I use the word democracy as I imagine the Pentagon uses it . . .

not at all meaning it. The United States itself, with all its glorious liberties, is only questionably democratic if it has a president dependent on media corporations who make more money the more they keep the audience dumb, and who then brings his country into war because God told him to.

But it seems like a democracy, because Americans can vote. We know on this island that voting is no guarantee of civic fairness . . . I sometimes wonder whether voting reform in Northern Ireland has made much difference to the structure of power and influence in areas like banking, say, or insurance. But the secret ballot is on the whole one of humankind's great achievements. The victory last week for the anti-war Democrat opponent of Joe Lieberman, a Democrat senator for Connecticut, was achieved by the ballot. But whether it was the simple expression of anti-war sentiment it is made out in antiwar quarters to be . . . or whether it prefigures a wider Democratic success in the crucial elections in November . . . I do not know.

I went up from New York not long ago to speak at an event in Hartford, Connecticut, run by the local paper . . . one of the grand old newspapers of the United States . . . the Hartford Courant. Looking through a few copies of it and local freesheets, and stopping for pizza in a part of working-class New Haven and bumping along on potholed I-95 and going off through small towns next day to walk on the ridge above Berlin in the company of someone who knows the depressed towns of middle Connecticut . . . Bridgeport, Waterbury, Hartford itself . . . it was evident even to an outsider like me that the image people have of rich Connecticut applies only to part of the state.

The rest is depressed in a way few Europeans, I think, can imagine. Town after town in this (and the other eastern states) has a main street that was handsome and had purpose in times past but now barely supports a few indifferent stores and a diner or two. Somewhere on the outskirts there'll be a plain, breezeblock shopping mall.

Shopping, even just for groceries, is what there is mostly to do, but Wal-Mart is a bleak place at midnight. There is very little employment. There can be very little optimism.

Tip O'Neill is credited with the aphorism that all politics are local. But if blue-collar Connecticut is in a depression, the link between that and Lieberman's defeat is not straightforward. The less privileged don't vote in primaries; the activists do, and activists are more likely than the less privileged to be anti-war. The war will, nevertheless, be factor X in the countrywide elections in November. Not just Connecticut but many places have huge needs. What role in society is there, what hope is there of a satisfying, self-respecting life for their young people, especially their young black men? The no-hope people of places like Hartford have urgent need of the executive attention and energy that has been focused on Iraq. They have urgent need of the billions that have been poured in there. In history, wars were fought for booty. The conflagration in the Middle East is spreading, but nothing has been brought home from this one except bodies and more expensive oil.

And yet Lieberman was not defeated by much. The more waging war in Iraq makes no sense and is patently not in the American people's interest, the more you have to wonder at the strength of pro-war sentiment. When, in November, not the welfare class but the working class come out to vote, will they reassess what they think of as, and in some ways is, patriotism?

It is in smalltown America and the modest and orderly suburbs of the cities that lawns are bedecked with flags and doors with 'God Bless America' and cars with 'Support Our Troops' stickers. There must be some correlation between 'my country right or wrong' and pride in the achieving of a house, a job, a pickup truck.

One way or another, surely it is in the intricate relationship between such information as they can glean from a manipulating media; where they believe themselves to be in American society; and whether they have pride in where they are or not, that pro- or anti-war voters are formed. America is not just embroiled in a war where all its options are bad: an America that is going downhill for millions of its people is embroiled in that war. But going downhill cuts many ways, and how it will play out in terms of voting for the party of the commander-in-chief we will not know until 85 days from today.