I'm not so sure. I think people are becoming more research based and open to non idealistic ideas. Not on the far right or far left however.
You may very well be correct, but the extremes in both camps are what is driving the overall political and cultural polarization of the country, such that the moderate left/right-leaning person is bound to run afoul of whatever passes for political and moral orthodoxy more generally in whatever party they may affiliate themselves with (as proven by the extreme rarity of, e.g., anti-abortion democrats, anti-gun republicans, etc), which -- because the whole mantra of 'the personal is political' has come true in the worst possible ways now -- has deep (mostly negative) implications .
So even if what you say is true, it doesn't really seem to matter at the moment because it has very little effect on anything. I don't remember the exact details, but social psychologist Jonathan Haidt showed this several years ago in one of his talks by pointing out that it used to be (15, 20, however many years ago it was) that if polling organizations knew your stance on 2-3 political wedge issues, they could reliably guess your stance on 5-10 other issues, whereas more recent polls have shown that your stances on 1-2 political issues predict your stances on another 20 issues (or some such increase; again, this was a talk from several years ago...sorry, I'm a bit scatter-brained as my father passed away two days ago, so I'm really spent). The lines between us and them are becoming increasingly rigid in this way, and there's very little room to breathe if you are not in total lock-step with whatever 'your side' has determined are its sacralized values and/or people.
This is why I ultimately don't view any increase in non-religious politicians as any different or better than when Evangelicals could reliably expect to control the political system under this or that regime. Okay, so now the new breed of politicians are atheists or otherwise non-believers. So what? If they are just as rigidly dogmatic as any token Evangelical or Evangelical-friendly politician, then how is it any better? Because those who don't believe in God have someone to look up in the political sphere now?
Frankly, I think the entire problem comes from looking up
too much to political figures and figureheads, no matter what they claim to believe in or not believe in. I'm not going to say that everyone needs to believe in God, or that believing in God or a god will somehow magically set things right in the political sphere, and I am pro-secularism if only because the experience of everyone but me in my Church (in their homelands of Egypt, Sudan, and Libya) really does show how the absence of secular political alternatives
will destroy a society (read: Egypt got
measurably worse under the Muslim Brotherhood than it had been under a dictator like Mubarak or Al Sisi, and those two were/are already not up to general western standards), but that doesn't mean that I'm going to welcome in quasi-religious gobbledygook just because those professing it this time are saying that they represent that secular alternative. Show me first what you think I ought not be allowed to say (or ought to be mandated to say/believe) and I'll decide if you fit the bill to me, or if you're just another conservative 'evangelist' of another altogether more worldly and hollow political/social/moral gospel.
The Gospel according to George Will or Mengistu Haile Mariam (to choose two atheists very far apart from each other on the political and cultural spectrum) is not necessarily better than or devoid of the problems to be found in the approaches or stances of people like George W. Bush or whoever might typify the conservative Evangelical politician in the minds of the average American.
