Pejman Yousefzadeh sums some of it up for me.

I think it’s a good to see activist government overreach repudiated at the polls (if this is, in fact, what’s happened).  There has seemed an endless stream of causes, grievances and victims coming out of the woodwork, often with fewer reasons and lots of emotion and conviction behind them.

Every solution proposed has seemed a government one these last six years, run by activists and their coalitions, favoring unions, with utopian promises usually masking a shabbier, grubbier political reality, and perhaps too much incompetence to track.

From my perspective, many in the media and in public debate have generally gone along to get along (aside from the moral and historical issues at play), and some have retrenched their political and ideological commitments within secular ideologies and progressive activism.

If you’re actually concerned about helping people, and maintaining more freedoms and opportunity for more people, I’d argue this is a bad way of going about it.

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Now it’s time to keep an eye on Republicans, the politically possible, the compromises they’ll have to make, the inertia built in the system.  I’m not expecting a fair shake from many in the media, and from very few ‘cultural gatekeepers.’

Many principles I seem to think are important don’t seem that important in the media landscape, and the Republican party seems closer to maintaining more freedoms and limited government, but I don’t trust Republicans that much either.

I see politics as a necessary evil, a business with anywhere from potentially crooked hucksters involved to shrewd, pretty honest, principled brokers at work (those who make sure not to stay in too long). This, too, often depends on your perspective.

If you’re looking for something else in politics, you should probably look somewhere else.