Over the past couple of days, I’ve heard many of my fellow Republicans lament that the Democratic convention offered an optimistic and hopeful vision of the American future while the Trumpified GOP convention did precisely the opposite. In his prime-time address to the nation, Donald Trump painted a vivid portrait of an America in the grip of a terrifying crime wave, a nation in which violence routinely spills across a lawless border and where working- and middle-class families have been immiserated by the self-dealing machinations of a sinister globalist elite. According to Trump, the nation is on the precipice of disaster, and only a dramatic change of course, under his steady hand, can save us. Barack Obama’s speech, in contrast, was a patriotic paean to America’s promise. Throughout the convention, Hillary Clinton’s partisans broke out in lusty cheers of “USA! USA!”

Why have the Democrats embraced Ronald Reagan’s vision of the United States as a “shining city on a hill” while the Republicans abandoned it? How is it possible that the politicians and activists assembled at the Republican and Democratic conventions are describing the same universe, let alone the same country? The answer is simple: In a very real sense, they’re not. The fact that so many smart, thoughtful Republicans are so baffled by this role reversal is, to my mind, the reason Donald Trump emerged as the GOP presidential nominee in the first place.

Successful politicians don’t choose political narratives at random. They understand that voters’ beliefs about the state of the nation are inevitably shaped by their life experiences and the ideological and cultural lenses through which they interpret them. That was as true in the 1980s as it is today. Consider a blue-collar worker who moved from a devastated Rust Belt town to a bustling Sun Belt suburb in 1984, just as the local economy was starting to boom. To this young woman, the idea that it was “Morning in America” felt exactly right. She had chosen to leave her past behind, and all the union bosses and tax-and-spend liberal politicians that came with it. Reagan’s individualistic ethos resonated with her experience, and it made her feel like the author of her own life.