But looking at the electoral map of states that voted against Bush suggests another, and in some ways a more sensible option that would save on moving costs for them.

The West Coast and North Eastern states should secede from the New Confederacy and join Canada in new Union of Provinces and States, based on rational and democratic principles.

That would leave the cowboy heartland and the South to the creationist fate they deserve – which includes the Hurricanes that either the Global Warming that they don’t believe in, or the God they do, is sending as a message to them.

The election result reveals a country deeply split, geographically and ideologically – or rather theologically – and a people deeply conflicted internally, since so many Bush voters ended up casting their ballots for a President whose actual policies on many issues they disagree with!

The mismatch can be seen in the victory of the referendum in Florida to raise the minimum wage – a plank of the Kerry campaign nationally, but which Bush has resolutely opposed in Washington, although as he showed during the debates, been totally and successfully evasive about during the campaign.

Over 72% of Floridians voted for the raise, which means that at least 60% of Bush voters supported a measure that is socially and economically the antithesis of what their candidate stands for.

There even seems to be some evidence that some black religious voters, long a traditional votebank for the Democrats may have succumbed on the “gay marriage/evangelical” issues and voted for a party that in some localities is the direct descendant of the Dixiecrats and the Klan.

It was a triumph of the Bush campaign to do that while still successfully evoking the coded racism that has been so successful for it across the country.

In fact, the polls from the University of Maryland showed that the Bush campaign had actually concealed much its real political and economic agenda from its supporters, who actually came out to the left of Kerry on many issues!

But the key issue was security and terrorism, where the War on Iraq, and, as so many of them still believe, the War on Terror of which it is part, motivated Bush voters whose views on these matters were as faith based as so much of their voting. 

As that poll showed, over seventy per cent of Bush supporters believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found, and that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11.

Indeed, it seems that many of them, confusing militarism with military experience, thought that Bush was a better Commander-in-Chief, despite his evasions and desertions during the Vietnam War, than Kerry, a bemedalled veteran.

So what are the consequences, apart from renewed scrutiny of the Constitution’s creakily democratic processes?

Slightly more likely than the union with Canada is that the Republican Party, under the renewed control of the deeply conservative ideologues marches down the dead-end charted by the British Conservative Party and reduces itself to an unelectable rump by shedding the saner and more tolerant Republicans, like Pataki in New York and Schwarzenegger in California, whose politics are not as right wing as the Bible Belt would wish.

On the brighter side still, despite the appalling levels of voter ignorance, even though this was the most expensive election in history, with more spent on the Presidential campaigns, over $4 billion, than some small countries’ GDPs, it also had more popular participation than ever before.

Set rolling by Howard Dean’s grassroots campaign, volunteers went to work on the Democratic campaign on a scale unprecedented for many decades, not least since Bill Clinton and the DLC turned it into a PO Box address for corporate contributions.

From safer states like New York and Massachusetts thousands of volunteers had taken weeks off work to get out the vote in swing states like Pennsylvania , where, incidentally, a core of British Labor and Union volunteers defied Tony Blair to go and canvass for Kerry.

That flood of volunteers, voter registrations, and, by American standards, high turnout led to great Democratic optimism.

However, unremarked by them, the evangelical voters were also turning out in large numbers. 

They were motivated, in part, by state referenda seeking to ban gay marriages, and by the abortion issue, one of those peculiarly American touchstone issues that drives away all rational considerations of war and peace, prosperity and poverty.

However, while most Kerry supporters were clear what they were voting against, the Kerry campaign was much less clear in showing voters what they would be voting for.

The Bush campaign successfully fudged these issues, just as the Kerry campaign failed to articulate them convincingly, even though it was indeed an uphill struggle against the constant intellectual erosion of overtly partisan news and talk shows from Tony Blair’s friend Rupert Murdoch and similar-minded media moguls.

Let us hope that finally, heartened by the unprecedented mobilization on behalf of the Kerry Edwards ticket, the Democratic Party may escape from being a bran-tub of special interests and minorities and begin to develop an agenda that can appeal across the board.  

At present, so many blue collar workers whose wages are frozen, who face export of their jobs abroad, and whose unemployment benefits are about to disappear, continue to abhor the Democrats as the party of abortion and gay marriage.

If the Democrats cannot frame a platform that appeals to those voters, then there is little hope for the Democratic Party– or for the US for that matter.

 It is not a matter of Clintonian triangulation. The record vote for Democratic (and liberal) Senator Russ Feingold in Wisconsin shows that having strong principles can win elections.

The Democrats should pick their leader now, whether it is John Kerry or someone else, and learn how to be an effective opposition while beginning the 2008 campaign now.

And in the meantime, the rest of the world has just got to get down and begin to work out how to carry on together without the constructive input of the world’s strongest military power.