Kevin Drum makes quick work of the latest nonsense from David Brooks by, gasp, actually using research and data: Of course, Drum is absolutely right. The number of conservatives in the country has not changed. Harris actually provides a decade-by-decade table of ideological self-identification to demonstrate this:

	   Con	    Mod      Lib
1970's	    32	     40       18
1980's	    36	     40       18
1990's	    38	     41       18
2000's	    35	     40       18

If there is any change at all, conservatism has actually declined slightly from its peak in the mid-1990's. Basically, however, there has been no change whatsoever in ideological self-identification over the past twenty-five years.

However, this is not to belittle how the American government has become, in many ways, far more conservative than it was thirty years ago. In this way, conservatives have indeed triumphed. The cause of this has been our slow drift toward two ideological coalitions, as more and more liberals vote for Democrats and more and more conservatives vote for Republicans. Just take a look at the share of the two-party vote among liberals and conservatives in Presidential Elections since 1976:

Liberal Two-Party Vote
     '76  '80	'84  '88  '92  '96  '00    '04
Dem   74   68	71   82   83   87   86	 85
Rep   26   32	29   18   17   14   14	 13

Conservative Two-Party Vote
     '76  '80	'84  '88  '92  '96  '00    '04
Dem   30   24	18   19   22   22   17	 16
Rep   70   76	82   81   78   78   82	 84

Democrats have lost half of their support among conservatives, while Republicans have lost half of their support among liberals. Because of the size gap between liberals and conservatives, this means that Democrats have lost around 5.0% of the population, while gaining 2.5%. By contrast, Republicans have lost around 2.5% of the population, while gaining 5.0%, for an overall swing of 2.5%. What was the margin between Bush and Kerry again?

In short, Brooks could not possibly be more wrong. The reason conservatives have triumphed is not because they argue with one another, but because they have united their vote like never before.