The Fall of Tulsi Gabbard—And Why It Should Worry the Left
Gabbard’s political turn reveals the alienating fragility and insularity of left-wing culture; its tendency to produce disaffection and assets for the right.
Tulsi Gabbard’s career as a left-leaning politician officially perished last week. The writing was on the wall for some time, but when the ex-congressperson appeared on Neil Cavuto and Sean Hannity’s Fox News shows to bash the hollowed-out shell of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill — a crumbling mass of social spending and infrastructure programs that Gabbard blasted as a big-government nightmare — a new feeling crept over the airwaves. This would be a point of no return. The last left-wing Tulsi purists could probably forgive her recent comments in support of the War on Terror, since there was actually little distance between the new, tough-on-terror Tulsi and Biden’s belligerent rants about ISIS-K. But Gabbard’s latest Fox News stints have shown her full breakaway from Democratic leadership and from the last bit of good Democrat orthodoxy she still supported. Gabbard has jettisoned the basic idea that crumbs for America’s struggling families and poor folks tip the scales ever so slightly in favor of good and deserving people, and not toward an enfeebling and menacing Nanny State; she has abandoned this idea and abandoned the left.
But as much as many progressives will spin this rightward fall into a tale of individual moral corruption — and that’s certainly one ingredient in this brew — these same leftists will mostly cry foul at any attempt to reckon with their own potential complicity, and that of the movements and figures they support, in laying the groundwork for Gabbard’s departure from left politics. But nevertheless, that complicity is real. Tulsi Gabbard’s history shows a true, substantial effort to court the U.S. left. It was the left’s response to send her on an ice floe to the right.
The prevailing narrative from the corners of the left who always hated Gabbard — we warned you! — belies the real scope of Gabbard’s political journey. For years, Gabbard has worked to pivot left against headwinds from these very same progressives, who are loud and influential in social and traditional media.
Jacobin — hardly a Gabbard-friendly publication — reports a remarkable political evolution for Gabbard over her time as a public official. Raised by a politician father who waged activist campaigns against same-sex marriage, Gabbard started public life with views considered conservative even in the 2000s. She lambasted same-sex civil unions as a political con to foist gay marriage on an unwilling population. She had a fondness for castigating so-called extremists in the fight for gay rights, remarking at one point, “As Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.” Her abortion stance? Staunchly pro-life. As nearly the entire nation turned pro-war during the early War on Terror, Gabbard opposed nearly every differentiator proffered by the Democrats from their GOP opposition. A route to Republicanism lay wide open in front of her; clearly the path of least political resistance (and probably the most money) would have been for Gabbard to join the right wing’s culture warriors as a charismatic soldier. Right-wing news has feted Tulsi for years. But contrary to all expectation, Gabbard veered left, and all the signs point to an evolution grounded in political principle rather than financial or reputational expediency.
Certainly, it would be tough for money or fame to explain Gabbard’s staunch support of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Sanders was an insurgent outsider that first year, one whom the media and the party took all possible pains to marginalize. Carrying water for “Not-a-Democrat” Sanders would hardly boost the standing of someone looking merely to climb ladders of influence and make money. But political and financial incentives did not deter Gabbard from endorsing Sanders and from vacating a position as vice chair of a Democratic National Committee who clearly wanted to destroy him.
No matter what her views, Gabbard could have become a Good Democrat simply by supporting Hillary Clinton’s “groundbreaking” presidential run; and by joining the chorus of rabidly anti-Trump voices who had set the wheels in motion for the upcoming Russiagate conspiracy narrative. If Gabbard wanted to set herself up for life, here was a clear opportunity.
Instead, she stuck her neck out for Sanders, exposing herself to a media onslaught that relegated her to right-wing outlets for even a modicum of sympathy. And what’s more, and more tragic, Gabbard had actually developed a number of great views beforehand. Not only did Gabbard pull a 180 on abortion, she eventually attained a grade of 100 percent on the Human Rights Campaign’s evaluation of pro-LGBT voting records. Gabbard fought hard against the drug war, championing legislation to decriminalize marijuana. She supported a version of single-payer healthcare and opposed the institution of deadly and costly wars for regime change, including the recent Syrian intervention. She was one of the few voices opposing a war that was both illegal under international law and launched by the Trump administration under extremely dubious circumstances.
And yet — ironically — some of Gabbard’s very best views kept her estranged and alienated from the country’s left-ideological infrastructure. Consider Gabbard’s stance on the Syrian Civil War and that country’s ruler, Bashar Al-Assad.
A U.S. left supposedly cognizant of how the security state and media fabricated false reasons to invade Iraq seemed to ignore the West’s considerable motivations to occupy yet another state — with a nominally socialist government locked in war against extremist rebels — and it even ignored extensive reporting suggesting that Assad may not have been responsible for the chemical attack that sparked U.S. intervention in Syria. Instead, the left showed a stupefying willingness to accept the media’s description of Gabbard as an “Assad toady” for opposing the intervention and meeting with the Syrian leader.
Even more incredibly, many of these same leftists swallowed the narrative that Gabbard was both deferential to Assad and an Islamophobe — Gabbard was supposedly a Muslim hater who nonetheless risked her political career to shill for a U.S.-hated Muslim dictator! The nonsensical nature of the allegations did not seem to harm their credibility.
