The Mercurial Tulsi Gabbard

Classical Liberal Superhero?

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I used to work in the conservative non-profit sphere, surrounded by concentric circles of chaos, bureaucracy, and glamor. I had only to venture north to find myself navigating the unpredictable, chthonian streets of Philadelphia. If I went further, I struck the sky-scraping magnificence of Manhattan. When I drove south, I passed through the unknown (to me), foreboding Baltimore before becoming lost in the marble slab of government, galas, and gadabouts that composed my experience of Washington, D.C.. My work sent me on many trips between these points, and to other, farther reaches of the U.S. It was the most I had ever seen of the country, its colleges, and its disillusioned, intellectual right-wingers in my life.

I had grown up a conservative, but the pro-free-market, classical liberal kind. I was shocked, therefore, to discover that the kids are now quoting Kirk and Burke, Augustine, Vermeule, and Deneen, not Hayek or Solzhenitsyn. I was behind the times, it seemed. 

When I wasn’t ensconced in philosophical debate and cultural criticism with this new breed of conservatives, I was trying to privately reconcile my views with theirs. As time went on, I spent less time with the rest of the world, reaching a point where I barely knew what life was like for the average American—what they talked about, what they feared, what they hoped. I felt less “based” and more rootless than ever.

Amid this personal confusion, I read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, and felt a little less crazy. Paglia’s humorous, biting, rich investigation of art, sex, and power confirmed the suspicion that plagued me: none of this is straightforward. Art, particularly religious art, is far more dark and complex, and much less pious and utilitarian, than it appears. The Patriarchy is a real, living force at work in the world, not just a propaganda piece manufactured by the feminists. Dynamics of sex and the struggle for power via identity under-gird (and often undermine) nearly every human endeavor. Politics is not a matter of using the right code to program every part to successfully complete its march toward Heaven. The system is as much Dionysian as it is Apollonian; the system defies programming, even programming it invents and enacts upon itself.

Nowadays, as I work with the general “normie” public in a customer service role, my affinity for the classical liberals, while better informed, remains. It stems from my conviction that it is those who have little-to-none of their identity staked in the outcome of the game who see it most clearly. The rabble-rousing Socrates, the Wily Odysseus, the don’t-shoot-the-messenger Mercury: these figures float above conflict, perceiving things that no one on the ground can. Paglia herself falls into the disjointed camp of anti-woke liberals, but that really means she pays dues to no one. She does not ally herself with feminists, so she can critique them to her heart’s content. She is more pagan than Christian, leaving her free to applaud and embarrass Catholics and Protestants as she sees fit. She is Mercurial, free to flit about exposing the Gods’ dirty laundry without involving herself in their squabbles. While such figures may be less popular with intellectual conservatives, they do hold enormous sway over the wider culture. Joe Rogan, Oliver Anthony, Elon Musk: love them or hate them, normies know who they are.

Another Mercurial classical liberal who has recently turned heads with her endorsement of Donald Trump for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, is former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard. When I first considered Gabbard’s electric public image and what sexual personae might be fueling it, I thought of Britomart and Belphoebe, Spenser’s Apollonian “female angels” who, “suppressing their maternal silhouette, approach the sexually indeterminate.” There is something superhero-like about these characters—with their cold aloofness and muscular sexiness—that I quickly recognized in Gabbard’s intimidating eloquence, self-containment, pristinely-packaged sensuality, and iconic streak of silver hair, which call to mind images of the X-Men’s Rogue and DC’s Wonder Woman. 

There’s something more dynamic and unpredictable to Gabbard, however. Her public image is not so obviously written by a man—at least, not by one of the Spenserian persuasion. The radiant thread of quick-silver that runs through her life and hair is the same Mercurial archetype that Paglia finds in Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Gabbard doesn’t suppress her ‘maternal silhouette’. Rather, like Rosalind, she is “both masculine and feminine… a Mercurius of swift, sovereign intelligence.” Rosalind, to Paglia, is Britomart and Belphoebe if they had more autonomy, flexibility, and wit:

“Rosalind as Mercurius has a quick smile and mobile eye…. Rosalind has an invigorating alertness. She is not smugly half asleep...She burns us with her glance. The daemonic eye sees nothing but its prey. It seeks power, the fascism of nature. But Rosalind’s socialized eye moves to see. It takes things in. Hers are not the lustful rolling eyes of Spenser’s femme fatales, which slither, pierce, and possess. Rosalind’s eye honors the integrity of objects and persons. Its mobility signals a mental processing of information, the visible sign of Western intelligence. In Spenser, we saw, the virtuous eye is rigidly controlled. Until our century, a respectable woman kept her eyes modestly averted. Shakespeare legitimizes bold mobility of the female eye and identifies it with imagination. Rosalind’s eye is truly perceptive: it both sees and understands. Shakespeare’s great heroine unites multiplicity of gender, persona, word, eye, and thought.”

Gabbard shines against a backdrop of forgettable female political figure heads, and I believe it is her ‘mobile eye,’ paired with her lack of attachment to stifling gender roles, controlling institutions, and stagnant relationships, that so sets her apart. She carries herself with more tact and grace than other anti-establishment voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene, while actively opposing neocons like Nikki Haley. She maintains a no-bullshit disposition that will not tolerate naivete or sentimentality. The ideals of the Democrat party eventually diverged from her own, so she left. She felt called to leave home and serve her country in a more tangible way, so she joined the military. She and her ex-husband, Eduardo Tamayo, were unable to make their marriage of four years work, so she agreed to a divorce. 

Gabbard’s Mercurial eye ‘both sees and understands,’ freed from superstitious loyalties and the desperate power-grabs of the unconscious. Her eye is not ‘rigidly controlled’ by an obedience to anything that would keep her blind or burning with inner conflict and growing resentment. In a recent interview with podcaster Chris Williamson, Gabbard describes the desperation to prove oneself via displays of destructive power, a certain kind of ‘Daemonic eye,’ that she has seen at play among the war-mongering political elite, and she is not afraid to call it evil.

While slinking femme fatales, dripping with poisonous ressentiment, can be deadly to the circles they have been enslaved by, a Mercurial woman like Tusli Gabbard can be downright catastrophic. Held aloft by her own strength, deftly navigating the gap between masculine and feminine strength, women like Gabbard have no need of bridges, and thus no compunction about burning any that tie them to soul-stifling forces. Gabbard will happily move beyond any role she has outgrown, including her identity as an Independent. She is unsentimental in her perception of the party’s inability to find real traction in American politics, and thus lets no scruple stop her from endorsing Donald Trump. 

What other surprises does Gabbard have in store for America? Only time will tell. It is possible that her Mercurial strength will not hold out forever, that she will fade into the murky waters of establishment politics or sleepy irrelevance. Perhaps she will be silenced by those who perceive her to be a large enough threat. Nevertheless, her career thus far has returned a powerful archetype to the political stage, one whose absence has been more bitterly felt than ever before. I truly hope that, under Gabbard’s example, other Mercurial figures will find their courage and their voice. America needs more mobile eyes to see through the smog and cognitive dissonance that have shrouded her citizens in alienation and nihilism for too long.