The Democrats Complete Their Transformation Into The War Party

One of the most stunning political shifts of modern times was consummated with a war-thirsty convention in Chicago.

Do you remember the fall of 2008? “Hope and Change” was in the air among Democrats, and that enthusiasm spread to independents. You didn’t have to agree with the policy prescriptions of the rank-and-file Democrats to recognize the genuine excitement so many of them had over the rise of Barack Obama--or to at least acknowledge that our own candidates had effectively burned down the financial system and the Middle East.

The desire for peace is what fueled Barack Obama’s rise in 2008. He would defeat, in succession, two of the biggest warmongers this country has ever produced--Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, followed by John McCain in the general election. For people who had been anti-war activists in the Vietnam era, it was the culmination of a lifelong political journey.

Contrast that 2008 spirit with what took place at the Democratic Convention in Chicago last week. The party with Kamala Harris as its public face enthusiastically embraced the following:

*Continued support for the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine War. This extends to the events of August 6, where Ukraine and NATO troops sought to move on Kursk, a Russian town with a nuclear facility. That this reckless invasion took place on the 79^th anniversary of the nuclear slaughter in Hiroshima is something we can only hope was a coincidence, rather than a haunting example of history’s rhythm. But I suspect it’s the latter.

*Unabashed support for continuing to arm Israel for its war in Gaza. Shortly after the convention concluded, Israel launched a heavy attack in Lebanon. Critics say it was unprovoked, Israel says they have evidence that it was done to thwart a planned attack. I don’t know who’s right. I know only that the U.S. continuing to fund the war is providing no incentive for anyone to come to a negotiating table. Harris (or whomever writes her lines) is determined to let the war go on.

*The Democratic Party openly mocked President Trump’s negotiations with North Korea back in 2017, calling it an embarrassment that gave dictator Kim Il-Jong some kind of standing on the global stage. I guess the 2024 version of the Democratic Party can’t recognize that it’s the possession of nuclear weapons that gives Il-Jong standing on the global stage, not anything an American president says. And today’s Democrats really consider it to be embarrassing that Trump negotiated a détente with a nuclear power that Obama himself said was the country that kept him awake at night.

Political parties change and alliances are always shifting. But this is a pretty dramatic shift for the Democrats to have undergone in just 16 years.

What makes the Democratic transformation from peace idealists to all-out war hawks even more striking is this—it’s the same people who have changed. It’s not like they swapped out leadership. Last week in Chicago was a convention where the Obamas were still the stars.

Moreover, the people switching to their side of the aisle are the same people they once opposed. Bill Kristol, the intellectual architect of the Iraq War, is now a dyed-in-the-woold Democrat. Just this past week over 200 former Republican staffers came out for Kamala Harris. For whom did these staffers work? Bush, McCain, and Romney. Everyone the original Hope and Change movement fought against.

All of this is bizarre enough. But for anyone who remembers politics in the 2000s, is there anything more stunning than seeing the Cheney Family held up as icons of democracy by today’s Democratic Party? The same Democrats that supported Obama in 2008 wanted Dick Cheney tried at The Hague for war crimes! Today, many of them openly applaud the Cheneys, and others give them at least tacit recognition for their recent accomplishments.

What are those accomplishments? The Cheneys—along with Kristol and the 200-odd former GOP staffers meet the only criteria that is apparently necessary in today’s Democratic Party—their hatred of Donald John Trump is considered sufficiently strong.

Say what you will about Cheney, Kristol, and the others—they are at least consistent. They gravitate to the political party that is most likely to support foreign wars, and they recognized the changing winds. But watching Democrats—not just elected officials, but ordinary Democrats at the grass-roots give in to war fury, particularly in Ukraine, has genuinely been one of the saddest things I have seen in politics.

How Did This Happen?

Normally, when a political coalition changes, you can start to see it coming. The Democrats’ transformation from the party of the working class into a coastal elite started to gain traction when Bill Clinton collaborated with Republicans on the big trade deals of the 1990s. It took a long time, and it took a change at the top of the GOP, but the working class vote is now a Trumpian bloc.

But the Democratic transformation into war hawks? Where did that come from?

