It's beginning to be a habit. It, in this case, is the messy business of center-left political jettisoning one leader suddenly deemed unelectable and, without resort to the usual rules or democratic procedure, designating a replacement. It's the process that came fairly close to giving Americans President Kamala Harris in 2024.

It's happening not just here but all over the Anglosphere. While the American political firmament post-July 4 was preoccupied with demands for the ouster of Maine's Democrat nominee for the Senate, Graham Platner, our cousins in Britain were witnessing the protracted ouster of Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his replacement by Birmingham Mayor Andy Burnham.

Labour Party leaders used to last a long time. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown held Number 10 Downing Street, with huge popular vote victories and matching parliamentary majorities across the square in Parliament, for 13 years. Now, Labour owes its parliamentary majority to a fracturing of other parties' coalitions and is picking a third consecutive leader who played no visible role in national government in recent years. And hoping that it's not on the verge of nearly disappearing like the social democratic parties in France, Germany, and Italy.

Sometimes this works, as it did last year in Canada. Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started 2025 hugely unpopular, the target of President Donald Trump's jibes that Canada would become the 51st state. Liberals ditched Trudeau for Mark Carney, who had conveniently spent most of the previous decade in London as head of the Bank of England.

America's Democratic Party used to revere its leaders, not discard them. Paeans to Andrew Jackson rang out from historians George Bancroft in Jackson's time, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the 1940s, and Jon Meacham in this........

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