I’ve been watching the Republican National Convention. Political conventions are not new to me. I got into this stuff as a 16-year-old when I became involved in Ronald Reagan’s 1976 insurgent campaign. So, I’ve seen my share of conventions.

There’s a palpable difference this year. You could hear that in J.D. Vance’s speech.

Some may claim the party is a “cult of personality.” Others have complained that “traditional conservatism” is under assault. Well, yes, now conservatism is different. Tonight, I watched an Arizona rancher and his wife talk about the drug couriers crossing their land. I watched 13 family members relate the loss of their children during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. I watched a 98-year-old World War II veteran tell us he’d fight all over again for “his country.” Perhaps we’ve forgotten there are still Americans who think of the United States as “their country” – and stand up for it. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that most Americans hope that politics is so out of their lives that they can just tend their farm or ranch.

No, we didn’t have a procession of office-holders. We weren’t treated to nostrums from the “distinguished Congressman from the 25^th district of Idaho.” We heard ordinary Americans. I didn’t hear Yale and Hawvahd accents. I heard New Yawk and Jawjuh and Wiscahnsin accents. Yes, I know that political conventions are staged events, intended to promote their candidates. Yes, I know that Donald Trump had a career in reality TV. Judging from the speeches I heard, there are still lots of ordinary Americans that still respect and love their country and want to share that good news.

Now, this is not intended to be a salute to a candidate, but it is a reflection on history. I’d argue that, in some ways, we are seeing the historical closure to a process begun over 50 years ago.

Richard Nixon won in 1968 because he spoke to the “Silent Majority.” We forget that, in 1968, Americans were concerned about where America was headed. We were fighting a faraway war we didn’t plan on winning. We saw our cities — Newark and Detroit — convulsed in riots and burning. We saw crime growing and inflation rising. And we saw a Democratic party disconnected from those realities. If you doubt it, remember that they “got the message” by giving America an even more radical nominee, George McGovern, in 1972.

Nixon began, but never finished, a process of disconnecting working- and middle-class people from the Democratic Party. I remember my parents being concerned where America was headed. By 1972, I had some interest in politics, an interest crystallized and intensified by what struck me as the barbaric dictum of Roe v. Wade. As I watched and grew up, I realized the Democratic Party my parents used to vote for no longer represented what they stood for. That was especially clear to me as I watched 1970s Democrats equivocate between their radical faction that proclaimed love for Roe v. Wade (Birch Bayh, Don Edwards, Bella Abzug) and an increasingly quiet faction ready to acquiesce in it (until, with Bart Stupak, they acquiesced themselves out of existence).

But I also felt somewhat alienated in the GOP. Ronald Reagan was different. But George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney — well, as a Catholic ethnic from New Jersey, there always seemed an element of truth to Ann Richards’s observation about having “a silver foot stuck in their mouths,” at least when it came to relating to working- and middle-class people. After Nixon’s time, Republicans didn’t so much bring working- and middle-class people into the party as much as simply occasionally tap their votes.

That was a loss, a strategic loss. We forget that, back in the 1970s, New York State had an emerging “Conservative Party.” It even elected a Conservative Senator, James Buckley. Writing in The Almanac of American Politics, Michael Barone commented that New York was sending to Congress a lot of “R-Cs,” which stood both for their parties’ endorsements (Republican-Conservative) and their religion (Roman Catholic). As a New Jerseyan, I was convinced that talking to and in the language of middle- and working-class Americans would have carried forward the political transition Nixon began. We used to have Republicans in Congress from states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania, even Maryland and Massachusetts. Did you know that, when Joe Biden arrived in the Senate in 1972, he joined a Delaware Congressional delegation that consisted of a Republican Senator and a Republican House member? And even if that realignment was partial, might it have at least saved some space in the Democratic party for a pro-life voice, for voices not inimical to Catholic values?

But that deal was never consummated. It lay dormant until 2016, when many Americans began hearing echoes in Donald Trump’s speeches of the things they stood for and believed in. They stopped being “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” to their Bibles and religion. They stopped being merely a “base” to be summoned every four years and then relegated to the back of the bus.

We’re hearing something of that same echo in this year’s GOP convention, and it’s a timbre somewhat atypical in political discourse. It’s definitely not heard among “progressives,” either hostile to or at best intimidated by its tone.

I’m not going to predict the electoral outcome, though I have my hopes. I will say that it seems to me this may be a unique historic opportunity to achieve a political realignment that should have happened half a century ago, a realignment with enormous potential for providing a political infrastructure for Judeo-Christian values. That could be among the most important outcomes of 2024.