For policymakers like Kristol and his crowd, they were able to “read the room” in the Republican Party after the Bush era and sensed they were no longer welcome. While it took eight years and the rise of Trump to bring the change to fruition, large chunks of Republican voters knew they had been had by the response to 9/11. The popularity of anti-war liberatarian Ron Paul (father of current senator Rand) in the ensuing presidential primaries was the hint. Kristol and others began searching for a home.

With Hillary Clinton safely ensconced as Obama’s Secretary of State, the War Hawks had a building block in the Democratic Party. Hillary’s role in everything from regime change in Libya to multiple Middle East bombing campaigns would be the latest display of her general thirst for blood. Of course, she would become the nominee in 2016, an election the War Hawks fully expected would restore them to power.

The fact Trump had a long history in the non-interventionist America First movement and had been a strident critic of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy during the 2000s only heightened the need for the War Hawks to change sides. Trump’s unique personality allowed the Hawks to pretend that their party switch was really some grand display of personal integrity and regard for democracy. But it had been in the works for years and it was always about war.

That’s why the elites—the intellectuals and the policymakers changed their stripes. And if you can look at politics in a cold-blooded amoral way, it makes sense. But why on earth would rank-and-file Democrats have gone along?

Let’s say you’re a grass-roots lefty with a personal political timeline that looks something like this:

*You protest furiously against the Iraq War. You do this in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of 9/11 when war fury was at its peak, and doing so meant you were being called an ally of Osama bin Laden who obviously loved Saddam Hussein. But you pressed on. You wore black on the Wednesday morning in November 2004 after Bush beat John Kerry (that really was a thing in the entire department of my workplace in downtown Pittsburgh).

*You continue to raise the heat, determined to change a Democratic Party whose most prominent leaders, including Kerry and Biden, had gone along with Bush’s war policy. You succeed. A massive Blue Wave in 2006 sets the table. Then you take the sweetest revenge noted above—Obama, a critic of the war, takes out Hillary, then takes out McCain, who had vowed to pour more troops into the Middle East to shore up what was by then a flagging war effort.

*You see your point of view validated by history—that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 and that the only thing invading Iraq did was distract the U.S. from the manhunt for bin Laden—and you see your man, Obama, be the one who eventually hunts bin Laden down.

*You watch the entire opposition party—the same people that called you a sympathizer for terrorism because of your anti-war stance—undergo a complete makeover. Eight years after the end of the Bush years, the Republican Party nominates Trump, who had openly called for Bush’s impeachment. Eight years after that, this past summer, Trump chooses J.D. Vance—who openly calls out the politicians who sent people like him to war and gives a speech at the Republican Convention calling out failures in Iraq and Afghanistan as prime examples of what the elites have done to our country.

In other words, if you’re a grass-roots, anti-war lefty, you got the ultimate triumph—not just vindication by history, but you got the other side to agree with you.

And the response to that? To switch sides and embrace the same ideology you fought against. Yeah, that makes sense.

As proof that this is what happened, how many Democrats are raising a ruckus over the war rhetoric that came out of Chicago last week? Maybe there are some. But they are few and far between. The rest of them have Ukraine flags in their social media bios or outside their homes.

So, let’s return to our question of why this happened. I can only think of three possible answers:

*That all they really care about is access to unrestricted abortion, anywhere in the country, at any stage of pregnancy. And they don’t want to raise any kind of ruckus with the Harris campaign over little things like war and peace.

*That their loathing of Donald Trump is so thorough, that they’ll literally see the world set on fire just to avoid ever having to acknowledge they have considerable agreement with him on a subject that is life and death.

*That when they said, “war is never the answer” and other such slogans, they never meant it to begin with.

I think it’s highly unlikely the latter is the answer—I’m sure they did believe their antiwar rhetoric, at least to some degree. The question is, did they value those principles more than their hatred Trump? Does their love for peace outweigh their hatred of one man they’ve never met?

I’m not a psychologist or an exorcist, so I don’t know the answer. But watching grass-roots left-wingers become fervent war hawks--or at least apologists for a party that is now unabashedly pro-war—brings to mind the most memorable line of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s speech last Friday, when he explained why he left the Democratic Party and is endorsing President Trump: “We have to love our children more than we hate each other.”