Obama said something last night that deserves wider attention. "We may not get there in one year or in one term," he said, "but, America, I promise you, we as a people will get there." Where there is remains in dispute. Adam flagged how the line echoes Martin Luther King’s final 1968 "I may not get there with you" sermon. And Yglesias points out that the real test will be a test of governing: do liberal policies truly work as well as we think they do? There’s truth to that. But there’s another truth, and that’s that last night marked the beginning of the end of Nixonland.

The old seat of the Confederacy will cast its electoral votes for the first African-American president. As of right now, so will the home of Jesse Helms, who I truly wish had lived to see January 20. If we’re to believe the CNN exit polling, Obama won 41 percent of white men, which is better than Al Gore and John Kerry did among that demographic. And the way in which he won matters tremendously. I think Chris Hayes of The Nation was the first to point out that the final two months of the race felt like a fast-forwarded highlight reel of all the old Nixonland techniques — black Muslim pals around with terrorists to socialistically redistribute your wealth. In the mechanics of Nixonland, a young white woman who would rather lie and claim she was abused by a black man than see the better man become president is a feature, not a bug.

And yet Obama triumphed. John Judis is watching the Democratic majority that he first glimpsed in 2002 finally emerge. All this without a single policy achievement from the Obama administration.

But here’s the thing about Nixonland: it crawls back from the dead. One of the best chapters in Rick Perlstein’s masterpiece is about the 1970 congressional elections. Agnew goes out on the trail as the Nixonland ambassador and rails against the pointyheads and the longhairs and, between the lines, the Negroes coming for the white women. The Democrats won seats. A few months ago, Rick gave a talk at the National Press Club about Nixonland. "It doesn’t always work" was the first thing he said about the strategy. But sometimes it works really, really well, even after an earlier failure.

We don’t know if this is a false dawn. Yglesias’s point about governance won’t even tell us that. If Obama loses in 2012 because his administration genuinely failed to rescue America from economic catastrophe and protracted war, that still won’t tell us if American politics has actually emerged from the darkness of Nixonland. What we can say, with profound relief, is that we may not get there in one year or in one term. But we as a people will get there.