The Realignment Continues Apace

Dick Cheney has joined his daughter Liz in backing Kamala Harris for president. George W. Bush hasn’t gone quite so far; he is remaining neutral. And Mitt Romney effusively praised Harris’s debate performance, although to my knowledge he hasn’t actually endorsed her yet. John McCain is no longer with us, but if he were still living it is easy to imagine him backing Harris or, at best, staying neutral like Bush.

What is going on here? Can anyone imagine Barack Obama endorsing Donald Trump, or any other Republican candidate for any office? Or remaining neutral in a presidential race? Or how about Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, or any other prominent Democrat? No. It would never happen.

Mark Steyn sees Cheney’s turnabout as an instance of the realignment of our politics:

I thought Cheney was an homme sérieux. But, in the end, he wasn’t. The Bush years have to be accounted a terrible failure, in which the leadership of the then dominant superpower was unable to grasp the simplest of truths – not least about the need for strategic clarity. Under Cheney, America launched wars with no war aims, in which it deluded itself that “smart bombs” counted for more than will. Meanwhile, on the home front, the rate of Muslim immigration to America doubled …because it was more important to show the world how nice we are than to consider the cultural consequences of demographic transformation.

Enter Trump:

So Trump has performed a great service in driving the likes of Cheney to vote Kamala. The feeble charade of TweedleDem vs TweedleRep is designed to obscure the central fact of end-stage western “democracy” – that, on anything that really matters, nothing can be permitted to change. Thus, having Dick Cheney and Ilhan Omar formally on the same team is very helpful. Trump has driven the “respectable” political class to make the Uniparty literal, and its consolidation has freed up space for an actual second party.

I take it that Trump represents, in Mark’s view, that second party.

Perhaps so. But Cheney’s apostasy, flanked by George W’s neutrality and Romney’s likely soon-to-be coat turning, seem to me to require a more specific diagnosis. What leads such lifelong Republicans and, in Cheney’s case, at least, a formerly stalwart conservative, to abandon their party in their twilight years?

It is a puzzle. All three of these men were viciously defamed by the Democrats–all of the Democrats, not just a left-wing fringe–and yet there seem to be no hard feelings. How can that be?

If conservatism at its core implies a suspicion of government, and a preference for less government rather than more, it probably isn’t surprising that people who spend much of their adult lives in government feel their conservative impulses waning. Government pays my salary, how bad can it be? And if you hear “Hail to the Chief” enough times, you probably get a very benign view of government.

But that still doesn’t account for the Stockholm Syndrome that seems to afflict many veteran Republicans. Has George W. forgotten “Bushitler” and the assassination fantasies that Democrats indulged throughout his administration? Has Romney forgotten that the Democrats accused him of wanting to reinstate slavery? Has Cheney forgotten the outrageous smears that the Democrats directed against him throughout his vice presidency?

Maybe these senior Republicans, like their Democratic counterparts, owe their highest allegiance to the party of government–what Steyn and others call the Uniparty. But the Uniparty is a one-way street. The Uniparty is the Democrats. Senior Democrats show no corresponding indulgence toward Republicans. On the contrary, their partisan hatred continues unabated into their later years, if it does not grow.

It is a puzzle, and one can’t overstate how disappointing the conduct of Cheney, Bush and Romney is.