We, at least, are very relieved. To be sure, this is partially because Gabbard and RFK represent long overdue corrections to Washingtonian institutions. Gabbard will serve as a corrective to an intelligence bureaucracy which has grown arrogant, insular, and clannish and which, despite a string of failures, still fancies themselves as infallible protectors of America. Kennedy, meanwhile, is the worst nightmare of the unholy alliance between America’s healthcare regulators and the pharmaceutical industry. If you want evidence of that, just look at the fact that his clearing the committee transformed Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren into a shrieking Karen. Warren, who has received over $5 million from the health industry, has a right to be worried; that’s one gravy train that potentially just ran dry. But her funders have even more reason to be worried, given that Kennedy cheerfully committed – under her questioning -- to not taking their money, and seems bent on suing them for any improprieties he discovers.
So on the merits, Gabbard and RFK’s incoming confirmations are good news. But that’s not all there is to be proud of. This Thursday, the third of President Trump’s “controversial” nominees, Kash Patel, will also be voted on in committee. If Gabbard and RFK can clear their votes, that’s a good sign for Patel, who’s faced far less open skepticism from the GOP caucus, and whose nomination as FBI Director is just as vital. After years of seeing the FBI weaponized against everyone from parents, to devout Catholics, to President Trump himself, it’s about time the agency had a director who’ll start cutting heads and demanding accountability. Patel is that nominee.
But more important than all this is one basic fact: the elevation of Gabbard and Kennedy – both of whom are former Democrats -- is about more than their individual qualifications. It is about realigning the GOP away from its toxic, out-of-touch former brand once and for all, and bending it to the pro-working class, pro-peace, and pro-accountable government philosophy which President Trump’s visionary leadership embodies.
Because, at the risk of bringing up a sore topic, let’s remember where we had to come from to get here. Ten years ago, before then-candidate Trump descended the golden escalator, the GOP was a very different party indeed: a party of stodgy, out-of-touch, visibly greying men still clinging to ideas that had been disproved by events. Theirs was a party of corporate simps, who were eager to throw money at some of the most regulated, predatory, self-dealing industries in America, the instant those industries flashed a bit of capitalist leg. A party of chickenhawks squatting atop a nest built from defense industry stock options, who sent poor heritage Americans to die in wars based on false intelligence while hiding their own children in ivory towers. A party of D-list aspiring Stasi, all of whom aspired to ever more administrative power to surveil and discredit their political opponents, while hiding behind the fig leaf notion that “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide,” ignoring the much more realistic idea that to show an intelligence agency a man is to invite them to show you a crime. Just look at Paul Ryan, John Bolton, and Liz Cheney if you want to see representative samples of what we mean.
It was this party which President Trump first disrupted in 2016, only for it to take over his administration without his consent and then scheme to force him from power, first by aiding the Left’s Russiagate smears, and then simply by sabotaging his administration, sometimes with open (albeit anonymous) proclamations that yes, that was exactly what they were doing, in the name of the “steady state.” It is only now, when President Trump won his second election despite their best efforts to hamstring him through dubiously legal charades like the Unselect January 6 committee, and the imprisonment of Steve Bannon, that their grip on both the Republican party and the nation has been shattered. They have now been reduced to hoping for presidential pardons, not presidential appointments, and thank God for that.
To be strictly fair, many of these people opposed President Trump not out of mere power hunger, but out of a misguided belief that they were protecting conservative principles from a ransacking ignoramus. But what they missed was that many of those principles were designed to conserve, but not restore, a bourgeois order that not only no longer existed, but which barely anyone remembered. The most honest changed their tune when they saw how President Trump governed, and how thoroughly committed to the cause of that restoration he was. But for many, that change of tune was only an inch deep, while they secretly still longed to go on fighting for politics which aimed more to reenact the 1980’s than to restore prosperity in the twenty-first century. By now, most such redoubts of ideological senility have retired, but some remain in the Senate, desperately clinging to the idea that they can drag the GOP back to 2013 and its donor-driven, Wall Street Journal-controlled GOP consensus.
What they missed is that while they were protecting their tiny little ideological fiefdoms, President Trump was busy planning a return to the White House which would end not merely the stale GOP consensus of the past, but the desiccated crypto-Leftist governing consensus of America, forever. And in his quest to do that, he was picking up allies – allies who the old GOP still sniff at, but who actually embody one of the noblest traditions in right-wing intellectualism: that of liberals mugged by reality. The conservative movement was built by such people: ex-communists like James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers; ex-liberals like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, and even ex-radicals like David Horowitz and Eldridge Cleaver. Which is, of course, not to mention ex-Democrats like Ronald Reagan and President Trump, himself. Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr are not interlopers, but rather worthy heirs to a proud tradition of thinking people who seek justice from the Left and, upon finding it denied there, realize that their proper place is on the Right. And, being heirs to that tradition, they have a worthy place in the new Trump administration, and the revolution against the administrative state which he is currently prosecuting. Confirming them will not just confirm their rise. It will confirm the death of a politics which no longer serves to protect Americans from the ravages of the Left; which does not even seem to like Americans very much. Which is why, now that they have escaped committee votes with their prospects intact, we cannot wait for them to follow it up with success in the full Senate, at which point all that will be left will be to step over the corpse of the old Right and take the oath of office.
So we say, confirm them all, and let the new golden age not just of America, but of right-wing politics, gain these new, impressive soldiers.