Politics tamfitronics
There is always a price to be paid for crossing party lines. But when the person doing it is a Kennedy, the cost is far higher. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s defection from the Democrats and his endorsement of former President Donald Trump last week is being treated by his family in joint statements as a betrayal of the legacy of his namesake father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Family members like his sister Kerry and brother Max have denounced him in vituperative terms. Longtime pals like actor Billy Baldwin have said they were ending their friendship. Media coverage was equally hysterical. A New York Times columnist skewed him by pretending to speak as a brain worm inside his head, a reference to a dead parasite that had caused a since-resolved medical problem in the past, the kind of sleazy dehumanizing shtick that it is unlikely the editors of that paper would allow to be used against any Democrat.
As a result, his withdrawal from the race has had the opposite effect that such a move usually has on a former candidate. Instead of being consigned to the dust heap of political history, RFK Jr. has been getting more rather than less attention in the week since he announced he was withdrawing from the race and then endorsed Trump. Even though the coming together of the two candidates produced nothing more for RFK Jr. than a spot on a potential Trump transition team, the agreement was considered not so much a typical case of politics making strange bedfellows as an act of heresy.
His betrayal smarts all the more given that RFK Jr. remains in many ways a man of the Left, yet when it comes to the very issue that Democrats claim to be fighting for in 2024—democracy—he views himself as more closely aligned with the populist MAGA wing of the Trumpian GOP than he was with the party he grew up in.
And that is something other Kennedys and the Democratic establishment will not tolerate.
Part of the hysteria around Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the attempt of the Kennedy family to preserve their claim to the status of political royalty. Many of its members have behaved like European royals with a cacophony of scandals (Chappaquiddick, rape accusations, drug and alcohol addiction and general bad sexual behavior) that are worthy of the most dissolute scions of the noble houses that once ruled Europe. Making matters worse is the fact that the second and third generations of the family have generally flopped in their efforts to cash in on their famous name. But the memory of JFK and RFK and the notion that they represented an American “Camelot” lingers in American political culture.
Having any member of the clan leave the reservation is dangerous to the attempt to preserve that myth of that administration as a “brief shining moment” in our history as part of the Democrats’ inheritance. That’s true even if the defector is someone with as checkered a past as RFK Jr, whose personal biography includes heroin use and troubled marriages.
RFK Jr.’s extremist environmental views put him at odds with almost all Republicans. So, too, do his views on many other issues. But his critique of the Democratic Party’s current embrace of authoritarian and anti-democratic ideas is entirely reasonable. To whit, Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that Facebook cooperated with the Democrats to censor mentions of the Hunter Biden laptop in the waning weeks of the 2020 campaign. The Biden administration also pressured Facebook into censoring criticism of COVID-19 pandemic policies that were later proven to be failures. Both revealed that the Democrats have little interest in free speech.
It’s also understandable that RFK Jr. saw the Democrats’ underhanded efforts to keep him out of their primaries and then off the ballot as little different from their lawfare campaign to bankrupt and imprison their chief political rival, Trump.
Moreover, Democrats are also forgetting that the politics of JFK and his brother are in many respects at odds with the views of their party today. In addition to his devotion to civil rights, RFK particularly sought to stand for a pro-working-class agenda that has nothing to do with current liberal fashion, in which the interests of the credentialed elites and the very poor are elevated over those of blue-collar Americans as well as the middle class to which they aspire. In 2024, this agenda is now being promoted by “common good” national conservatives like Vance more than liberals.
Kennedy is an outlier in many respects, but his vaccine skepticism rings true to many Americans on the Right and the Left after the collapse of public faith in the medical establishment, and his opposition to a blank check for an unwinnable endless war in Ukraine also aligns him with grassroots Republicans more than the Democrats.
That might be shocking to anyone who just woke up after going into a coma in 2012, when Mitt Romney spoke for Republicans and working-class Democrats still bought into President Barack Obama’s “hope” slogan. But it is a sign of the current realignment in American politics that has fueled Trump’s rise; the Democrats now stand more for Wall Street than Main Street on immigration, trade, and so much else.
RFK Jr. ‘s ideas can be challenged as they have by conservatives who are appropriately skeptical about including a loose cannon like him in any future GOP administration. But his decision to throw in with Trump is a logical development for anyone who understands the way American politics have changed in the last decade.
If narrow partisan loyalty or the obsessive crusade to keep the “bad orange man” out of the White House is the sole standard by which we should judge a man, then RFK Jr. is a traitor to today’s Democratic Party. But by endorsing Trump, he has not betrayed his family’s legacy or basic democratic principles. He’s made good on them.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
