We’ve lived through nearly a quarter century of intense polarization with no clear dominant political party. Unless last night’s presidential debate changes the race as dramatically as June 27’s did, we could see an election as close as 2000’s based on the current polling.

But don’t say political realignments are impossible. Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris completes a major shift within the parties, if not between them.

It is tempting, and at least partially true, to say that the two least popular and most radical vice presidents of the 21st century have been brought together because of a family beef. It is difficult to imagine Cheney following his daughter in a crusade against the former President Donald Trump if Trump hadn’t engineered Liz Cheney’s 39-point defeat in a Wyoming congressional primary. The elder Cheney was the highest-ranking Bush 43 administration official to endorse Trump in 2016, despite the indignities suffered by Jeb(!).

More significantly, however, Democrats have decided they hate Trump more than they dislike the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Former Republicans who can loosely be described as neoconservatives and their fellow travelers have increasingly left, or been driven from, the party in the Trump era.

The elder Cheney’s first real fight with Trump was when he confronted then Vice President Mike Pence about his boss’s foreign policy at the American Enterprise Institute in 2019. That Pence now agrees has much more to do with January 6 than Cheney’s original views do. 

“It seems, at times, as though your administration’s approach has more in common with Obama’s foreign policy than traditional Republican foreign policy,” Cheney was quoted as saying by an event attendee.

In GOP circles, them’s fightin’ words.

Fighting, of course, is what Cheney wanted the military to do in even more countries than the president he served under was willing to tolerate. Bush’s presidency was ruined by the Iraq War, without which there might never have been a Barack Obama administration, at least not with the huge congressional majorities that were barely sufficient to enact Obamacare. (Despite Obama’s antiwar bona fides, there was also a later Iraq-lite adventure in Libya that mostly Republicans opposed, but I digress.)

Trump pointed much of this out during his 2016 presidential campaign. Calling the Iraq War a mistake and a failure on the Republican debate stage in military-heavy South Carolina, where Ron Paul was practically booed off the stage for making similar observations, Trump wound up repealing and replacing the Bush dynasty. It is not an accident that the earliest, and most enduring, Never Trumpers were disproportionately neoconservative.

Now Harris is honored to receive the Cheneys’ endorsement, years after the former vice president, at least, had attained a Trump-level supervillain status among partisan Democrats. Rumors that Dubya himself might be a surprise guest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago seemed plausible enough. Harris even obtained her party’s presidential nomination through something resembling regime change, even if the regime actually remains very much the same. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and a subset of the Libertarian Party are supporting Trump over Harris because they think she is closer to the Cheneys on foreign policy. 

The transformation by the two parties on foreign policy isn’t complete. I wouldn’t go as far as Tucker Carlson and call Harris a neocon. Trump has also so far done more to jumble the political coalitions and complicate partisan rhetoric than change U.S. foreign policy, which has perplexed some of his more consistent allies.

President Joe Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan and in the process risked the progress of foreign-policy restraint in the Middle East. But the withdrawal needed to happen, he saw it through to completion in the face of withering Republican criticism, and it would not have been pretty or cost-free no matter who was president at the time.

Yet few buy Biden’s argument that a relative lack of boots on the ground amid a large U.S. role in proxy wars, including one involving nuclear-armed Russia, is really peace. Progressives have for mainly Trump-centric reasons abandoned any skepticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s policy on Ukraine. And their concerns about the war in Gaza appear to be driven at least as much by identity politics as latent peacenik tendencies.

One now hears in private conversations generic Republican voters talk about the military-industrial complex. The people who roll their eyes at that kind of talk now discard their conservative domestic policy priorities to vote for Democrats. The generic Republicans in turn roll their eyes at them, even (and perhaps especially) when they have the stature of someone like Dick Cheney.

The conservatism of Trump’s new friends is suspect as well. RFK over Ben Carson at the Department of Health and Human Services would be bad news for pro-lifers, for example. There has also been a troubling tendency among intervention skeptics to revert to old, fringier habits while in greater proximity to political power than during the Bush-Cheney years.

This is nevertheless one of the most dramatic political changes of our times and a rare reason for cautious optimism.