I think the feeling of general malaise that I felt on Tuesday evening was the same as what many other people were feeling. Like rising too quickly from a high pressure environment, I had a bit of the emotion bends. For one thing, I've paid nearly unending attention to the election, and it didn't really hit me that it had been 20 months. As xkcd points out, what now?
With a final feeling of triumph came, inevitably, a feeling akin to what Robert Redford as Bill McCay said in The Candidate: "what do we do now?" We haven't actually done anything yet; we just made sure the guy in charge wasn't a disaster.
As for the demise of the Republican party, I am reserved. Repubs have had two down cycles, but they are far from out. The idea that they will now jettison their time-honored but perhaps largely irrelevant social issues of creationism, pro-life, and no gun control is far from a foregone conclusion. McCain was a disaster, his running mate a disgrace, and yet this was still no landslide victory. The Dems won because white people wanted their 401Ks to go back up and black people wanted one of their own in the top office. A sea-change within their opposition is possible, but I fear not likely.
And as the blacks rose up, voted their numbers, and perhaps bent the arc of history toward justice for themselves, so did they bend it back against the gays. Their hypocrisy on the Proposition 8 ballot is perhaps a symptom of their being for so long outside the political arena. The fact that I can think of zero gay black men shows that something about the culture we have now beckoned to join us in voting is lacking in honesty. With luck, the liberalization of blacks will begin now.
Young people, among whom I think I no longer belong, once again disappointed in their voting numbers, coming out barely more than the 2004 election. I can't help thinking that if they were truly mobilized, they would have counteracted the black vote that put Prop 8 over the top. Legal challenges will likely not work. Equal rights for gays will just have to wait.