Things that are a lot like each other: The downbeat moods of the British and American electorates, faced with bitter political division, perceived national crisis and impending national elections that won’t solve any of that.

Things that aren’t like each other at all: The nature — and the duration! — of the election campaigns in the two countries, and the two pairs of major candidates vying to lead the Western world’s most storied democracies. (I could use scare-quotes around that last word, but at least for the moment, and for the sake of argument, I won’t.)

There was a debate on Wednesday evening, and while I have no ability to see the future, I’ll make the bold prediction that it bore little or no resemblance to the one CNN will host in Atlanta on Thursday night between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, people with whom you may be familiar (and of whom, quite likely, you are heartily sick).

This one was in the English city of Nottingham, between Rishi Sunak, the Conservative Party’s almost-certainly-outgoing prime minister — a definite historical curiosity, as the first nonwhite person to hold that office and quite likely the wealthiest — and Keir Starmer, the anodyne, Clintonesque leader of the opposition Labour Party, who will almost certainly be the prime minister a bit more than a week from now. I know, right? One can only gaze across the pond in wonder and longing at the merciful brevity of a U.K. election campaign, which runs six weeks from start to finish. Does that mean I’m about to tell you that the Starmer-Sunak debate was a model of small-D democratic probity, decency and civility, and that we unwashed, unschooled, gun-crazed ex-colonials still have a lot to learn from Mother England? It does not.

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OK, sure, maybe a little: To be fair, Sunak and Starmer did not accuse each other of being radical Marxists or fascists or white supremacists or “groomers,” nor of weaponizing the justice system, suffering from senile dementia or being on drugs. Although the onstage atmosphere in Nottingham was “spiky” and........

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