In the near universal dismay among ‘thinking’ Europeans at the re-election of President George W. Bush there has been one un-thinking notion which has reached cliché status so often has it been repeated.

It is that what we saw in America on November 2nd was a manifestation, among 60 million Americans or so, of pre-Enlightened irrationality. Bush, this view has it, was elected by the religious right which, by definition, is anti-science. Ruling the roost in the world's only remaining super-power it is, almost by definition, dangerous. It is dangerously dogmatic in its opposition in principle to the progress made in moral matters by secularism over the past century or two, and dangerous in that it is a view which now has so much power behind it.