You may have read that Rishi Sunak has called for a snap UK election for July 4th. If you look carefully at the CNN explanation, you'll note that its author is not really telling you anything. This is the "least bad time" to call an election or something. That's nonsense, because how would anyone know that? The ABC News explanation is not really any better. He's trying to "take the bull by the horns." Also no. You would think the current government in the UK would either 1) do something substantive to win election between now and the end of the year (when they would be required to call an election) or 2) try to hold onto power as long as possible. But Sunak's approach is neither of these.

Well, as it appears, the UK, as well as many of the governments of Europe, and of course the United States, is not really a democracy. There is of course a fairly-sized list of people who control America. The Fortune 500, the Pentagon, the police forces, the alphabet agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA), the super-rich, the think tanks, Ivy League schools, Dem/ Rep parties, those people really control America. The rest of us are their rubes. Elections do not change this, though it's not as if anyone in the US has actually tried to do so by, for instance, voting 3rd party or anything like that. Thus we must conclude that elections are only for show. I'm sure it's the same in France, Germany, and so on.

At any rate, when there isn't really a democracy, how does it devolve? Revolutions, uprisings, civil war, actual war. Early modernity in Europe, pre-elections Europe, the era of kings and queens, was a period of constant warfare. There's no reason to believe that anything has changed, as the various "settlements" (the Congress of Vienna, the League of Nations, the UN and so on) were only temporary expedients.

Today we have Alastair Crooke, perhaps a bit on the pessimistic side, but a realist:

At any rate, the constant warfare thing appears to be going nuclear, and the decision, typical of a non-democracy, has already been made. Rishi Sunak is calling for a snap election because he doesn't want to be part of a nuclear war which he will very likely lose. So he has decided to lose an election instead. Keir Starmer will be the force engineering the UK's defeat in the upcoming war.

So if the governments are not democracies, what we can expect next are calls to overthrow them. The first call to overthrow the non-democracies of the West will come from Vladimir Putin -- he is, after all, the world's most secure individual.