Barack Obama’s fan club is growing

The universal praise for Barack Obama’s speech Wednesday night felt tinged with sentiment. The most remarkable political ascent since that of another Illinois legislator—Abraham Lincoln, who also rose to the presidency on the strength of his rhetorical gifts and quietly ruthless political instincts—has reached its end. And with it Obama seemed looser, freer, lighter. He skipped onto the stage looking young and fresh, even happy, as he summoned his troops—the great coalition he built to achieve two 50 percent-plus election wins—for one last battle, which he painted in the stark hues of historic danger. Hillary Clinton is not just the better choice, Obama said. Her opponent, Donald Trump is an outlier and existential threat. Not a “real” Republican or conservative, Trump instead dwells among the alien tribe of  “homegrown demagogues.” In a veiled attack on Trump, he declared that “fascists or communists or jihadists” will always fail in the end.

The “Never Trump” faction on the American right has been saying exactly that, or trying to, for many months now. But they could find no effective messenger. Now they have one, in Obama, whom they have disparaged for the whole of his two terms—reborn, in their eyes, as the great tribune of conservative values. It wasn’t just his attack on Trump, but also his sunny vision of “hope and change,” complete with quotations from the Constitution (“those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago.”) Of course Obama is as steeped in America’s creedal scripture as anyone on the right. The right just never seemed to listen before. They now seem amazed to have discovered the Obama most of the country has known from the beginning.

“American exceptionalism and greatness, shining city on hill, founding documents, etc--they're trying to take all our stuff,” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the nation’s flagship conservative magazine) marveled to his 97,000 Twitter followers. The conservative radio host and writer Erick Erickson (163,000 Twitter followers) was also impressed. “Finally seeing the texts of my Republican friends,” he wrote, "beside themselves over that speech.”

Why are these erstwhile detractors now joining Obama’s fan club? I went on Twitter, too, and asked the question. One reply came from Damon Linker, an intellectual historian who writes an astute column for The Week. “Conservatives are suffering idealism withdrawal,” he explained, “and in [the] absence of it from their own side, Obama gave them their fix.”

The Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi (Il Foglio), a deeply informed observer of American politics, suggested that our endless dog-days of polarization may have obscured a deeper affinity between the two parties. In retrospect “Reagan conservatism”—the cold war internationalism disdained by Trump and his followers—“shares something with liberalism at a fundamental level.”

Yes, American politics has at last found its Great Unifier, the interloper and political home-wrecker Donald Trump. His candidacy has achieved what even months ago seemed impossible: a new consensus in American politics. The trouble is, it is a consensus of anxiety, worry—and fear.