It's Official: Republicans Have Become the Rebel Party
And I'm not gonna lie, I’m here for it.
You likely will not be surprised to learn that I was a mouthy little brat thing growing up. In third grade, in the little box next to “talks unnecessarily” on my report card, poor Miss Washofsky crammed about thirteen angry red check marks into that very small square. Having the last word was essential to winning any argument in my house, which meant knock-down-drag-outs heated discussions at home routinely looked like this:
Me: [something generally rude, insolent, or disrespectful, probably at a very loud volume and accompanied by the slamming of a drawer or door *please don’t judge young Jenna, she did not grow up in a Cleaver-style household; it’s why she’s funny*]
Mom: That’s enough. One more word, and you’re grounded for a week!
Me [dramatic pause]: Word.
Mom: Jenna, I mean it. Another word, and I’ll make it a month.
Me [
fearlessignorant and defiant]: Word.Mom: Do you want to have a birthday party this year? Because I promise you, if you utter even one more—
Me [singing]: Wordy, word, word, wordy-wordy-wordy word.
Mom [whispers Serenity Prayer to self]: You just wait until your father gets home!
Morgan Freeman: And in that moment, young Jenna knew that sweet victory was hers and there wouldn’t be a single minute of grounding in her future. A disciplinarian, her dad was not.
(Years later, when Mom would moan about what a rebellious hellion Jenna was growing up, Jenna would remind her that a child’s job is to push boundaries; a parent’s job is to set them. Jenna would sometimes even refrain from pointing out that only one of them was doing their job back then. Ahem.)
As a mostly lifelong Republican—save a brief stint as an Independent—I’ve never felt my party was particularly rebellious. As I understood it, we favored a strong military, limited government, and a free-market economy. We believed in personal responsibility and felt that excessive taxation and overgenerous handouts disincentivized diligence and ambition. Democrats were the subversives, always protesting this system or that inequity and crusading for social justice. I had no desire to participate in a vagina hat march per se, but I did sometimes wish my people would get a little edge.
Oh, what a glorious difference a decade makes. Apparently, we’ve now got all the edge.
This week, former Obama adviser and CNN political commentator Van Jones deliciously dissed the sitting VP and recent presidential hopeful for her part in nudging all of the mavericks straight into MAGA’s waiting arms. “Kamala Harris promised us freedom. Well, she delivered it to us… because now we’re free from having to run anything in Washington DC,” Jones quipped in the year’s best metaphorical mic drop. “That’s not what we were signing up for, but that’s what we got. And I hope the party takes a chance to look at the fact that we pushed all our rebels out of this party.”
Jones went on to point out renegade Democratic defectors RFK, Jr., Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk specifically, adding, “The rebels in this party no longer feel like they have a place here.”
I find it hilarious that—as an American—putting America first is considered an act of political sedition. Questioning government (in)efficiency somehow makes you an iconoclast. Patriotism is synonymous with being a Nazi. During the Vietnam War, liberal groups were up in arms over the way the media misrepresented events; when conservatives call out the same bias today—whether the topic is vaccine injury or a drone invasion or food additives or election bias—we’re branded “conspiracy theorists” and told to “trust the science” or worse, “trust the system.”
Robert Kennedy Jr., who was born into one of the most iconic political families in history with an ancestral dedication to the Democratic Party and its values, has famously said he didn’t change—his party did.
“The party that I grew up with was the party of peace,” Kennedy recalled. “It was the party of constitutional rights and civil rights; it was the party that stood up to Wall Street and the big corporations. Today’s Democratic Party is the party of war. It’s the party of censorship. It’s the party of surveillance. It’s the party of Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Banking, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Food and Big Pharma. I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”
Rogan has echoed Kenney’s sentiment almost verbatim.
CNN: Democrats need to figure out how to get to the places where their base is listening. There’s always been a robust right wing media ecosystem. Democrats need a liberal Joe Rogan.
JOE ROGAN: Hahahaha they had me! I was on their side!
Ditto Musk.
And let’s not leave out Tulsi Gabbard, the former congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate who ditched her party in 2022 to become an Independent. Two years later, Gabbard left the left reeling when she announced she was joining “the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country, the party of common sense, and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.”
Buncha rebels, I tell ‘ya.
Can you blame Dems for defecting in droves? [Vee, I know you can because why bother they’re the same party anyway?!] Can you imagine being proud to be the party of the pouty, hysterical LGBTQ activist/identity politics addict? Liberals have tried so hard—they really have—to turn patriotism into racism and national pride into xenophobia—and I’m trying not to look smug while I type over here, but their efforts have backfired spectacularly.
Because let’s be honest; Republicans aren’t just the party of the common man or even common sense anymore. We’re also not (exclusively) the party of pickup trucks and barbecued pork either *not that there’s anything wrong with either of those things; both feature prominently in my personal life. We’re the party of sanity and reason; the party of freethinkers and freedom lovers; the party of open debate and optimism; the party of innovation and evolution—not empty promises and posturing. In a world full of distraction and division, we’re the party that’s bringing clarity, courage, hope, and, yes, a little bit of edge back to the conservative side.
If you’re a Democrat who’s offended by that, I only have one thing to say.
Word.
I was a lifelong Democrat for the same reasons RFK, Jr. was. Especially the antiwar part. And after I left the party that left me, like a spurned girlfriend, I thought long and hard about who the Democrats actually are. Here's what I found: 1. They are the party of slavery. 2. They are the party of the KKK and Jim Crow. 3.They excluded most black workers from many of the New Deal programs. 4. Then when LBJ came along, they did a 180 and gave special hand outs to black people as a way to make them dependent not only on government largesse, but to ensure blacks would always vote for Democrats. 5. Most egregiously, they were the party of masks, lockdowns, closures, distancing, and clot shots. So I concluded, the Dems are actually the party who has historically viewed people as property and not individuals. It was the Republican's founding ideal to end slavery. True, the Republicans have periodically lost their way when it came to the Gilded Age, the madness of the 1920s, McCarthyism, etc. but the party has returned to its roots. And those are healthy strong roots growing out of individual liberty and adherence to the Constitution. One last historical fact: I'm not even sure anymore that the Dems were actually the party of peace, my main reason for supporting them. It was the Dems who were actually responsible for the Civil War, who took us into World Wars 1 AND 2, Viet Nam, who gave us the National Security Administration and the CIA. Oh, and the FBI and the administrative and regulatory state.
Jenna - your last line absolutely cracked me up - might have something to do with my belief about words as evidenced by my sig line on my emails:
When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom. ~ Confucius