It was inevitable, of course.

We’re just too close to the tipping point. We were here 150 years ago, when the South, which had been running the country for years — despite the fact that the North was bigger and growing faster — saw a specifically northern leader elected president. It was too much for them, and they broke up the country — or tried to.

With so many people seeing the future close in on them — a future in which their values and understandings lose their special status, in which whites, and men, and Christians are no longer on top — it is was inevitable that someone, somewhere was going to snap. And of course the first one to go would be a total nut job. (There are always plenty of them around.)

Don’t be surprised in the next few days if you hear voices on the Right demanding that the Left “tone down” it’s rhetoric as well. We can’t. The struggle between the future (us) and the past (them) cannot be ducked, and it will probably get worse before it gets better. But that future is worth whatever pain it takes to bring it to birth.

And besides, only one side is talking relentlessly about using violence.

One of the first things you learn when you become an electoral activist is that no election is ever “final.” Win or lose, there’s always another one coming. The 2012 campaign began when the polls closed on Tuesday. And there is every reason to think that future elections won’t be as brutal as this one has been.

The Right has oversold this election. They’ve been telling their followers that, on November 2, “the American people” — traditionalist white Christians, like themselves — are taking the country back from … those who aren’t really Americans. But, of course, that won’t really happen. The tea-baggers’ number-one “reform” — repealing the health care law — is the one thing that they can’t have. And as for the Republicans actually reducing government spending … when have they ever? Government is not going to shrink because of what happened this week. The Right will go into the next election-cycle nursing a deep sense of disappointment.

Those of us who want to grow the government still have every reason to expect to prevail. Most important, the social and cultural changes moving in our favor will not stop, nor even slow. The non-white majority is still coming, and the rising groups are likely to take a less “worshipful” attitude toward the ideology of the F–ing Fathers. Traditional American beliefs, which had a strongly Christian cast, will be further undercut by increasing religious tolerance. The traditional family is still dissolving, and people will need things from the government that their ancestors got — or didn’t — from their families and communities. The working and middle classes are still losing out economically.

In short, the pressure for more entitlement, regulation, and redistribution will not let up.

Next time around, the tea-baggers will not have the “enthusiasm gap” on their side; their disappointment with the Republicans will be just too strong. There will almost certainly be a bloody confrontation between extreme and moderate Republicans over the choice of presidential candidate. Nor will they benefit from the tendency of “marginal” constituencies — young people, minorities, the poor — to skip off-year elections.

And that’s even before we factor in the anger and resentment people will be feeling toward the Right — especially if they try something really stupid. (Remember the government shutdown? The Clinton impeachment?)

So get ready for 2012 to be our year.

Everyone seems to agree that this fall’s mid-term election will be a real barn-burner. How could it not be? What is happening now — and why politics seems so intense — is nothing less than a redefinition of what America means.

Through all of American history — until, well, now — America has been a white Christian country with minorities. The status of those minorities has always been at the discretion of the white majority. Even at their most generous, that majority had the right — more important than the right, they had the power — to set conditions for full membership in the community. And the condition they generally set was acceptance of the majority’s beliefs and values — or at least a respect for the special status of the majority culture.

There has been resistance from the minorities since the beginning, but over the last fifty years, those of us who don’t fit into the traditional majority have decided to say, “enough.” We are here by right, and we don’t need to meet anyone’s “conditions.”

Not only that, but with the coming of the non-white majority, and people getting used to increased personal freedom, that conservative majority isn’t a majority anymore. White Christians are just one more minority group, entitled to live by their own rules, but not to impose those rules on anyone else nor to claim any kind of special status.

It’s no wonder the conservative white Christians, the self-styled “Real Americans,” are screaming about the “Founders.” They need a fixed point from which to attack the changes of the 20th century — and, for that matter, the 19th. They need a time when the status of their culture was safe from challenge.

And nothing makes them angrier than someone who points out a dark side of the “Founding.” They love to talk about “taxation without representation.” (They like it so much they even want to claim they’re victims of it today.) They don’t want to talk about how much of the colonists’ displeasure with the British government was because it was at least trying to protect the Indians from dispossession, or because it was looking like the British courts were about to declare slavery illegal.

Personally, I don’t look back to the 18th century “Founding” as the root of the country to which I belong. I look back to the liberation struggles of the 20th century — women’s suffrage, the labor movement, the various civil-rights movements, women’s liberation, environmentalism … and, yes, the sexual revolution.

I’ll hazard a guess that in the deep future — after everyone now alive is gone — Americans will look back to the 18th century “Founding” much as contemporary Brits look back to the Norman Conquest. It’s incomparably important in their history. (Ours too, for that matter.) but they don’t celebrate it. The bad guys won.

And the more the Americans of the new majority get the F—ing Fathers thrown in their faces every time they want to do something, the sooner that day will come.

So who are the real “Real Americans”? They are nonwhites — and white people who don’t have a problem with racial equality. They are non-Christians — and Christians prepared to practice religious tolerance. They are people who don’t follow traditional “family values” — or who do, but don’t object if their neighbors don’t.

That’s the country I belong to.

The tea-baggers are eager to tell anyone who will listen that they are fighting the Federal government and the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. They scream themselves red in the face — or even weep publicly — about how much they “want their country back.”

“Back” from whom?

Hearing them talk, one could be forgiven for overlooking the sole reason Obama is president and the Dems control Congress — a majority of the American electorate voted for them. The real enemy is not the government, but the voters behind it. Cocooned in their closed-loop media, the tea-baggers still see themselves as the majority, which they have not been for some time.

Between the “backlash” of the mid 60′s and the late 80′s, the Republicans had a series of presidential blow-outs — 1972, 1984, 1988 — in which they swept the electoral map. That hasn’t happened since. Since 1988 there have been five presidential elections; the Dems have won three, they got a popular-vote majority in a fourth, and the fifth saw a narrow Republican victory — IF there was an honest count in that one.

The truth, of course, is that the country is changing around them. The world before the social and cultural changes commonly associated with “the Sixties” — inaccurately, but that’s another story — is slipping farther and farther out of reach. The forces of backlash will never be the majority again.

That’s why we’re hearing the other side cast about for a basis of legitimacy — the F—ing Fathers or the Bible — that would justify ignoring the will of the majority. That’s also why they use so much imagery of violence and armed resistance. And we should expect much more egregious vote-suppression efforts. They can’t win honestly anymore.

When they are a spent force, when the project of rolling back the late Twentieth Century withers and dies, then we’ll finally be able to confront corporate power directly. Then we’ll finally have achance for a decent society. But first we have to win the next few election cycles.

So keep pushing.