Why politicians can't talk back, and one who can

This past week I have been in Britain, where two events are shaping up to have broad impact on democratic politics. There is, of course, the much discussed referendum next week in which Scotland could decide to declare its independence and exit from the United Kingdom. At the same time, the most interesting politician in the English-speaking world, Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has begun the next stage of his almost inevitable assent to prime minister and to the world stage.

These two events are connected in political as well as dramatic terms.

A modern state on the precipice of dissolution is something that has seldom been seen. If Scottish independence succeeds or even comes close, the fractioning option likely becomes part of modern discourse and politicking—relevant from Catalonia to Texas, not to mention conferring legitimacy on the ongoing breakup of so many unstable nations.

Boris Johnson, a writer and editor and by far the most popular politician in the United Kingdom, has built his career on wit and language. He is perhaps the only mainstream politician at the top of his trade who can speak not just in elegant sentences but in spontaneously crafted, enjoyably digressive paragraphs full of the unexpected, and often the audacious. He is where he is because people enjoy listening to him. He is, in short, what we used to call charismatic.

Charisma, that combination of energy, sex appeal, surprise, originality and media savviness—political showmanship—is an attribute that has largely passed from the official political world to the outsider political world. It is part of the arsenal that now undermines the center and whips up civil strife.

Alex Salmond is the charismatic figure, and extraordinary huckster, in Scotland who has almost singlehandedly bedeviled the British establishment and created the social and media conditions leading to the improbable breakup of a 300-year old union built on economic and cultural consanguinity. Salmond, with a little critical interpretation, is not that different from the voluble and pugnacious Vladimir Putin, now bedeviling the Western world in his efforts to divide and conquer Ukraine. Both are self-styled dramatists.

These outsider mavericks are contrast gainers to the well-tempered, bureaucratically constrained, ever-frustrated, quite inarticulate, diffident and obtuse stewards of the official order. President Barack Obama now surveys the violence and breakdown of large parts of the world with an almost singular inability to even change the expression on his face. Modern, corporatized, PR-ruled world leaders seem literally not to know what to say to the ludicrousness and mayhem—even opting, according to The New York Times, not to use the term "invasion" for Russia's military attack on the Ukraine.

Enter Boris Johnson. He had become the central theatrical presence in British political life. His political rise from editor of the venerable literary and political magazine The Spectator has been against the background of the era of Tony Blair and David Cameron—men who, along with Obama, are bottled up and buttoned down, ever confused by the passions of passionate men. They are all so controlled they can't deal with the loss of control.

The Scottish independence movement, as preposterous a historical and social development as it might ever be possible to imagine, happens largely because Blair (ironically a Scot himself), when he was prime minister, felt it politically more efficient to offer the rump movement its own Parliament rather than to express the incredulity that the nonsense demanded. It continued to this present point of existential referendum because David Cameron seemed unable to appreciate that illogic, unmet, invariably generates its own wacky logic.

And it rose to a level of media bullying in which almost everyone is now intimidated by the forces of idiocy. Even Paul McCartney, perhaps the closest thing the United Kingdom has to a national hero, has received death threats for expressing wistful hopes that his country might remain intact.

The center lacks the will and words to defend itself.

Johnson himself, whose career has flourished likely because of rather than in spite of, sexual scandal, almost daily inopportune utterances, frequent displays of clownishness and a spectacular joy in his own self-promotion, is an outsider insider. Like Cameron, he is a Tory Etonian—both of them party stalwarts. But Johnson stands alongside Cameron talking out of the side of his mouth, mugging for the camera, calling attention to the emperor's lack of clothes. Curiously, his antics are in defense of some middle of the road traditionalism. He reinvigorates the center—gives it the thing it sorely lacks, cleverness and imagination.

Johnson, who left Parliament for the London mayor's job, has announced his intention to return, a necessary step to Downing Street. In this he anticipates that the Tories, led by Cameron, will likely be defeated in the next election, making Johnson the likely leader of the party. Then Labor, as corporatized and flummoxed as the conservatives, will shortly go down in defeat itself. (indeed, without Scotland's heavy Labor vote in the event of a "yes" vote, Labor would lose its majority and the government would fall anyway.) This means Johnson, in as unlikely a rise as perhaps Churchill's return to power in 1940, will become the prime minister of Great Britain, albeit a less great one if it's without Scotland.

What Johnson returns to government is a function that it has, rather inexplicably, lost, arguably its most important one: the ability to talk. At a time when social media has given every tinpot nobody a voice and the opportunity to express himself, most often destructively, if not violently, the liberal power structure is hopelessly tongue tied.

Boris Johnson sounds unlike any other contemporary politician. He is sharp, funny, joyful, lacerating and inclined to say what everyone knows but is too polite or cowed to say out loud.

Oh, and Johnson was born in America. His future may be unlimited.