NIALL FERGUSON, the British historian currently living in the US as a Harvard professor, believes the country is polarized but not as much as it's sometimes pictured. It's on the brink of an election, not another civil war:

Yet the conventional wisdom that America is being rent asunder by this election strikes me as fundamentally wrong. Having spent much of the past few months on the road, giving lectures in states as diverse as Massachusetts, New York, California, Michigan and Minnesota, I am happy to report that civil war is not imminent. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the notorious political polarisation in the United States is something of an illusion. What we are seeing here is a sign of democratic vitality in a land that remains fundamentally whole.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn thinks that it's not just the economy, stupid.