The results of the Anderson County Council Republican primary election represent the greatest protest vote in a generation.

When you lose three out of six status-quo incumbents by wide margins, that’s an inescapable conclusion, no matter whether Raymond MacKay beats incumbent Bob Waldrep in the June 24 runoff.

We should all be pleased, I suppose, that residents sent the kind of decisive message I dismissed as a fantasy just a week ago. If nothing else, it proves that local democracy is alive and kicking.

No one can predict exactly how the next few months will play out.

But it would seem a fairly good bet that Administrator Joey Preston and many of his top lieutenants will be updating their resumes and readying for pastures new.

Shortly after January, I suspect we’ll spend a fat lot of money on auditors to dig into the county financials, too.

In the run-up to elections in 2010, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw an attempt to reinstitute an elected supervisor form of government, adding another ring to our political circus.

Those are the easy predictions.

Given the current administration’s political tone-deafness and its arrogant, dismissive attitude toward dissent and the public right-to-know, many “progressives” actually, secretly might breathe a sigh of relief.

The million-dollar question, of course, is what kind of impact all of this drama will have on this community’s destiny. I have heard many people talk about the elections taking us back 20 years.

Perhaps there’s room for some optimism.

Firstly, the burst of the progressive “bubble” in our political economy is healthy. No government has any business taking its people where they do not want to go.

When I arrived in Anderson almost a decade ago, it was exceedingly strange to see a large, rural county carrying the mantle for “progress” as though it had the dynamics of a unified urban area.

District 3 loser Larry Greer, representing Starr and Iva, gladly propped up that false assumption to borrow political capital for re-election. The cost was tens of millions in infrastructure investments in areas such as Iva and Starr that had only the faintest prospect of a true return, especially if you count the opportunity costs.

Tuesday’s “tipping point” represents the possibility that, finally, the urban heart of the county will look to the city of Anderson as the standard bearer for progress that it probably always should have been.

The city of Anderson’s “underreaching” in the 1970s and 1980s ended up being matched with the county’s overreaching in the 1990s and the 2000s.

It just might prove that two wrongs can make a right.