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Conservative David Cameron stands on the right, with Nick Clegg to his left, and Gordon Brown to his far left. Can this coalition teach America anything?

If this merry month of May has taught us anything thus far, it's that we're sure we made the right decision 200 years ago when we abandoned the idea of parliamentary democracy. At least we don't have a mess on our hands like Britain has now with a coalition government. Smug as we are in knowing that we never have to be hamstrung by a hung parliament, there are curious British contrivances -- the duumvirate and the Ministry of All Talents -- that we can consider adopting in our own time of political and economic angst.

On May 6 Britons went to the polls apprehensive of what the pundits had predicted -- that a hung parliament would likely ensue. As fate would have it, the three parties claimed almost equal shares of the electorate. In their worst crisis since World War II, Britain's government resembles a barge floating sideways down the Thames.

We had our "too close to call" experience in 2000, and it ended up being decided by the highest court in the land. The Court's decision was rendered according to each justice's partisan leaning even though complex legal arguments gave optimism and credence to both sides. However, the country that gave us Churchill, Ringo, and Beckham won't have the grim satisfaction of finality that comes from the bang of a justice's gavel as Americans did with George W. Bush v. Al Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).

For seven and a half centuries our English cousins have alternately labored and prospered under parliamentary government. It's been centuries since Wat Tyler and his pitchfork-peasant friends mobbed Westminster in a rebellious mood.

Londoners are used to theatrics in their House of Commons; they even expect it. However, what they're about to get with the Conservative Party's David Cameron and the Liberal-Democrat Party's Nick Clegg is anything but typical of their parliament system. As their political beefsteak roasts on the spit of voter angst, we adherents of American-styled democracy should pay closer attention to some of their "behind the scenes" parliamentary tactics. Maybe the Founding Fathers cast off a useful and time-honored practice during that long, hot summer in Philadelphia.

Brits know that behind the scenes their government is a well-oiled, party-run machine. Not anymore! It took five days in May to haggle a truce between the Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats. But for the time being, Britain will be governed by the Conservative - Liberal coalition, and if that leaves you feeling dizzy, imagine a buggy with a horse attached to one end and a team of mules to the other. Don't count the beefeaters out just yet, for they were understudies to the Romans 2000 years ago. And those ancients had tricks up their sleeve when it came to statecraft and ruling empires!

According to the classical scholars, the term "Duoviri" means dual magistracy -- or dual monarchy. First century Roman historian Livy in his multi-volume History of Rome, recounts the Etruscan tradition of employing the Duoviri -- dual monarchy principle in governing far-flung provinces or contentious ones. In modern day Britain, a forced duumvirate of David Cameron and Nick Clegg leading Britain seat first into the fray of the economic demise of Europe is a scene more fitting for an Anthony Trollope novel. Trollope's The Way We Live

Now (1875) comes to mind. No stranger political bedfellows could be found in British politics than Cameron and Clegg, yet they are being forced for the sake of the country to merge their oft-times polar views into some workable policy consensus. It'd be a delicious prospect for political junkies if the economic security of the western world were not resting upon the necessity that they find a way to work together--fast!

Restoration England knew a duumvirate of sorts in 1670 with Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftsbury, and Henry Bennett, 1st Earl of Arlington. Both were exceptionally powerful men, king-makers in their own right, and they were forced to act where there was no convenient precedence. Unlike Cameron and Clegg, Cooper and Bennett were like-minded and were exiled as conspirators in later years.

Speculating upon how Cameron and Clegg will form a united front for Britain in the arena of world crises, one need only ponder how Barack Obama and Ron Paul would meld in the political milieu of 2010 Washington. If worse comes to worse, ancient Etruscans and Romans, modern Brits, Australians, Russians, and Polish have all been forced at one time or another to govern through a coalition of disparate interests.

Cameron and Clegg can take refuge in another tried and true parliamentary stratagem, the so-called "Ministry of All Talents" - a scheme last employed by Churchill in World War II's coalition government, yet it dates to Lord Grenville's days as prime minister during the Napoleonic era.

If the east Asian idea of yen and yang can be made to hold true in politics, then now is the ideal time for the "put America first" statesmen of both parties to secure a bi-partisan agreement on everything from health care to financial bailouts.

Neither Henry Paulson nor Tim Geithner garners the nation's trust. Likewise, in Britain, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, rankles about half of the country's populace, as Liberal-Democrat shadow Exchequer Alistair Darling rankles the other half. British and American elected officials will be served well if they resort to a Ministry of All the Talents as FDR and Churchill did in the crisis of 1940-'45.

Think of the great financial minds that we have -- Warren Buffett, George Soros, Ross Perot, "the mouth of the South" Ted Turner, and the list goes on. Even though the Brit billionaires have surnames that resonate anything but Anglo-Saxon, bringing Mittal, Abramovich, Bertarelli, and Rausing in to "put their shoulders to the wheel" of Britain's sluggish economic engine is an idea that should elicit bipartisan support. If Churchill, the Conservative, could invite into his wartime cabinet Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, two staunch Labourites, then Cameron and Clegg can certainly have a "try on goal," to borrow their sports metaphor.

Our mutual problems are of our own making, and the solutions are likely not beyond the realm of our own thinking - if we can end the partisan bickering and finger-pointing. Cameron and Clegg are being forced to relearn some old lessons of cooperation that somehow weren't picked up on the playing fields of Eton and Westminster, their elite boarding schools. Maybe Cameron-Clegg can pass along what they learn to Obama-McCain, neither of whom learned much in cooperation from equally posh Punahou and Episcopal, respectively.

Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his website at www.historyslostmoments.com.