the struggle du jour

David Brooks's column this week (as i write this its freely avail on NYtimes.com but if you're reading this later you may have to pay to see it) says:

We’re about to enter another of those periods without a dominant ideology. It’s clear that this election will mark the end of conservative dominance. This election is a period, not a comma in political history.

People like Brooks make me a little nuts sometimes because I feel like they are writing as if the "conservative" movement in america today is the Goldwater conservatism of my father's generation rather than the radical anti-empiricist movement it has become. I think (or is it hope?) that Brooks is wrong and we're on the verge, not of sliding into a period of non-aligned politics but a big swing back toward the enlightenment values that our country was founded on. Maybe we'll look back on this as a time when the attack on our country by a dangerous bunch of religious nut-cases briefly put another bunch of dangerous religious nut-cases in control?