Like it or not, I think he’s got it right:

Even before the final results, showing a Democratic sweep, were in, Washington’s pundits were declaring that nothing had really changed politically in the country. In a cover story labeled “America the Conservative,” Newsweek editor Jon Meacham warned that, “[s]hould Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal.” Meacham’s judgment was echoed by Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “America remains, in the main, a center-right nation,” Wehner wrote in the Washington Post.

These guys–and the others who are counseling Barack Obama and the Democrats to “go slow”–couldn’t be more wrong. They are looking at Obama’s election through the prism of Jimmy Carter’s win in 1976 and Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992. Both Carter and Clinton did misjudge the mood of the country. They tried unsuccessfully to govern a country from the center-left that was moving to the right (in Carter’s case) or that was only just beginning to move leftward (in Clinton’s case), and were rebuked by the voters. But Obama is taking office under dramatically different circumstances. His election is the culmination of a Democratic realignment that began in the ’90s, was held in abeyance by September 11, and had resumed in the 2006 election.

This realignment is predicated on a change in political demography and geography. Groups that had been disproportionately Republican have become disproportionately Democratic; and red states like Virginia have become blue. But underlying these changes has been a shift in the nation’s “fundamentals”–in the structure of society and industry, and in the way Americans think of family, job, and government. The country is definitely no longer “America the conservative.” And with the Republican Party and big business identified with a potentially disastrous downturn, it could become over the next four years “America the liberal.”

That “identification” is based on a lie, of course, as is most of liberalism’s other central tenets: that America is the root cause of most of the world’s ills; that the best way to guarantee our national security is by slashing defense and assuming a posture of meek enfeeblement; that socialism just works, and serves to enrich and empower far more people than capitalism; that punitive taxation is the foundation of a strong economy; that more power in the hands of the federal government will make us more free.

But I’m afraid his thesis is correct, and I think to even try arguing otherwise is to float, float, float down the river of denial on the SS Wishful Thinking. We can argue over how it came to be — personally, I think it’s quite obvious that the theories of Alinski and Gramsci on undermining capitalism and American strength with a “long march through the institutions” have just been proven very damned astute indeed — but I don’t see how anyone can look not just at the election results but at the history of the last forty years and deny that it’s happened, for better or worse.

And you already know my bet’s on worse.