There is little our tribal era hates more than political turncoats. Ask a Republican: Who really boils your blood more, AOC or Liz Cheney? Chuck Schumer or Mike Pence? Democrats are no different. They may grumble about Elise Stefanik and Marco Rubio — and be especially disgusted by Pete Hegseth — but the real bile flows for a pair of ex-Democratic stalwarts who might soon be catapulted into the Trump administration.
Outside a partisan perspective, their reinventions are great American political stories. They are the kind of characters a novelist or showrunner would fail to imagine. Too peculiar. Too unrealistic. Kennedy, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, and Gabbard, the nominee for director of National Intelligence, may or may not be confirmed by the Republican-run Senate. GOP moderates might abandon Kennedy over his skepticism about vaccines. Conservatives could balk at a politician who, until very recently, held conventional liberal views on abortion. Gabbard, meanwhile, will need to win over hawkish Republicans who are wary of her relative isolationism and past support for Edward Snowden. Neither party likes that, while in Congress, she held a lengthy meeting with Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator. Democrats are expected to be overwhelmingly opposed to both.
Gabbard and Kennedy were, of course, once Democrats in good standing — Gabbard as a rising star in the party and vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, and RFK Jr. as both a celebrity Kennedy and an effective environmental advocate. Each migrated — gradually, then all at once — into the MAGA movement. For most Democrats today, their departures are welcome news, even if their endorsements of Trump in 2024, at the very minimum, seemed to usher a new group of voters into the Republican coalition. There’s a feeling among Democrats that Kennedy and Gabbard are both so detestable on so many issues that the party can only be healthier without them, free of supposed conspiracy mongerers and, in Gabbard’s case, someone who appears to have deep ties to a strange and hateful cult.
But the fact that each are nominees for vital cabinet positions in a Trump presidency is a reflection of Democratic weakness. One, Trump won. Two, the Americans who admire Kennedy and Gabbard were overwhelmingly Democrats a mere decade ago. Just as Kennedy and Gabbard maneuvered into Trump’s orbit, their supporters largely did the same — concluding that only one party could be hospitable to them.
One way to think of these Americans is as dissident voters. The term itself is broad and slippery enough, and here it will refer to a people from a wide range of backgrounds. At their core, dissidents are skeptics of institutions, whether that might be the federal government, the military-industrial complex, corporate America, or the pharmaceutical industry. Some of them are anti-vaxxers and some of them are 9/11 truthers. Some indulge in many conspiracies and some none at all. Some homeschool their children. Some care a great deal about wellness and physical fitness and have unconventional ideas for how they might achieve optimal health.
Elements of the Kennedy and Gabbard worldviews speak to a wide swath of these voters, who are nowhere near a majority of Americans but make up a minority that can’t be readily ignored. They cheer on Kennedy’s denunciations of Big Pharma and Gabbard’s criticisms of the surveillance state. They are uneasy with entrenched institutions and received wisdom; they do not want to take orders from the so-called Power Elite.
Until the 2020s, Americans who held these views weren’t necessarily Republicans — and, in fact, might have been more likely to reside, nominally at least, on the left. Liberals and leftists reviled the FBI for its relentless harassment of civil rights and anti-war activists. They decried the CIA for spearheading violent regime changes abroad. In the 2000s, at the height of the George W. Bush era, lacerating the “deep state” was a fundamentally left-wing posture. Cultural conservatism was at its apogee. To be dissident — to be part of the counterculture — was to align, in some form, with Democrats. And neither party had a monopoly on conspiracy theorists: Believing 9/11 was an inside job, like arguing that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone, often meant you leaned left.
The decisive break may have been COVID. Democratic politicians were much more enthusiastic about pandemic restrictions and lockdown measures than Republicans. Democrats became, by the end of 2020, the party of social distancing and mask wearing. They resisted the possibility of COVID originating in a Chinese lab, fretting that such a theory was xenophobic. They advocated for the closure of businesses and public schools to stop the spread of the virus. In 2021, they embraced aggressive vaccine mandates, tying, in certain cities and states, vaccination status to employment. Before the pandemic, the anti-vaxx movement cut across party lines, but the rise of the COVID vaccine — and its suddenly divisive place in the culture — would permanently sort many dissidents into the Republican camp. Kennedy, still a Democrat then, would begin his drift toward MAGA.
Even if the nominations of Kennedy and Gabbard fail, Democrats can only feel so triumphant. The dissidents are not rushing back. There are a few Democrats, like Jared Polis, the Colorado governor, and Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressmen, who still might be able to reach them. Both have shown a willingness to buck the Democratic Establishment, and both could be 2028 contenders. They understand the ideological diversity of the electorate. Whether they’ll be enough, though, to reach the dissidents remains to be seen. Trump might have captured the whole generation. It is one of his more significant victories.
