As the civil war develops between Tea Party versus "country club" Republicans, the Senate defeats in Indiana and Missouri on November 6, and in Nevada, Delaware and Colorado in 2010, will be held up as evidence that the Tea Party has lost the party the chance of having a 50:50 split in the upper house. "We can't continue nominating whack-jobs for Senate seats," was the response of one Romney aide I spoke to on election night, referring to one senatorial hopeful who admitted to "dabbling in witchcraft" in the 2010 race and another who referred to "legitimate" rape in this election. Yet to hope that the Tea Party will put likeability over ideological purity in choosing candidates is too much: if the country clubbers want to retake the party, they must simply work as hard as the Tea Party does.

Meanwhile, we have four more years of President Obama. We can look forward to a nuclear Iran; to Supreme Court justices (of whom four are in their seventies) being replaced with liberals; to tax hikes for those earning over $250,000; to Janet Yellen pursuing Keynesianism at the Federal Reserve after Ben Bernanke's retirement in January; to Palestinian statehood at the United Nations; to legalised pot-smoking in Colorado and Washington state; to the percentage of Americans who take more in benefits than they contribute in taxes increasing from the now notorious figure of 47 per cent to over half of Americans, while 30 million people enjoy healthcare benefits which are effectively paid for by other, more productive people. When it comes to Obama's dystopia, therefore, we are indeed "all in this together".