s blindingly obvious that the other side will take whatever she’s willing to give before flipping her off.

That’s what the Trump Republican Party does. That was how the more traditionally conservative Republican Party that existed before the Donald’s successful hostile takeover largely conducted itself. Now, with the alt-right, which is really the extreme right, in control it’s even worse.

If Pelosi needed an example of how it’s going to play out over next couple of years, she need only look at Wisconsin where, having lost the governorship, the Republicans are seeking to use the “lame duck” legislative session to strip power from incoming Democrat Tony Evers, along the lines of a similar effort in North Carolina. Incapable of accepting the verdict of the voters, the GOP seeks to cheat them.

Similar forces are at work in Britain. Theresa May took nearly two years to come up with her Chequers plan, which was intended to serve as a way to take her Brexit negotiations with the EU forward.

The cabinet’s agreement to it lasted only for as long as it took Brexit secretary David Davis to sharpen his knife, followed (of course) by Boris Johnson with this blunderbuss.

They had backing by the European Research Group (ERG) of extremist Tory MPs, which basically wants a no-deal outcome, regardless of how damaging that will be.

For them it’s the crazy way or the highway.

Neither the hardcore Trumpkins who dominate the modern Republican Party nor the ERG are normal politicians, in the way that is traditionally understood. The compromises and dealmaking that is par for the course in traditional politics, because that’s the only way democratic systems can work, are anathema to them.

Their sole purpose is to break things.

May and Pelosi are very different politicians, from different political parties representing different traditions in different countries. But they’ve both made the same mistake in thinking that there is give and take to be had with people who are only capable of taking before getting down to the business of eating their own young.

Politics in this decade is no longer about right vs left. It has instead coalesced around three groups: assholes, those who would oppose them, and those who haven’t paid any attention to history and would appease them.

The latter have facilitated the dizzying success of the first group, which is made up of some truly repulsive politicians. They have obtained power through democracy only to seek to destroy it once getting there. And yes I know that sounds chillingly familiar. But you can see it in action in Hungary, in Poland, in Brazil, in Turkey.

American democracy is older and it ought to be stronger, but there’s an awful lot now resting on Pelosi being more than the paper tiger she’s been in the past.

As for Britain? God only knows what’s happening here. There are assholes and their appeasers on both sides of the House of Commons.

Perhaps the resignation of Boris Johnson’s brother Jo, and his call for a people’s vote, will ultimately end with us getting the chance to bypass the appeasers and save ourselves from them.