Yeah, I was voting age through the Clinton and Bush Presidencies. I view the Bush Presidency as a complete disaster. What we have here, however, is setup to be worse, because the Republican Party has shifted even more to the right with the rise of the Tea Party.

They can most immediately do massive damage through appointment of Supreme Court justices. While its true that the open seat was an arch conservative and having a Republican appointment to that seat will not change the balance of power in the court much, Kennedy, Ginsburg and Breyer are all 78-83 and mortality will be catching up with them soon. That puts Roe v. Wade legitimately in jeopardy like never before.

When it comes to one of the biggest issues of our time -- climate change -- we just elected the candidate who claimed that it was a chinese hoax. The House is full of candidates who believe similarly. The most moderate of Republicans are likely to dismiss the magnitude of the concerns over the climate and vote in favor of protecting carbon based industries. It really is fairly black and white on this issue and the fact that there's a few moderates who won't straight up deny the science doesn't help when they form a coalition with the anti-science tea partiers, the effect is going to be the same.

Its also likely that the ACA gets repealed now. It might take triggering the "nuclear option" in the senate to override a fillibuster, but I can see that happening now. About the only upside to this is that when 10 million or so Americans wake up the next day and find they've lost their healthcare they might think twice about voting Republican. Conceivably the possibility of that backlash might cause some Republicans to defect and not consider the nuclear option and this may not happen, but that is teetering on a hugely sharp knife edge.

Then there's just rolling back all the progress over the past 8 years in civil rights. At the very least it will solidly block progress for the next 4-8 years. It won't be getting any better. I can't imagine that the issues with police shootings of black males will improve and that BLM will be going away. If anything, I could see even more incidents like the Dallas shootings and movements springing up that really were more like the Blank Panthers. Riots in major cities, etc.

And then there's foreign involvement. I suspect that everyone who voted for Trump thinking that was the anti-war vote is going to be shocked pretty soon at how many boots we wind up with on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. I would never defend Obama's drone strikes or Hillary's penchant for bombing, but the Republican party is the one that likes to see Abrams battle tanks rolling across sand dunes in the Middle East, which is orders of magnitude worse. There was one anti-war candidate in this election and it was Bernie Sanders. What we got was the Hawk in Dove's clothing.

And when it comes to financial crisis we're going to see the repeal of Dodd-Frank almost certainly. The problem here is that while during the 2008 crisis you saw George Bush's administration rescue the financial industry (and the entire country) there's no assurances that we won't see the Trump administration and the Republican congress blow up the US financial industry. Last time there was that awkward picture of Treasury Secretary Paulson getting down on one knee and begging Nancy Pelosi to stop the financial crisis. What we've elected since then is the whole Tea Party wing who think the solution to financial crisis is not regulation before it happens and instead is just letting a financial crisis unwind with maximum possible destruction. Next time we might see money market accounts lock up, short term credit evaporate and literally ATMs and monthly paychecks from otherwise solvent industries stop. We peered over that abyss in 2008 and now we've put all the people who thought going over that cliff sounded like a great idea into power.

And even if you discount those last two arguments I made as being unlikely, its still not remotely going to be okay.