Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘For Love of Country’ rings alarm bells for democracy

Are we at the end of history or the end of our republic?

A few decades back, before September 11, 2001, but amid the jihadist war against the modern world, political scientist Francis Fukuyama posited that history as we know it is over. It’s done. History, in his telling, was a striving for an end state of humanity — and we had reached it. Liberal democracy was here to stay as the final form of government, and “the last man” (and woman) would always have a vote and a role in life from here on out under the rule of law fairly applied to all.

Gabbard’s words of warning speak to an America on the brink of a fundamental transformation into something no one should want.

The attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center delivered the first major blow to Fukuyama’s beautiful theory. The wars that followed, and the implacable rage of radical Islamist theocracy, posed real existential challenges to liberal democracy. The two cannot coexist. One will defeat and cancel out the other.

Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate from Hawaii. Now an independent, Gabbard has written a brilliant new book — her first — that lays out another, perhaps more dangerous challenge to liberal democracy and the health of our republic. “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind” is Gabbard’s tour de force look into the true battle for America’s soul and future.

This time, the threat is not radical clerics preaching bloodthirsty doctrine in camps on the other side of the world. It’s not beholden to medieval foreign powers enriched by oil. It’s not foreign at all, though it’s thoroughly alien to the American way of thinking and living.

The threat is the Democratic Party that Gabbard courageously left behind in 2022 and hopes others will leave behind, too.

Gabbard opens her book with a salvo aimed squarely at her former party. “Guided by their belief that the ends justify the means,” Gabbard writes, “the Democrat elite are using the power of law enforcement to target political or persona opponents, undermining the essence of the rule of law and exposing their contempt for the American people and democracy.”

“If we allow this to continue, the America we know and love will disappear forever,” she warns.

Just consider the Obama and Biden administrations. Under Obama, the IRS sued nuns and targeted legitimate opposition groups — the Tea Party that sprang up around the country to challenge him — using lawfare to intimidate and to take opponents out of action.

During the Trump administration, beginning well before inauguration, Biden and other high-ranking Democrats launched the Russia collusion hoax which plagued and undermined Trump’s entire presidency.

As Trump seeks to unseat Biden, he faces no less than 91 indictments, all brought against him by partisan Democrats. Some of these same Democrats have no problem allowing violent criminals to run free, they have no problem erasing our border and with it our national security, and they have no problem engaging in illicit activities from which they personally profit. The rule of law means nothing to them. But they are using our legal system to interfere in a presidential election, crossing a Rubicon and marching to assault our republic at its very foundation.

These actions and more, Gabbard writes, may amount to “the final nails in the coffin of our democracy.”

Gabbard notes that we now live in a nation of double standards, two nations in parallel really. In one, Democrat elites and their friends can get away with anything. In the other, Democrat elites indict and prosecute Trump and anyone else who challenges them for actions that have never been prosecuted and that they’ve done themselves.

The classified documents case makes this clear. Biden’s Department of Justice has indicted Trump for keeping classified records. But Biden has also been caught with classified records and faces no risk of prosecution whatsoever. He was barely even investigated and let off as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” while Trump faces spending the rest of his life in prison if he’s convicted. Among other things, in the Democrat elites’ minds, such an outcome would take their most effective opponent off the board — and intimidate other would-be challengers at the same time.

This is, as Gabbard writes, unprecedented in America — and fundamentally un-American.

Gabbard earned a reputation for telling the truth no matter the consequences and no matter who it upsets while she was in Congress. She cemented that reputation during her presidential run and after, having left a party that she says has abandoned the rule of law and is turning our democracy into a banana republic.

America is in grave danger, Gabbard says. Biden has repeatedly gaslit and badgered the nation by saying the half that disagrees with him is the gravest threat America faces. He said so explicitly in his eerie, red-light authoritarian speech in Philadelphia in 2022. Gabbard rejects that and posits that Biden and the Democrat elite who support and control him are in fact that grave threat.

What Gabbard writes is simply true. The fact that this young lifelong military officer and public servant has the guts to say it clearly is honorable. Her words of warning speak to an America on the brink of a fundamental transformation into something no one should want.