NEW YORK’s Frank Rich on the difference between. certain U.K. Tories and U.S. Republicans

British Parliament’s continued defiance of Boris Johnson on a no-deal Brexit this week has required a group of conservative lawmakers to join the opposition party, forfeiting their parliamentary majority. What would have to happen for Trump’s more vocal Republican critics to stand in his way?

Nothing, apparently. With the sole exception of a single Michigan congressman, Justin Amash, current Republican officeholders, even those who purport to be occasional critics, have refused to challenge Trump even as children are put in cages and top administration jobs have been routinely handed out to grifters, bigots, and perpetrators of sexual assault. As Trump has said that his base would stand by him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, so Mitch McConnell has deferred to Trump and tabled new gun-control laws even after the deaths of 53 Americans in mass shootings in August alone.

As Edmund Luce of the Financial Times pointed out this week in a powerful column about “the surrender of America’s adults,” it’s not just senators like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker who have retreated from taking real action against Trump despite their periodic furrowed-brow expressions of “concern” over his latest outrage. No less wimpy are departed Cabinet members like Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis, who have continued to withhold public criticism of a president they obviously thought was a danger to the nation. Mattis has said he is doing so out of a “duty of silence” to the administration he served. As Luce points out, the departed Secretary of Defense may also have a duty to shareholders: “Shortly before Mr. Mattis launched his memoir, he rejoined the board of General Dynamics, one of America’s largest defense contractors. Mr. Mattis’s worth to GD is inversely related to the value of what he can say about the future of U.S. democracy. The more he speaks against Mr. Trump, the likelier his company will suffer.”

As for Mattis’s specious theory of a “duty of silence,” history is replete with examples of the calamities that follow when good men stay silent while serving criminal regimes. Unlike their feckless and/or ignorant American counterparts, the 21 Tories who left their own party rather than countenance their prime minister’s abuse of power know this history. And none more so than Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson, who is leaving Parliament after 37 years rather than knuckle under to Johnson. “I knew what I was doing,” he told the BBC of his banishment. Elucidating further to The Guardian, he recalled a debate in the House in 1938, when the apostle of appeasement, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, accused his grandfather of undermining his negotiations with the Germans. “I think history will prove my grandpapa to be right under the circumstances,” said Soames, “and I think I will prove to be right.”

Though Trump might disagree, history has long since proven Soames’s grandpapa right. The American adults who have surrendered to their leader over the past three years are unlikely to be treated more kindly by posterity than Chamberlain.