To lose one candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is unfortunate. Twice looks like carelessness. Last October, Andrew Yang left the Democrats. On Oct. 11,
Tulsi Gabbard
followed. The party of diversity has now shed both of its most prominent AAPI figures. The party that throws a party every time a pantsuited pioneer pushes through a glass ceiling has lost the youngest woman ever elected to a U.S. state legislature, the first Samoan American to vote in Congress, and the first Hindu to serve in Congress. Still, there’s always Elizabeth Warren.
The Democrats had already left Gabbard. The party has not so much drifted to the left since Gabbard entered Congress in 2013 as deliberately set a course, full steam ahead, for big-state autocracy and oligarchy. Gabbard is a religious libertarian. Today’s
Democratic Party
is run by libertines, not libertarians. Libertinism, whether of the Marquis de Sade or Hunter Biden variety, is one way an aristocracy shows it is above the law. Another is displaying open contempt for the values of the little people who pay their taxes and, as Gabbard did, volunteer to serve in the U.S. Army.
TULSI GABBARD’S LEFT-RIGHT JOURNEY TAKES HER OUTSIDE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Gabbard’s resignation was scathingly accurate but alarming in tone. The Democrats, she said, are controlled by “an elitist cabal of warmongers” who “actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms.” They use “cowardly wokeness” to “divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism.” They are “hostile to people of faith & spirituality,” and they “demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans.” They “weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents” and are now “above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”
This is Manichaeism 2.0, the war of darkness and light tuned up for social media. It combines founding and familiar cliches (“our God-given freedoms”) with more recent ones (“elitist cabal of warmongers”). It’s understandable, but it’s a pity. As a digital politician, Gabbard must speak the coarse argot of online combat. In 2020, Hillary Clinton implied that she was a traitor, being “groomed” as a Russian plant. This calumny, for which no evidence exists, resounded on social media last week. Academics, a columnist at the Washington Post, an adviser to Julian Castro: They all chimed in, like the Party from 1984.
Gabbard is more original than her cant. She is not a left- or right-wing politician: She is a spiritual radical. Raised in a Hindu cult, she seeks to transcend the power binary of material, contractual politics with a higher power. She has more in common with Gandhi or George Harrison than with Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. She is a 19th-century self-helper, by way of a 1960s self-actualizer. The Gabbard paradoxes spring from this combination: the soldier-pacifist who supports the troops but hates Washington, the visions of apocalypse broadcast from a lush Hawaiian Eden, the advocate of constitutional rights who could not quite bring herself to condemn Bashar Assad.
Gabbard may be expertly shallow in her image projection: the serene white pantsuit, the cute Twitter clips that show her working out and shooting a pistol. But she is a deeply acute analyst of America’s spiritual rot. The American crisis is about more than partisanship and economics. It expresses a loss of purpose. The “elites” have grown so distant from this reality that they cannot comprehend why faith, the family, and the flag might be more rewarding than pills, porn, and transitioning your teenager to boost her college application.
Gabbard is not a bicoastal atheist. She may be an institutional avatar of the ’60s revolution, but she speaks from the heart and about the Heartland. She has nothing in common with Andrew Yang, the other rogue runner in the Democrats’ 2020 field. His idea of putting the unemployed and unproductive on a universal basic income is straight out of Idiocracy, which is where we’re heading now. His frustration with the Democrats isn’t that they’re control freaks fused to the snoopers of Big Tech; it’s that the party isn’t getting to Silicon Valley’s future fast enough. Yang has formed a Forward Party, which is nothing if not progressive. It is progressing neither forward nor backward but downward.
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Gabbard has lately campaigned against sexual harassment in the military, denounced the controversial Netflix film Cuties, called Adam Schiff a “domestic terrorist” for seeking to limit Americans’ civil liberties, and filled Tucker Carlson’s seat on Fox. But she is not a natural fit for today’s Republicans and will not work as the friendly face of MAGA. She is anti-fossil fuels and pro-abortion. She is also not an idiot. She now asks “commonsense and independent minded Democrats” to follow her. So far only to YouTube, where she has launched a podcast. It would be a shame if that is where she remained. But it would not be a surprise.
