The news last week that former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard was leaving the Democratic Party might not have seemed at first like a very big deal. Gabbard, after all, didn’t seek re-election to her House seat in 2020 and hadn’t played a role in party politics since her failed presidential bid. But her announcement highlights an important and growing gulf between Democrats and Republicans — and helps explain why Republicans, who may well have majorities in both chambers of Congress in January, have become a threat to democracy.
Gabbard, who represented Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District, at one point had the voting record of a mainstream Democrat, albeit with a tendency toward fringe views. She served a term as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, was a strong Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, and when she ran for president in 2020, she was included in the debates despite being a fierce critic of some Democratic policy positions.
She was still enough of a Democrat to endorse Joe Biden against Donald Trump. But she became a frequent guest on Fox News programs and used her appearances to criticize Biden and the Democrats. She finally made her break with the party official last week.
You can be excused for thinking her announcement amounted to nothing more than an effort by an oddball political figure to grab a bit of attention amid a fading career.
I think that misses something important, which is that Democrats tend not to tolerate demagogues. Gabbard has been selling unorthodox views of various types for some time. She never quite lived down a 2017 meeting with brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. While she was able to hold on to her House seat, it turned out there simply wasn’t much of a market in the Democratic Party for indulging authoritarians.
This isn’t because rank-and-file Democrats automatically reject extremism. Instead, it’s because influential Democrats enforce something like a minimal level of responsible behavior. Those who can’t abide by it find themselves ostracized by both the party and media organizations such as MSNBC.
Political scientists aren’t in agreement about why the parties have diverged. One factor surely is the enormous influence of news media deeply aligned with the Republican Party. That has led to a self-perpetuating cycle, as the airing of outrageous viewpoints attracts an audience comfortable with those views.
Gabbard wasn’t the first Democrat to find herself cut off from the Democratic Party for being too fringe. Consider Cynthia McKinney, a member of the House from Georgia who was exiled for (among other things) anti-semitism, or even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose status as a party loyalist couldn’t protect him from being ostracized over his conspiracy-mongering surrounding vaccines.
That isn’t the case in the Republican Party, and hasn’t been for some time. Former House member Michele Bachmann couldn’t capture the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, but she was able to run a far more credible campaign than Gabbard, even picking up a smattering of endorsements from party politicians and others despite a long history of oddball statements and beliefs. As long ago as 1988, Christian conservative broadcaster Pat Robertson finished second in the Iowa caucuses despite having no particular qualifications for the office other than his own series of controversial comments. And while small in numbers, the House Freedom Caucus and its predecessors have been a dominant force within the House Republican conference for some time, pushing out more responsible leaders such as former Speaker John Boehner and pushing for (and sometimes achieving) government shutdowns.
The truth is that for some 30 years it has been hard to find examples of Republican politicians who were shunned by the party for being too irresponsible or too radical.(Hard, but not impossible. First-term GOP representative Madison Cawthorn was defeated in a primary this year after the party turned sharply against him, perhaps because he accused congressional Republicans of sexual perversion and drug use. Many Republicans also turned against Iowa Rep. Steve King after he made repeated bigoted statements.)
Democrats are hardly perfect in rejecting demagogues, but the party as a whole has established incentives for its politicians to avoid outlandish or offensive conduct.
The parties’ different thresholds aren’t about ideology, as Gabbard’s case demonstrates. There are examples of demagoguery among liberals, conservatives and centrists. What matters is whether political parties are open to it or reject it. Once a party rewards irresponsible and even authoritarian rhetoric, it is going to get a lot more of it.
And that’s how we wound up where we are — with more than half of Republican congressional candidates questioning or outright lying about the results of the 2020 election, and with a reasonable chance that the president who lost that election and then attempted to overturn the results will be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024. Keep rewarding the cranks, the conspiracy theorists and the fringe characters, and before too long they will own the party, top to bottom. And if they win enough elections? The future of US democracy will be in grave danger.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
