60-40 NATION:

In fact, as the elections last week--and the results that continue to trickle in--have demonstrated, America remains what it has been for some time: a country of moderates, whether of the Left or the Right. No doubt Americans, like other nations, have their paroxysms of extremism, such as Prohibition in the 1920s, or Trumpism a century later. Yet the political pendulum always moves back to the centre, and if the major political parties show an inclination to remain in thrall to their extremes, the people vote for divided government to ensure that the radicals do not have their way. Moreover, it is for good reason that the largest contemporary American political grouping is neither Democratic nor Republican, but what are known as "Independents".

Americans demonstrated in 2012 and again in 2016 that they could elect and re-elect a Black president. Yet in 2016 when Democrats offered the electorate the widely disliked Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate, who managed to be perceived as both a far more Left-oriented politician than her centrist husband, and yet so elitist that she could dismiss working-class Americans as a "basket of deplorables," voters opted instead for that bumptious, self-centred, bigoted outsider Donald Trump. In turn, Trump's antics, his defiance of presidential and legal norms and his lording over the Republican party proved too much for voters in 2020. They instead chose Joe Biden, whom they perceived to be soothingly centrist, and they followed up in last week's elections by handing the Republicans the worst defeat in mid-term elections that any out-of-office party has suffered since the 1930s.

It is not clear, however, that the extremists of either party will absorb the lessons of November.

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