Reaction

Or lack of it, to the latest progress in Iran's development of undoubtedly civil nuclear power.

Finally given the opportunity to vote for a candidate who had secured nomination and was now seeking election by running against the likes of AIPAC, conservative America - the people who reaffirmed traditional marriage in California and Florida, who abolished legal discrimination against working-class white men in Colorado, who declined to liberalise gambling in Missouri or Ohio, and who keep the black and Catholic churches (especially) going from coast to coast - leaped at the chance.

And why not? From America's own point of view, Iran should matter more than Israel just as Germany, then West Germany, then Germany again has mattered more than Britain even since before the War was properly over. This is not to say that either Israel or Britain should not matter at all. But Iran and Germany are larger, more populous, and vastly more importantly located in strategic terms.

Middle America rightly views the wider world in strictly realistic terms, "not seeking for monsters to destroy". She is the land of those Republicans who called for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Of Eisenhower, with his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and with his denunciation of the military-industrial complex.

Of Nixon, who ended the Vietnam War as President Obama will end the Iraq War, and who began détente with China as President Obama is beginning détente with Iran (and beyond). And of Republican opposition to Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration.

Of course, Middle America is also the land of that rural and Western half of the Republican Party which supported the New Deal, of those Congressional Republicans whose votes passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance, of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice, of popular fury at the bailout, and of the cry for universal healthcare.