The reality is this: American Democrats are increasingly looking like the British Labour Party under socialist Jeremy Corbyn, with a heady mix of urban liberal-intersectional-minority candidates on one hand, and raging socialists on the other. Just as the Labour Party changed in the last few years, there are signs of growing anti-Semitism on the American left, as well as religious intolerance, while increasing support for foreign interventions and hawkish foreign policy, due to a late influx of neoconservatives like Max Boot and Bill Kristol.
That is, of course, unsustainable in the long term, but Gabbard is an outlier in all of those categories. She’s from a minority background, but not the “standard showcase” minority. She’s hard left, but also socially conservative, and she’s not insane with her Russia conspiracy theories. For some reason, she’s almost Metternichian in her amoral foreign policy realpolitik, which is unthinkable among naïve and idealistic left-wingers.
While Gabbard might not win the presidency, all she has to do is go on the offense from the very start and hammer out her two fundamental policy positions for the public to decide––her foreign policy non-interventionism and heartland conservative Democratic social positions. She might just disrupt the script if nothing else. Whatever the case, it would be anything but boringly predictable and tokenistic, as the majority of the Western left has come to symbolize recently.
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