No Comb To Fight Over

For all the occasional quirks of the Electoral College, the Presidency is America's only truly national election.

And a generation later, the economic policies of the 1980s have created a national electorate in which one in every four voters is a single woman.

That is Ronald Reagan's real legacy, and the real reason why his party stands no chance of providing another President for anything like the foreseeable future, if ever.

This year, and doubtless for many years to come, that party's Presidential field is the most astonishing freak show, full of people who indicate quite how undistinguished it is possible to be and now count as a shining light among Republicans.

A spectacularly failed businesswoman, small town lawyers to people who never finished school and are therefore impressed out of all proportion to their achievements, a boorish and born-rich popular entertainer, a man brilliant in one field but otherwise a complete crank, and so on.

Several profess the original Cafeteria Catholicism, that of most Catholics who now describe themselves as American conservatives.

Through certain media interests, that also commands something of a hearing in Britain, where it is wildly unrepresentative, as it is in any country other than the United States, and not is not typical of Catholics even there.

The school of Evangelical Protestantism, one of the world's great popular religions, that has come to be associated with the American Right is perhaps more influential internationally.

But it is still not normal among Evangelicals outside America, and certainly not in Britain, where the brethren do not need to rely on American money.

Time was when it was feared that that species of political religion might take over the United States.

But Reagan, the highly irregular churchgoer who had legalised abortion in California and who had gone on to appoint no fewer than three supporters of abortion to the Supreme Court, had guaranteed that there would be absolutely no electoral chance of that.