One cannot compromise with evil.

There are now two types of US voter, I would suggest: evil, and not evil.

The evil may be subdivided into those who know themselves to be evil (though they would not use the correct term), and revel in it. And those too blind, deaf or dumb to realise the consequences of what they intend to do, but who will be adjudged by history to be equally guilty.

It may be that a narrow majority of the USA's adult citizens turn out not to be evil. That nonetheless leaves the country - and the wider world - dealing with the fact that one in every two of them is committed to the overthrow of every element of slow, societal progress seen since independence, in a land which in many respects - healthcare, employment law, gun control... - has still not achieved even the most basic level to be considered by the rest of the developed world to be civilised, nor even shown any great ambition to do so.

A worrying state of affairs, whatever numbers come up tomorrow.

Two of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council are already in the hands of vicious, brutal, anti-democratic regimes. A third may well follow.