So this is what radical change looks like.
Eight years ago, a fairly inexperienced president-elect promised a new, post-partisan era and sweeping change. That never happened. Tuesday, radical change came riding in with the vote returns.
The top-down, establishment-led Republican Party of the Bush and Romney families no longer exists. What's taking its place isn't even fully formed yet, but it's dominant. The Democrats, meanwhile, lost their last stronghold.
Donald Trump ran against the free-trading, immigration-allowing donor class that's run the GOP as long as I've been alive. That defiance won him the nomination over 16 better people and shocked the Republican establishment. Trump stuck to his themes in the general election and won that, ending any chance the old guard could re-assert control. He owes them nothing.
For six years before that, Democrats made what changes they could with court rulings and executive action. Meanwhile they lost congressional seats, governorships and legislatures all over the country. Now they're going to lose the executive branch and, with it, decisive judicial appointments. The first appointment to go will be a still-vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Barack Obama's executive orders will go up in smoke.
A frustrated liberal summed up his party's status election night, with some hyperbole: Democrats have no real grip on power left above the municipal level, at least not in most places.
Power at the state level is crucial. What the federal government can't do, states usually can and vice versa. A federal and state tag team of one-party rule can do just about anything.
The Environmental Protection Agency's Waters of the United States standards are toast. The Flint Creek coal-fired plant in Gentry can breathe easier now, pardon the pun. Local industries that rely on immigrant labor have something to worry about, but we'll see how serious Trump is about deportations. It's the families of the workers who have the most to fear.
Perhaps the next four years will get more Democratic voters to show up at a mid-term election. I don't expect it, though. Obama's coalition didn't show up in force for Hillary Clinton, or for any other Democrats in elections where Obama wasn't on the ballot. This election was clearly for all the marbles, too.
The most piercing insight I read election night was someone saying how no other presidential candidate before Trump had ever won by running against both parties. His election clears the board. Using chance, design or a combination of both, he's going to rearrange our politics as the undisputed leader of the clearly dominant, largely unfettered party. He'll also be in charge of the most powerful domestic spying apparatus ever created and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world by far.
Trump's not even constrained by the truth. He has told, by a long bit, more provable falsehoods than any successful candidate in a presidential election. But he seized upon two great truths. First, people are sick of the great Red vs. Blue game. They want their elected officials to do something for someone besides their donors. Second, white Christian rural America can still summon up the strength to win a presidential election. We'll soon see what the leader they've picked does with this once-in-a-lifetime chance.
Emails, the FBI, the Clinton Foundation and so forth had nothing to do with Democrats losing the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and state races all through the years. Even with those issues as baggage, Clinton won the popular vote. She lost in the Electoral College -- which was created to prevent big states with the most votes from dominating smaller ones. White, rural America told liberal metropolitan centers to take a hike.
All this further reduces the Democratic Party to a smaller core living in cosmopolitan areas, with a few scattered sympathizers. No one can blame the supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for believing their guy would have won. I don't believe it, though, considering what we just saw and have seen since 2010. If there was a liberal, populist groundswell going on, we'd be seeing it at the state level and in the un-gerrymandered U.S. Senate.
Democratic voters acted like the presidential race was the only one that mattered. Eventually, they were right. It became the last one left.
Commentary on 11/12/2016