Usually designating periods of time as “eras”—noting when they start and stop, and so on—is done long after they have concluded. The present—especially the present of the modern age—tends to smear together; things change gradually in our vision. This week’s elections thus brought a strange feeling over me: that this is the end of a bizarre 10-year era. It was like waking up from a very, very long and feverish dream.

In a world in which the “Never Trump”-ers of 2016 have long been forgotten (having either jumped ship wholeheartedly for certain strains of Democratic thought, or else fallen into line after becoming more flexible about the meaning of the word “never”), suddenly it is the primary season of that fateful year again—and the voters all agree, Donald Trump is not only a dishonest and somewhat absurd figure, but obviously so. He wants to be president? How odd.

This does not mean that the new era which is apparently beginning will be a good one. (Most Democrats who won are various degrees of terrible, after all.) But for the time being, it seems to be a more open-ended one. Trump was the image and embodiment of the Republican party for 10 years; the GOP candidates who lost this week were generally cheap dimestore imitations of him, mediocre acolytes at best. This bizarre comprisal—himself, and then an extremely odd and frequently unlikable bunch of underlings—resulted in a party which was simultaneously harmful and unfocused (when it even managed to be much of anything substantive at all). It resulted in compromise on allegedly sacrosanct principles of conservatism, yet somehow also resulted in total discreditation of those same principles through their tangential association with a naked personality cult. It’s nice that this might all start to change.

I’m hopeful for a GOP which is less inclined to ally itself with the anti-human tech world, more committed to peace, more willing to reason from first principles rather than pure reaction and the aesthetics of cruelty, and above all, more Christian than it has imagined itself to be.