Meanwhile, the left never was defunded, creating a huge structural mismatch in the process of "culture creation": Massive government dollars fuel their organizations and ideas, while even tiny social conservative funding streams like abstinence education are under intense assault. The federal government is larger and more intrusive than ever -- where exactly in the Constitution did it say Congress has the power to regulate my lightbulb purchases? And we never did win back the right to buy toilets that flush properly, did we?
Most heartbreaking, the drive to rebuke judicial activism appears to have stalled just one Supreme Court justice short of overturning that most monstrous monument to judicial tyranny, Roe v. Wade.
The public education system continues to be more adept at preaching left-wing values than teaching reading and math, more interested in multiculturalism than American history and heritage.
The mismatch in "culture creation" funding has helped give rise to a new "creative class" of urban knowledge workers who, like Kansas, tend to vote their values, and not their economic interests. They have fewer votes than Kansas but a lot more money to give, as Obama can testify.
A resurgent cultural liberalism, writhingly angry at the experience of being held in check for two decades by fears of electoral losses at the hands of the moral majority, is about to be unleashed on the American body politic.
McCain may well win the White House this year, as even in the middle of the 50-year dominance of the Roosevelt coalition, Americans regularly elected GOP presidents from time-to-time.
But the next great conservative movement is still waiting to be conceived, much less, born.