They meant it. There have been five national elections in the past decade. In four of them—2006, 2008, 2010, and 2014—voters gave notice to the politicians who are supposed to lead them. They were different elections and different times, and the results invested power in different political parties. But the message was more or less the same: We want change.

And for the better part of that decade, voters have gotten more of the same. More government, more regulation, more taxes, more doubletalk, more bureaucracy, more corruption, and virtually no accountability. Barack Obama ran as the candidate of “Hope and Change.” He promised “change we can believe in” and declared to his supporters: “We are the change that we seek.” Immediately upon taking office, Obama issued an executive order on transparency vowing to “restore faith in government, without which we cannot implement the changes we were sent here to make.”