AS I have to write this on a Friday it may be that by the time you read it, there is a new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the third most powerful person in America, finally elected after a fractious and protracted process not seen since the days leading up to the American Civil War.

But equally, it may be that the stand-off continues and 20 or so right-wing zealots, more Trumpian than Trump, are still exercising their warped, narcissistic blocking power to the detriment of both the rule of democracy and the rule of law.

In a sense, this is other people’s business, though the health or otherwise of law-making and scrutiny in what is still the most influential and most over-armed (personally and militarily) nation on the planet should always concern us. But it also has echoes of arguments much closer to home.

For whilst the smarmy Gaetzs and the gun-toting Boeberts fulminated against the system in the USA where the electorate now seems to be turning against the type of conspiracy-laden fundamentalism they espouse, one of those echoes was also sounding off here this week.

Stephen Kerr, very briefly a Tory MP, is now an MSP only by virtue of the fair proportional system of Scottish Parliament elections, yet he has been arrogantly braying that it is time for a revamp of everything to do with Holyrood to allow people like him to take control even though the electorate don’t want it.

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Stephen and his fellow right-wing Tories actually believe that the Scottish Parliament should be downgraded to the extent of virtual abolition, just as the dissident Republicans in Washington want – as Trump himself has said recently – to abolish those parts of the US Constitution that block their attempts to overthrow elections and impose their will.

Their argument that there is a conspiracy to silence them should, on its own, make them figures of pity if not of fun, given they never stop whining like spoilt weans denied all the toys in the shop. Nonetheless, they persist in their belief that they are the only ones who know what is wrong with the world and the only ones with the solution, which is to abolish the norms of democracy.

In fact, they are suffering from the sickness of false memory, a poisonous yearning nostalgia for supremacy and dominance which has caused so much damage in the form of Brexit.

Such people can’t live in today’s society because it no longer panders to their prejudices. Consequently, they refuse to work with others on ways of making the planet better despite the problems we are all facing from war, climate change and global inequality.

But amusing they ain’t. They are deadly serious, ferociously tenacious and contemptuous of the opinions of others.

Filibustering Parliamentary debates or refusing to vote for an agreed party candidate may seem mere gestures but when pursued relentlessly and repeatedly they are the type of obstructionism that wears down reasonable people.

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By such means is democracy – a messy system but still the best we have – defeated for, as Kipling observed, once you start paying the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

Moderation in defence of moderation is a fine concept but sometimes more is required. There is a fashion for dissing Joe Biden – and I am far from sure that any politician should still be actively plying that debilitating trade at 80 – but he has been prepared to confront those who despise elections and seek to subvert their outcomes.

Here in Scotland, we should also be robust in our defence of our fellow citizens’ right to choose how they are governed and by whom, first of all by seeking to establish a system that cannot ever be overthrown by a Tory whim whether by the Kerrs and Rosses of the branch office here or by their bosses in London.

Of course, the reality that such people never face is the reality of decline. The truth is that their idealised UK is now a poor, archaic and badly run country, as even the London-based commentariat now accept, yet also one in which the principal opposition party is hoping to win by merely imitating those presently in charge, most notably by accepting the self-inflicted disaster that is Brexit.

In the last stages of the 1980 US presidential election, Ronald Reagan, running several points behind the incumbent Jimmy Carter, concluded a television debate by asking the audience: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

He went on to pose some further questions about the state of his country, concluding: “If you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.”

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That approach changed the contest. From being three points behind, he quickly went three points ahead.

Reagan was no left-winger, but he was more outgoing and moderate than most modern Republicans and from a different political planet than the MAGA crew.

His question is particularly appropriate in the independence debate because just changing government at Westminster will not change the trajectory of decline. Compared to 2014, when we last voted on indy, we are poorer, with fewer in work, stranded in increasing international isolation and stuck on entirely the wrong course, yet with a system of governance and a constitution which actively prevents Scotland from setting the right course for its own people.

The current Tory party in Scotland is, like the voluble US Republican right, an extremist inward-looking sect. It is focused solely on exercising the power needed to maintain the current disastrous status quo even if that requires the extinction of our Parliament and the erasure of our democracy.

Back in 2014, that would have seemed a crazy notion. Now we must work to ensure it cannot happen.