No one should doubt that in the American presidential election on Tuesday and the long campaign towards it, and in much of the international as well as domestic reaction to the result, we see again that the United States is a partially mad country that provokes frequently insane responses from people who are normally somewhat sensible (such as the demented ravings of Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail). This election also demonstrates that corrupt, vulgar and outrageous though it often is, the American system works: the constitution of the United States has been in operation for 235 years and in that time the jurisdiction that it governs has risen 130-fold from under three-million to approximately 340-million people and it has gone from a bold experiment in republican government and egalitarian society (apart from a million slaves who were only emancipated 75 years later after a terrible civil war in which 750,000 people died in a population of 31 million), to be the most powerful and influential jurisdiction in the history of the world, which for more than a century has operated on a scale that the world had never before imagined to be possible.