In what I believe was the first episode of her new podcast, Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, announced this past Tuesday that she was leaving the Democratic Party. Her statement, as reported by The Blaze, was pretty much self-explanatory.
“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that’s under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, who actually work to undermine our God-given freedoms that are enshrined in our Constitution…..who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, who demonize the police but protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, who believe in open borders, who weaponize the national security state to go after their political opponents, and, above all, who are dragging us closer to nuclear war.”
As I have said repeatedly, my “conservatism” is rational and of the center, its designation as a Right-Wing Ideology being a product of the absurd Leftist notion that a reliance on Reason is a Western eccentricity of no objective value. Gabbard’s choice of words in asking other Democrats to follow her is interesting: “I’m calling on my fellow commonsense, independent-minded Democrats to join me in leaving the Democratic Party……..If you can no longer stomach the direction that so-called woke Democratic Party ideologues are taking our country, I invite you to join me.” Clearly Tulsi sees Reason rather than the sentimental dementia known as “wokeness” as the only epistemological tool that can lead us to a truly democratic, truly tolerant, truly civilized future.
Like Naomi Wolf who is now highly critical of the political perspective to which she was aligned throughout her earlier life, Tulsi Gabbard has not officially embraced “conservatism.” Yet the evolution of each of these ladies, along with that of Bill Maher, suggest the inevitable destination of any intelligent human being to be an endorsement of Rational Western Humanism which is, in fact, the basis of contemporary, mainstream “conservatism.”