Tulsi Gabbard has left the Democratic Party, hitting her former colleagues with a left-right combination of warmongering and anti-white racism allegations on the way out the door.
That seemingly eclectic mix of views made the anti-woke and anti-war former Hawaii congresswoman an uneasy fit in the party of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, much less the Squad.
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It is an independent streak that has brought Gabbard from Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman and candidate for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, and before that someone House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called “an emerging star” and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) described as “wonderful” and “an extraordinary political talent,” to a perennial guest on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Even at her most progressive, many conservatives saw Gabbard as a critical part of a left-right alliance against political correctness. She was also a critic of the United States’s interminable wars in the Middle East, with which she had direct experience as a military veteran.
But it wasn’t the beginning of Gabbard’s unconventional political trajectory. Her father, a Hawaiian state senator for the past 15 years, is a former Republican and fairly hard-line social conservative. She initially shared those views, most controversially on same-sex marriage and related LGBT areas, and then quietly shed them as she rose in Democratic politics.
Gabbard’s explanation for the shift was frequently limited to invoking “aloha.” She did, however, give a more detailed answer to Vogue in a 2013 profile. “I love my parents dearly,” Gabbard said. “But serving in the Middle East, I saw firsthand the extreme negative effects when a government attempts to act as a moral arbiter for its people. It’s not government’s place to interfere, especially in those areas that are most personal — for a woman, her right to choose, or who a person chooses to spend their life with.”
A 2015 National Review profile highlighted Gabbard’s dissents from former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, which did not always unfold according to her recent brand. The piece, written by Eliana Johnson and Brendan Bordelon, noted the “congresswoman from Hawaii has endeared herself to right-wing hawks,” complete with flattering quotes from American Enterprise Institute heavyweights Danielle Pletka and Arthur Brooks.
For these reasons, liberals have often distrusted Gabbard even as Democratic leaders initially saw her as an up-and-comer. Stray comments in media interviews suggesting she saw the party as too extreme on abortion or too intolerant of other views reinforced those concerns despite an overwhelmingly liberal voting record — she has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of just 7.63% — and her endorsement of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2016 presidential campaign.
Those left-wing doubts worsened as Gabbard attacked the progressive and civil libertarian bona fides of such Democratic figures as Harris and Hillary Clinton. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said of Gabbard. “She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
Gabbard endorsed Biden for president in the 2020 general election.
To Gabbard’s critics, these are signs of political opportunism. But in a period of political polarization and deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, she may represent people who have become unmoored from the two-party system. Fellow 2020 Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang represented the more centrist version of this phenomenon and has also left the party.
Gabbard hails from the more anti-establishment wing of this political tendency, which has lumped together refugees from Sanders’s Democratic presidential campaigns and former Rep. Ron Paul’s Republican bids with some supporters of former President Donald Trump. Joe Rogan speaks to this audience as much as Tucker Carlson, who features disenchanted progressives such as Glenn Greenwald on his show as regularly as he does Gabbard.
The group is loosely stitched together by opposition to wars, wokeness as practiced by government or corporations, Big Tech censorship, and a general distrust of authority.
It was not good for Gabbard’s career in the Democratic Party.
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Whether that leads Gabbard back to her more conservative roots or a more idiosyncratic political profile remains to be seen.
But the 41-year-old won’t be “the next Democratic Party star.” She’ll be surfing in new waters.
