The reconfiguration of American politics rocks on, as the Cheneys endorse Harris, welcomed to the fold by Bill Kristol, Jimmy McCain, and Adam Kinzinger. "I'm a lifelong Republican, but" the endorsers always say. They should continue: "but, then again, so are Joe Biden and Kamala Haris." Because in retrospect the parties hadn't done much substantive disagreeing in a long time before Trump showed up. They agreed on what everyone now seems to call "the liberal world order," which we might epitomize as follows: free trade and “neoliberal” capitalism administered by multi-national organizations such as the World Bank and WTO, with the US as a guarantor of world military security and the unipolar super-power, intervening throughout the world while pursuing a domestic welfare and surveillance state. Disagreements on abortion and gay marriage were more verbal or emotional than substantive, as the Supreme Court had decided on them and public opinion seemed to converge.
I'm having trouble recalling what Mitt Romney and Barack Obama might’ve disagreed about in 2012, what was at stake in the contest, or how the country would now be different had Romney won. Romney, of course, will be voting this year for Harris. One way we might think of this is that Trump forced Romney to switch. Another would be that Trump showed us, and Romney, who Romney always was. He's showing Harris who Harris is too. Well, she's Lynne Cheney.
A few more examples drawn from when American was a one-party system with two names for the party. The Clintons went tough-on-crime and welfare-to-work in the 1990s, prosecuting the war on drugs and helping Republicans and Sen. Joe Biden achieve mass racial incarceration. Democrats of the Clinton/Biden/Harris stripe endorsed the Iraq invasion, and former peacenik John Kerry, running as the Dem nominee in 2004, couldn’t bring himself to oppose the Bush administration's disastrous military foray. The one party with two names made trade deals that almost ended American manufacturing, and they voted together to recreate the US as a surveillance state after 9/11. They enthuse about military interventions all over the world.
Maybe they talked or looked a bit different. But there was little or no substantive difference, just as Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris are all now realizing. When push comes to shove, it's time for Biden and Cheney to pull together. As a matter of actual beliefs, policies, positions, they were always together. Kristol and Michelle Goldberg always had the same politics, really, and they’re both going to vote for Harris: statism, militarism, welfare system, offshoring. They've just realized it now. If everyone else is realizing it too, that's an advance, I think. Wait: was that unfair to Goldberg?
With the possible exceptions of the last two Trump elections, the two-party system hasn't thrown out a choice this stark (Harris/Walz vs. Trump/Vance) since 1972, when a vote for George McGovern was a vote for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. Since then, the differences have mostly concerned vocabulary or maybe gender identities. I felt good voting third party all that time because the differences were negligible or not material (that is, they were primarily merely symbolic). But this year there's a real choice between "right-wing populism" and "the liberal world order." That's a fucked-up choice and I’ll probably vote third party again. But at least there’s some sort of substantive disagreement. I've been yearning for that, all this time.
Trump and his movement, I admit, have their drawbacks, like insurrectionists in the US Capitol waving Confederate battle flags. But on the other hand, the Trump phenomenon has been clarifying with regard to the overall contours of American politics. It didn't take long, in the face of MAGA, for traditional Republicans and traditional Democrats all the way out to AOC to realize they were the repositories and defenders of the "liberal world order." In the face of Trump, Lynne Cheney and Hillary Clinton have realized that there’s nothing substantive that they disagree about, that they’re in some sense the very same person and represent the very same interests. It's hard to miss.
This is what the never-Trump Republicans, and also the Democrats, mean when they say (repeatedly) that Trump's Republican Party is not Reagan's Republican {arty. As we can all see by who's endorsing her, Harris' Democratic Party is Reagan's Republican Party.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
