This election season has brought the usual stories of people crossing the aisle to vote for a party they previously opposed.  We're inundated with reports about former congressmen or government officials announcing that, to save America, they'll vote for Biden.  The stories about people crossing the aisle to vote for Trump get less play, of course.  What nobody comments about, though, is that these party switches are not identical.  Instead, they represent a profound realignment in the fundamental nature of the parties.

This thought occurred to me when I read the story touted in conservative media about the fact that "Rick," from Lorain, Ohio, called in to C-SPAN after the first night of the Republican convention to announce that he was a lifelong Democrat who was going to vote for Trump.  The reason he gave was the Republican Party's fealty to and respect for God:

Lifelong Democrat tells C-SPAN: “after watching the convention tonight…I am definitely changing my vote to Republican” pic.twitter.com/zGAqVAnM6q

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 25, 2020

Another person crossing the aisle was Robert Vlaisavljevich, a lifelong Democrat and the mayor of Eveleth, Minnesota, which he described as a "small town in the Iron Range of Minnesota."  He spoke movingly about the way the Democrats had abandoned the steel industry in America, destroying American lives, and handed it over to the Chinese:

And of course, on the first night of the convention, one of the best speakers was Vernon Jones, a black Democrat assemblyman from Georgia.  He explained why he was voting for Trump and touched lightly upon the way his party tried to cancel him for calling them out for their continued failures regarding America's blacks:

I also get lots of emails from people across America confiding to me that they're voting for Trump.  They're lifelong Democrats, but they no longer feel connected to a party that has abandoned the Constitution, a sovereign border, the biological reality of male and female, and respect for religious faith and that seems determined to foment racial hatred, civil unrest, and disdain for America.

These are the people that Kurt Schlichter calls the "Normals."  They're not political activists, Hollywood stars, magically gendered non-binary people, racially obsessed neurotics, or any of the other kinds of people who sit at the heart of the Democrat party.  Instead, these Democrats voting for Trump still believe in their classic Democrat values — but those are the values we associate with Kennedy and even Clinton.  To paraphrase Reagan, these people didn't leave the Democrat party; the Democrat party left them.

But what about the vaunted Republicans who are proudly strutting across the aisle to vote for Biden?  First, many of these proud strutters also crossed the aisle to vote for Hillary, and a lot voted for Obama, too.  At a certain point, you have to stop pretending to be a Republican and just come out as a Democrat.  Otherwise, you're just a poseur.

But what these people really have in common is that they're not Normals.  Instead, they're all members of the Deep State.  The "over two dozen GOP members of Congress" who created a group called "Republicans for Biden" could just as easily have labeled themselves Deep State Mono-Party People for Biden.

Their ideology isn't conservative (Constitution, liberty, patriotism); instead, it's statism with a corporate spin.  It would be accurate to call this view "fascism" — and no, I'm not calling them Nazis.

At a purely ideological level, though, when one strips from fascism Hitler's unique racist evil, the ideology that Mussolini originally envisioned was a partnership between the state and the private sector, with the state getting the ultimate say in matters.  China is a modern fascist nation, as is Europe.  When Donald Trump stepped on this non-racist fascism, the statists abandoned ship.

The other "Republicans for Trump" are the Lincoln Project people, many of whom were failed campaign managers and advisers.  Rather than learning from their failures, they turned on the people who refused to get with their monoparty Republicanism and threw themselves to Hillary and Biden.

And of course, there are the very high-level military officers who oppose Trump, from Colin Powell to Admiral McRaven to General McChrystal.  These men, too, are purely political animals committed to the monoparty that Trump emphatically rejected.  Moreover, they also support endless wars, which is the opposite of Trump's approach.  Trump is the only president in decades who has not gotten America into a war, and they hate him for that. 

Other than those Deep Staters who are seeing Trump destroy their bread and butter, Trump's supporters are stalwarts who will not abandon him.  In the vote switch, Republicans got the real people, while the Democrats got the fakes.  It sounds like a fair deal to me, and one that might see Trump win the White House with 37 states.

Image: Collage of Jeff Flake and Vernon Jones using public domain images.