With the two national conventions just receding in the rearview mirror, it’s clear that one party has become the party of national security, the party of patriotism, the party of support for veterans, and the party with an optimistic view of America’s future. Some Republicans are more than a little despairing of this shift and view Democrats as poaching their positions.
For the Democrats, it was a carefully calibrated, precisely drafted assault on the Republican coalition. For months, they have sought to tar Republican politicians with Mr. Trump’s essence, arguing that the New York developer and reality star was the true id of a Republican Party marbled with political extremism and racial antagonism.
But Democrats aren’t stealing the Republican’s strengths at National Security or robbing support from veterans. The Republicans abandoned those positions. They discarded them forcefully by selecting a man with neither knowledge nor experience who claims he need not consult generals or experts because of his “good brain.” They tossed them aside to embrace the idea that the military is “hopeless” and that America is an embarrassment on the world stage.
There’s a reason that people like retired Marine General John Allen were so eager to join Democrats in Philadelphia, flanked by a score of veterans, and endorse Hillary as the candidate who will keep us safe.
“We trust her judgment,” said Allen, who led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and served as the country’s top envoy in the fight against the Islamic State group. “We believe in her vision for a united America and we believe in her vision of America as the just and strong leader against the forces of hatred, chaos, and darkness.
It doesn’t mean that Democrats have embraced a hawkish position on foreign policy. It means that Republicans have surrendered any sense of coherence as they’ve threatened allies, spoken wildly of dispersing nuclear weapons around the globe, and blithely praised aggressive dictators. Democrats didn’t become the pro-war party. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Democrats became the only party that those with experience trust to keep us out of pointless conflict.
In fact, what happened over the last two weeks wasn’t some wild reversal of roles.
Wednesday night confirmed a dramatic shift, perhaps even a reversal, of the roles the two major parties have been identified with for several decades. For the first time, perhaps, since Vietnam, the Democratic Party is now the party of national security expertise—not just in its own rhetoric, but in the eyes of national-security specialists on both sides. One of the most striking facts about the election of 2016 is that a sizable majority of Republican foreign-policy professionals appear to agree with Obama and Biden. They believe that Trump is a far greater danger to U.S. national security than Clinton is—and many of them say they will even vote for her. And it’s the Democrats who are selling themselves as stronger, tougher and smarter than the Republicans when it comes to securing America’s place in the world.
Democrats and Republicans did not shift places. Republicans simply surrendered their position. They didn’t become less supportive of using the military to enforce American authority. They simply became insensible in how that force might be applied.
Meanwhile, Democrats didn’t give an inch on their support for women, their support for the LGBTQ community, their support for people of color, their support for the poor, their opposition to rising income inequality, their fight for a comprehensive answer to immigration, their struggle to bring down the cost of college, their defense of Social Security, Medicare, or the Affordable Care Act.
Democrats did not move right. The Democrats did not become Republicans. The Republicans just ceased to be.
Republicans jumped so far off the spectrum, that they abandoned logical positions altogether. And now Republicans who care about anything beyond the party’s entrenched—and still held—social positions, are trying to escape the sinking boat. Some of them are washing up on the shore of the Democratic Party. More probably will.
After all, it’s hard to be patriotic or optimistic while you’re painting the country as a smoldering hell hole.