SINCE over a decade ago, the left and right began a manoeuvre, what I call a “political Strangers on a Train” — each party taking on many of the political positions of the party across the aisle.

During lockdown especially, I noted more and more conservatives in the United States taking up talking points that traditionally Democrats had while the Democrats shifted even further to the right.

In the infamous “Yogurtgate” of late 2020 Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commiserated on camera with the masses in the throes of the pandemic as she opened her $20,000 refrigerator-freezer, grabbing a $12-a pint ice-cream. In this incident we catch a glimpse of today’s Democrats, once the party of the white and black working class. 

It used to be a given that the Democratic Party was the party of labour and immigrants, and pretty much any group that had a vested interest in major structural reforms to US society. It was also a given that since the civil rights era the Republican Party generally included the business classes, white-collar professionals and other elites, and, white southerners interested in protecting the region’s racist hierarchy. 

This paradigm is no more as these coalitions have not only been fractured, but they have been entirely obliterated. 

The Democratic Party’s most prominent shift to the right is most visible since September 11 2001. All but one Democrat in the House of  Representatives voted for the invasion of Afghanistan shortly following the attacks in the US, leaving California Democrat, Congresswoman Barbara Lee alone to face insults and death threats for her opposition to this war as the Congressional vote was 420 to one.

Similarly, the use of military force in Iraq, also known as the “Iraq Resolution of 2002,” passed in October of that year, with 81 Democrats voting for a war on the basis of lies that had already been exposed at the time, not least of which were Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. 

Even when former president Donald Trump made the December 18 2018 announcement of his intention to withdraw all US troops from northern Syria, despite some support within the anti-war flanks of both parties, it overwhelmingly provoked bipartisan outrage among Washington’s reflexively pro-war Establishment.

Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly criticised former president Barack Obama for insufficient militarism, reacted to Trump’s announcement with her usual “war on terror” rhetoric, stating that his decision was “a betrayal of the Kurds,” while claiming that Trump’s decision would cause a resurgence of terrorism in the region. It was what I call “opposite day” as we watched Democrats pushing for yet another endless war in the region.

What is remarkable about this move, however, is that polling data on Trump’s decision on Syria indicates that the bulk of public support for keeping troops in the region did not come from Republicans, but from Democrats. Independents and Republicans overwhelmingly favoured the removal of troops.

And while this poll could be interpreted as part of what many call TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) — where Democrats oppose anything Trump approved or advocated — the Democratic Party’s move to the right has become even more pronounced under the Biden administration entrenching itself in pro-war measures. 

For instance, Democrats massively pushed for the US proxy war which was preceded by by the US-orchestrated coup, euphemistically called the “Maidan revolution,” in 2014. The Ukraine war, according to many pundits, was the issue that scrambled party messages on both sides of the aisle. However, according to many regional experts like John Mearsheimer, the entire Ukraine-Russia conflict is the direct fault of the US. 

Mearsheimer notes of Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and her involvement in the coup in Ukraine: “Although the full extent of US involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup.”

Mearsheimer goes on to note how Nuland and the late Republican senator John McCain had “participated in anti-government demonstrations” observing: “Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.”

Nuland hails from one of the US’s most prestigious neocon families: her husband, Robert Kagan, was a co-founder of the neocon war-mongering group Project for the New American Century, which pushed regime change in Iraq far before September 11.

Kagan, along with Bill Kristol, a neoconservative — yet bizarrely billed by liberals as a liberal — who, along with the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, were two of the primary actors responsible for disseminating the lie that Saddam was working with al-Qaida.

Kagan played a key role in convincing Americans to believe that Saddam was personally involved in the planning of September 11 and along with Judith Miller’s writing for the New York Times, falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had a WMD programme, neoconservative lies and talking points were widely embraced and parroted within the Democratic Party. 

Despite her neoconservative links and ventures, Nuland was adopted within the heart of the Democratic Party and she has been running Ukraine policy for the US for years, especially while working for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry’s State Department under president Obama when she became immersed in the 2014 coup that resulted in a change of government in Ukraine that fell within the favour of the EU and the West.

Thus it was not at all surprising that when the US proxy war in Ukraine kicked off in early 2022, it was the Democrats rushing to war, approving $45 billion in funds towards Ukraine in May 2022, while House Republicans were critical of the Democrats, claiming they were moving “too quickly.” Most Republicans opposed the Bill, joined by only one Democrat, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

The Democratic Party’s shift to the right became even more pronounced when in March 2023, despite there being broad bipartisan support to withdraw the congressional approval granted in 1991 and 2002 for military strikes against Saddam’s regime, the Democrats overwhelmingly supported congressional authorisation for the use of military force in the “global fight against terror,” turning back an effort by Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul to repeal the 2001 measure that keeps in suspension a war against an ideological entity, “terror.” 

Paul rightly stated that by repealing only the measure specific to the Iraq authorisations, the problem still remains since the 2021 authorisation which was not repealed is broader and far more ideological. According to Paul, this remaining authorisation approves “war everywhere, all the time,” given that the authorisation that remains in law could be used to justify military action against any group as long as politicians label them “terrorists.”

Say what you will about Republicans’ historical record, one thing is clear: they are more and more becoming the anti-interventionist party, as a recent Pew Research Centre study confirms. The Democrats, even to the detriment of their own party in this year’s presidential election, are operating against their own constituency regarding Israel’s ongoing military action in Gaza, as demonstrated in a recent NBC poll showing that 70 per cent of voters aged 18 to 34 oppose the war in Gaza. 

The Democratic Party’s shift to the right on issues of war, among many other subjects, which used to compose the political heart of the party, is no longer a matter of rearranging the garden furniture around anodyne political narratives. Today, many on the left are most definitely witnessing a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

As many Democrats refuse to abandon a sinking ship of neoliberal and neoconservative alliances, evidence shows that in recent years not only are non-white voters abandoning the Democratic Party, but many Democrats are asking that the party ditch the “activist left,” especially on issues of gender and race.

The worst part of all for Democrats is that as Trump currently faces 91 criminal charges in four separate trials, he has never been so popular and has become the face of the Republican Party’s non-interventionist wing that puts to shame Biden’s current hawkish government.