Two hundred fifty years in, Americans still know how to change the people in charge. The harder test belongs to the people they just handed it to.
Two years ago voters granted that use to one party. On Tuesday they took it back and granted it to the other. The machinery worked. Tens of millions of ballots were cast and counted. The loser conceded in Texas. A sitting President said he would get along with the Democrats unless they turned destructive.
It is worth pausing on how strange this is. For most of human history, power changed hands by funeral or by force. Here the landlord has no army, the tenant holds the keys to the building, the budget, and the military, and the tenant still packs up when the lease runs out. Human nature gives us very little reason to expect that. It is a habit, kept up by millions of people who rarely think about it, and it should never stop surprising us.