In Iowa, Vice President JD Vance offered voters a lens through which to interpret the coming midterms — not as a contest of competing policies, but as a civilizational choice between stability and rupture. Drawing on his own working-class roots and the memory of a Democratic Party his father once trusted, Vance argued that something fundamental has shifted in American political life, and that the 2026 elections would force a reckoning with that shift. It is an old rhetorical move — casting one's opponents not merely as wrong, but as alien — and its power lies in how deeply it resonates with th