Perceptions of Gabbard as an Islamophobe stemmed mainly from Gabbard’s relative amity toward Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and from some arguably Hindu-nationalist donors to her campaigns. This was supposed to make Gabbard, a self-identified Hindu, ipso facto Islamophobic, even though most Democrats accept donations from pro-Israel groups and support legislation to segregate and annihilate Palestinians. The Intercept reported that one of Joe Biden’s top staffers, as Biden ran against Gabbard and other Democrats for the presidential nomination, expressed open and enthusiastic support for Narendra Modi. The report named this staffer — the director of the Biden campaign’s AAPI community outreach — a “strong backer” of the right-wing Indian prime minister. And yet this same official did top-level work for the Biden campaign throughout the entire primaries and general election, during the very times when high-profile Gabbard haters harangued the entire left to throw unwavering support behind Biden. This was the same Biden who received Modi graciously at the White House when working as vice president for Barack Obama. This was the same Biden who served as a principal agitator for the Iraq War (ironically sending Gabbard to fight in it). And this was the same Biden who served Obama as the latter ruthlessly bombed and waged war in the Middle East. And yet it was Gabbard whom the media, and the left, called Islamophobic.
It should be unsurprising that corporate media would cynically tar a left-wing politician with allegations it would never level against a corporatist counterpart. But it’s the responsibility of the left not to buy into such tactics. Instead, the left amplified almost every sleazy attack against Gabbard, and its media organs credited these snipes just as they did with figures such as Jill Stein. New York Magazine was actually fairer to Gabbard, musing that “critics might draw a line from her [military] deployment at a time of American Islamophobia through her later sympathies for Assad and Modi,” than outlets such as Jacobin, which boldly declared “Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend” and indignantly disclosed (horror!) that Trump “White House adviser Steve Bannon has reportedly spoken well of her.” The Nation absurdly decried Gabbard’s foreign policy instincts as an “‘America-first’ Trumpism of the left” and commented on her “barely cloaked” Islamophobia. Astoundingly, The Nation cast a wish not to topple Bashar Al-Assad and even Saddam Hussein as right wing — and again, as something that supposedly confirms Gabbard’s monstrous and scarcely hideable Islamophobia. Once more, the tortured thinking of this thesis was validated mainly by an alleged quote from Steve Bannon approving of Gabbard’s policies in certain areas.
All of this is not to say that the left could or should have accepted every one of Gabbard’s policies. Things such as her late-2020 push to define Title IX around biological sex certainly could produce harmful outcomes. Such policies deserve a vigorous public debate. It’s just that there’s a wide gulf between that and repeating sloppy-bordering-on-nonsensical ad hominem attacks from a mainstream press which has invested against most of the good policy Gabbard supported. There was no press meltdown about Richard Spencer directly endorsing Joe Biden; Biden’s endorsements from ghouls such as Colin Powell, Bill Kristol, and many, many other prominent Republicans were actually celebrated. It is only on the left — and maybe on the saddest parts of the right — that supposedly impure people actually liking your candidate ruins that candidate in your eyes. The Democratic centrists never operate this way. It ends up being the left, once their cultural purity has obliterated most of the left-wing contenders in a race, who are compelled by their rabid negative partisanship to support a candidate substantially worse than the impure leftists they’ve allowed media narratives to destroy.
Gabbard’s treatment mirrors the left’s rejection of and ire toward figures such as Joe Rogan. Rogan is another figure whose general progressivism is overshadowed by his distance from certain progressive pieties, usually the cultural ones. In an absolutely broken application of “intersectional” thinking, all of the various cultural positions popular among left activists, no matter how niche, are assigned a weight roughly equal to someone’s other political commitments, even when those others include life-saving principles such as universal healthcare, economic redistribution, and anti-interventionism. Faltering on the question of open borders or expressing warm sentiments toward any questionable individual is enough to have one’s left card revoked, to be branded forever as a TERF, fascist, Islamophobe, fake leftist, or right-wing “grifter.”
After this sequence, it ends up being the right which rushes in to claim such individuals, showering every possibly right-wing idea they express with encouragement and praise. It’s impossible to imagine Gabbard succeeding in left-wing media without dramatically altering her approach and principles; right-wing media accepted her just as she was. A National Review article from 2015 even called her “a Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who’s Turning Heads.”
This landscape left Gabbard with nowhere else to go on the left. We shouldn’t romanticize the situation — Gabbard could have persisted with her principles, as many maligned leftists do — but it’s not hard to imagine why she broke right after years of losing all cultural support from leftists and liberals that might have advanced her political career. Politicians are not all-powerful despite their elite stature. If Gabbard had adopted the language and nostra of wokeness, which saved Elizabeth Warren after she faked Native descent, she could have possibly reversed her fortunes. But this would have been ingenuine, and it was clearly a bridge too far.
In the end, many on the left will be glad that Gabbard has gone. The thrill of group policing is just too great to resist. But these people will now have to deal with the loss of a valuable ally, even if they fail to realize it. Gabbard supported Sanders at great cost to self during his initial campaign; and when Sanders himself was Russiagated during his 2020 bid, it actually fell to Gabbard to defend him. Gabbard took to mainstream media to point out rightly that “Reckless claims by anonymous intelligence officials that Russia is ‘helping’ Sen. Bernie Sanders … are deeply irresponsible.” Again and again, Gabbard defended Sanders from bad-faith attacks, helping Sanders serve as tribune for a left that seemed to despise Gabbard herself.
The Reaganite Gabbard, sadly, will confirm the priors of a whole host of progressives; they will claim to have seen her as a wolf in sheep’s clothing all along. But still, they will miss how her story conceals something altogether more tragic. The same overconfidence that leads us to misread Gabbard’s trajectory will certainly result in many more losses for the left. We can change things only by recognizing Gabbard as a loss; as a loss we could have avoided.
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