JFK would not recognise his party

Tuskegee airman Charles McGee,100, at Donald Trump’s State of the Union last week. The President pinned the stars of a brigadier general to McGee at the White House before his address. Picture: AP

Democrats, when they’re feeling alarmed or mischievous, will often say that Ronald Reagan would not recognise the current Republican Party. I usually respond that John F. Kennedy would not recognise the current Democratic Party, and would never succeed in it.

Both men represented different political eras but it’s forgotten that they were contemporaries, of the same generation, Reagan born in 1911 and JFK in 1917. They grew up in the same America in different circumstances, one rich, one poor, but with a shared national culture. By the 1950s, when JFK was established in the political system and Reagan readying to enter it, bodacious America had settled into its own dignity. Both men valued certain public behaviours and the maintenance of a public face. It involved composure, coolness, a certain elegance and self-mastery.

Their way is gone, maybe forever. Democrats blame this on Donald Trump, and in the area of historical consciousness he is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit. Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.

Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious. The lack of professionalism, the incompetence is the kind of thing that not only shocks a party but shadows it. They can’t run a tiny caucus in a tiny state but they want us to believe they can reinvent American healthcare?

You know what Iowa really tells us? Anything can happen now. Because rigour in politics is waning, the old disciplines are not holding, old responsibilities are being thrown off. It was a failure of competence by people who were just passing through and burnishing their personal brands.

What a disaster.

And what happened a day later in the House of Representatives was just as bad.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the President delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.

The classy lady was not classy. She forgot she has a higher responsibility than to her base, but — yes, how corny — to her country, the institution, the young who are watching and just getting a sense of how to behave in the world.

The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute. There were the usual boasts: “The unemployment rate is the lowest in half a century”— but they had force in the aggregate. The policy that was emphasised (opportunity zones, expanded vocational education, neonatal research combined with a call to ban late-term abortions, expanded child credits) combined with the heroes in the balcony (a Border Patrol agent, a kid trying to get into a charter school, the brother of a victim of crime) was powerful and rich in inference.

More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”— with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people— that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.

This was the President putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colours as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively.

Yes it was bread and circuses, and yes it was like a reality TV show. But if you weren’t moved by the mother of the baby born prematurely and the 100-year-old Tuskegee airman, there’s something wrong with you, and in your attempts to maintain a fairminded detachment you’ve become distanced from your fellow humans.

Republicans in the Reagan era used to say, and think, that we were the Main Street party, not the Wall Street one. In the three decades since, small-town America has fallen apart and Main Street disappeared into broken up, lonely, ex-urban places. Trump is saying he’s for the people who live there, in Main Street’s diaspora.

Whatever happens with him, that is the party’s future. Whatever happens with the Democrats, they cannot afford another week like this.

Peggy Noonan was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan