Anyone who thinks the two major political parties are basically the same just needs to watch the competing political conventions to understand what radically different creatures they are. The GOP is a monologue, whereas the Democratic Party is a cacophony of contending voices. At the Republican National Convention (RNC), it was striking how much the entire party had become a MAGA-echo chamber, with every major political figure adopting the rhetoric of Trump. Conversely, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) reflected a much more heterogeneous party, with centrists and leftists both coming out in support of Kamala Harris—but for different reasons and with varied accents and arguments.

Another way to frame the difference is that the RNC took place only in the present, while the DNC contained both the past and future of the party. At the RNC, the traditional convention invocation of the party’s heritage was at a minimum: scarce references to Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt—or even Ronald Reagan. All that mattered was Trump. Even the living Republican nominees for president (George W. Bush and Mitt Romney) were excluded from the RNC.

The absence of the past—or any non-Trump future—at the RNC is a negative version of the DNC, where the stage was shared both by representatives of earlier iterations of the party (on the first night notably, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) and the emerging stars who represent the party’s future (notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Raphael G. Warnock). The first night also featured many labor leaders, most notably Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers. These labor leaders aren’t the political future of the party, but they do indicate a major change, as elected Democrats have embraced not only unions themselves but even some of the language of union militancy.

To underscore this embrace of organized labor, Joe Biden in his speech said:

“I’m proud to be the first president to walk a picket line, and (to) be labeled the most pro-union in history. I accept it, its a fact. When unions do well, we all do well.”

But Biden’s praise of unions was a rare case of Biden acknowledging the future. Most of his speech was a backward look at his achievements and motives for running, with a strong emphasis on Donald Trump’s embrace of racism at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Similarly, Hillary Clinton’s speech evoked many of the themes of her 2016 campaign, notably the importance of breaking the glass ceiling on women’s achievements. Clinton has earned her medals as a political warrior, so it’s easy to allow her a moment to bask in the applause of the assembled Democrats and her sly smile when the crowd started yelling “Lock him up!”

The voice of an earlier politics could also be heard in a fine speech by a non-politician, Steve Kerr, the coach who oversaw the winning Olympics men’s basketball team. Kerr offered a message of national unity that called to mind the Barack Obama of 2008, who promised a transcendence of the divide between red and blue America. Kerr said, “The joy, the compassion, the commitment to our country that we saw at the Olympics, that is what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have, and it is what our country needs. Leadership, real leadership, not the kind that seeks to divide us, but the kind that recognizes and celebrates our common purpose.” Kerr added, “Imagine what we could do with all 330 million of us playing on the same team. Not as Democrats, not as Republicans, not as Libertarians, but as Americans.”

This vision of a Harris/Walz administration reuniting a fraying nation is of course the standard boilerplate of centrist Democrats. But it’s the talk of a moment from the past that isn’t relevant anymore given the radicalization of the GOP and the fighting spirit needed to actually address the problems of the present.

What made Shawn Fain and Ocasio-Cortez both voices of the present is that they didn’t eschew partisanship but openly embraced it. Their Donald Trump wasn’t objectionable just because he was crude, vulgar, and divisive but also, more importantly, because he embodied the class interests of the rich. Fain framed politics with the classic union question, which is also a throwing down of the gauntlet: “Which side are you on?” By denouncing Trump as a scab and union-buster, Fain made clear that the goal was not national unity but the decisive victory of the party of workers.

Ocasio-Cortez also took a strong class position, contrasting the middle-class struggles of Kamala Harris (as well as Ocasio-Cortez herself) with Trump’s wallowing in inherited wealth and privilege.