Embrace Her

Tulsi Gabbard has left the Democratic Party. By now the divorce looks like it was a long time coming. But it’s important to recall that Gabbard was once considered a rising star of the party. A woman of color! A veteran of the Iraq War! A Hindu and Samoan background! And yes, uncommonly comely for a politician. This is why I reject very strongly Bobby Miller’s assertion that “she is an incredibly cynical and disingenuous political figure,” and that “she could easily turn back the other way if the political winds shift.” If she was merely following the political winds, and only interested in her own rise and power, she would be the Democrats’ Jacinda Ardern by now, and we would all be living under her endless lockdown regime. That was the future being prepared for her, when she, as a freshman House member, was catapulted to nearly the top of the DNC.

But she consciously undermined that future. Some will think she did so out of political perversity, but I see integrity in it. First it was foreign policy. Like many veterans of the Iraq War, Tulsi Gabbard’s experience of her post-9/11 military service left her with huge skepticism of Sunni Islamist radicalism. Although she is considered a dove’s dove now, she has always been an opponent of Islamist terrorism. It was her seriousness on that issue that attracted positive comments from then AEI president Arthur Brooks. But it was her commitment on this that drove her into dissent from the blob’s consensus on the Syrian civil war, in which America allied itself with the moderate child beheaders like Nour al-Din al-Zenki. She has said consistently that she joined the armed forces to fight al-Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11. But in Syria we were, in the eyes of many vets, going to act as the air force for al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. We certainly acted, inadvertently or not, as their arms supplier. If conservatives don’t want to hear complaints about the Syrian civil war, maybe they shouldn’t support the Obama administration’s decision to use our special forces and intel agencies to intervene in it without Congress’s authorizing any such mission. But perhaps hatred of Assad (or Iran) runs deeper than fealty to the Constitution on these matters. Instead of trying to reconcile the contradictions of American foreign policy in the Mideast (like using an AUMF to fight al-Qaeda on one side of the border, and ally with it on the other), Gabbard’s critics have tended to impute to her some kind of exotic personal religious prejudice against Muslims. 

She ended her career in Democratic politics, effectively, by refusing to endorse Hillary Clinton and instead endorsing Bernie Sanders. It was an obvious thing to do given her commitments on foreign policy. She then made more enemies on the left by criticizing her party’s implied religious tests for Republican Supreme Court nominees. And then in her quixotic run for her party’s nomination in 2020, she helpfully showed the world that Kamala Harris is an empty suit. Since that time, she has been a consistent opponent of transgender madness and “woke” Democrats, whom she is willing to call out as “anti-white racists.”

Perhaps 15 percent of Americans are regular churchgoers. If traditional views on gender are going to remain relevant in American life, it will be because people who aren’t full-spectrum conservatives — people like the Tulsi Gabbards and J. K. Rowlings — are willing to stand up for them. It’s true that, as an elected Democrat, Gabbard was to the left of most (not all) Republicans on abortion rights and other social issues. She is also to the right of Republican governors Spencer Cox and Asa Hutchinson and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in knowing that boys are boys and girls and girls. I’m curious if now, freed from affiliation with the Democratic Party, she will trend back toward the social conservatism that informed her teenage activism.

The orthodoxies on the left side of the political spectrum are becoming so rigid, and so heavily guarded by taboo, that many people, including ones who aren’t conservative, are being cast outward to make new alliances. This presents challenges and opportunities for the political Right. We fail to embrace them at our own peril.