Tulsi Gabbard: I’m leaving the Democratic Party

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(11-04-2022, 05:42 PM)BengalYankee Wrote: Seems like the Democratic Party "evolved" and Tulsi decided to leave. 




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Interesting perspective considering the party is essentially where it was when she endorsed Joe Biden 2 years ago. But if anything it has moved slightly closer to the positions of Bernie Sanders whom she endorsed 6 years ago. Her current endorsements are some of the most extreme MAGA candidates running this cycle. Polar opposite of her political opinions of just 6 years ago. Since the party hasn’t changed but she has moved on, we can only assume that Tulsi’s political opinions are like a hairdo that is changed based on a whim. They seem to move towards whichever will garner her the most publicity and potential power.
As someone who has changed political parties and who has become more liberal over time, it doesn’t happen seemingly overnight and it doesn’t move you from one extreme to another. I went from the liberal end of Republicanism to Democratic. It began with watching the Party embrace more and more conservative religiously driven positions coupled with the cowtowing to extreme hate groups throughout the 90s and 2000s. Their extreme right wing positions left me in their wake. I formally resigned from the Party when Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland from even having a hearing for the Supreme Court. I thought that move was the antithesis of our Founding Fathers intended which was the President nominates and the Senate votes. Not the Senate majority leader unilaterally deciding. I held my nose and voted Democratic for the first time in my adult life in 2016. I though Hillary Clinton would be bad for America. However, I believed, correctly, as it turned out, that Donald Trump would be far worse. I grew more and more disgusted my the blatant abuse of American political traditions and behaviors by Trump and the acceptance of that corruption by Republicans all in the name of power. I became scared as I watched the once proud GOP evolve into a Party that stands for whatever Trump wants and doing whatever it can to permanently consolidate their political power. I formally joined the Democratic Party in Jan 2021. I can no longer watch today’s Republican Party destroy American democracy and the ideals America supposedly was founded on.
All this was a very long winded way of explaining that why, in my opinion, Tulsi’s “evolution” isn’t believable. It isn’t rooted in the reality of how most people’s political stances changed.