After a month of traveling and working remotely from Britain, I was having my last English breakfast Monday morning — porridge seemed appropriate in a cool clime — on a garden terrace in the quiet Whitehall neighborhood of London. The British election on the Fourth of July was still big news, as was the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, and I had three newspapers spread out in front of me on the table — the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian. Another breakfaster came out through the French doors. I looked up and said good morning to a gent about my age, blazered. He stayed silent, simply nodded, went over to his table. And then in a minute he had come over and was standing next to mine. “I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude. You seemed so engrossed in the papers.” I said it was nothing and asked if he would like to sit down. He did so. Hearing that I was American, he said, “Ah, you and your country and your guns! So many guns! It’s not as if we English don’t have guns. I once bought a house in the country and it came with several rifles, for shooting rabbits. But we don’t have guns everywhere.” They don’t, I agreed. I had walked past 10 Downing Street the evening before, and the security for a prime minister was two police officers. Yes, with guns. But, still. It is among the many differences in UK politics and domestic life from ours. After a hard-fought, blissfully short campaign of a few weeks, Labour had soundly trounced the Conservatives for the first time in 14 years. The transition was instantaneous. A couple of days later in the House of Commons, former PM Rishi Sunak and new PM Keir Starmer were shown on a video with their arms on each other’s shoulders, smiling, then laughing together over some joke, each quite clearly comfortable with, or at least resigned to, what had occurred. The Tories and the center-left Labour, as I mentioned in a dispatch recently, essentially agree on what ails their nation; they just propose different solutions. Across the Channel in France, the electorate had just dramatically rebuffed the populist, anti-NATO, anti-immigrant National Rally party, until recently known as, shudder, the National Front, born out of post-war Holocaust deniers and protectionist nationalists. The far right had done frighteningly well in an early balloting. Then, a crazy-quilt of liberals, leftists and ecologists came together at the last minute and shockingly took the know-nothings down. Can reason prevail here? Not if the Democrats stick with their unelectable current candidate, who has made us endure the most remarkable fall of any leading presidential contender in modern history. We could stay in the sensible world center if we found a better candidate and voters go with their actual policy preferences instead of weird momentum. The young zealot running for vice president has some policies that make even his boss look slightly better, though the latter is certainly more bonkers. J.D. Vance opposes marriage equality, is for a national abortion ban, including rape and incest. He’s against the popular access to health insurance through the ACA. He’s a 2020 election denier. He’s pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine. And he kisses up to a man he formerly called “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” out of self-interest. No, those of us concerned about the new extremism won’t move to Britain, or France, if the populist nationalists prevail. We’ll stay and fight the good fight for the real America. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to be afraid of the dark cloud settling in over our nation. Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].