Tonight was a victory for many things. It was a victory for the Republican Party, a sorely needed win by a party that was left for dead just one year ago in the wake of a supposed national Democratic realignment. It was a victory for those who believe in divided government, who recognize the extremism and corruption inherent in one-party rule, and for good-government types who have enough of a sense of history to recall that the best government seems to emanate from bipartisan combinations like Reagan/Tip O’Neill, not Reagan/Bush, and from Clinton/Gingrich, not Clinton/Gore. But first and foremost, tonight was a victory for the anti-establishmentarian sentitment that is currently permeating the American political psyche — a sentiment which was present in full force just one year ago and that was misinterpreted then, and probably will be misinterpreted now, as an ideological mandate instead of what it really is: discontent with the decimation of the American Dream and a belief that the elites and the political establishment, regardless of party, have the blood of the Republic on their hands.

Earlier tonight on Fox News, Frank Luntz asked his focus group of Virginia voters, comprised of an equal number of McCain and Obama voters from 2008, how many were angry. Almost every hand in the room shot up. What were they angry at? The economy. Jobs. Spending. The fear that taxes will go up. The fact that health care needed reform but that Democrats were attempting to reform it in a way that would make things worse than they already are. There was a high correlation between Angry Voters and McDonnell Voters. The GOP sweep of Virginia was not an ideological message. It was not delivered by voters concerned with abstract, philosophical ideas about what the Constitution says the federal government should and should not do. It did not constitute the rise of a new band of Culture Warriors nor was it the re-emergence of NeoConservatism. This election was not about the big ideas that are discussed over pizza in a college dorm room, or in a graduate-level philosophy class. This election was about real people and their real problems in the real world. This election was about the realization that the Democratic Party, with which the nation was entrusted just one year ago, is still the same paleo-leftist party that it’s been for the past thirty years, and that it simply does not have the solutions required to move the country forward.

There is a growing sense, I think, that America is on the decline, and that our country is being led by the worst political class in memory. In the wake of the Bush/DeLay/Frist Republican Party came the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Democratic Party, and tonight was essentially a repudiation of a repudiation. Americans seem perfectly content with throwing out one party after another until someone gets things right, and deep down inside, Americans are wondering whether anyone is capable of getting things right, or if there’s any “right” left to get in a society with unsustainable entitlements, rising health care costs, a sputtering economy, and one which exists as part of a global society with lots of competitors who seem to be surpassing us by the day. Americans are beginning to wonder whether the nation’s best days are behind it.

The romanticism of the days of Reagan/O’Neill and the sleek technocracy of Clinton/Gingrich have made way for the current establishment, the one of Bush/Obama. This is an establishment that has genuflected to the robber barons by bailing out the powerful and the connected and asking Middle America to pay for it. This is the establishment that drops countless dollars on endless war in the middle of a barren desert that has destroyed many an empire and that hasn’t changed since the 10th Century and has no intention of doing so now. This is the establishment that fiddles while America burns, refusing to do the hard things, like modernizing entitlements, health care, and immigration policies, because doing any of those things would offend too many interest groups, too many trial lawyers, too many monied interests, and too many lobbyists. This is the establishment that calls itself the heirs to Reagan on the right and to JFK on the left and then refuses to do what’s necessary to restore America’s greatness simply because it’s too hard.

Tonight, the Obama Establishment got what it deserved, just like the Bush Establishment got what it deserved a year ago. And Americans will continue to give the political class in this country what it has coming to it until our leaders garner the courage to stand up and do what it takes to unleash America’s greatness once again.