The Dream is Dead
Kennedy 2024?
So I listened to the RFK Jr announcement speech, and I thought I’d give you an off-the-cuff reaction as proof of life, in between working on bigger things, as well as to test my own ability to produce polemical short-form.
I would recommend listening to the whole thing before you soak in this article. If you can get over Bobby Jr’s nails-on-chalkboard voice, it is a concise, contemporary reformulation of the Kennedy weltanschauung.
Although he’s been palling around with anti-vax voices on the right, Kennedy is a fundamentally left-wing guy. One imagines Bernie Sanders, if he never sold out. His worldview is build around a coherent skepticism of all mergers of state and corporate power, and that system shapes all of his takes, from the aforementioned vaccine issue to his isolationist stance on Ukraine, which I thought he handled with a politico’s tact in his address.
And although the left-wing lugenpresse smear him as an astroturfed “chaos agent,” his populist predilections have long predated his associations with MAGAworld.
The best long form expression of his ideology can be found in his memoir, American Values.
“Grandma consistently reinforced our sense of identity. We were Americans first, yet she wanted us to remember the lessons of our Irish heritage. We learned about the bitter history of British conquest and oppression, the holocaust of starvation and exile that depopulated the Emerald Isle, and our tribal struggle for liberation. She told us about the gallant figures of the Irish Rebellion, especially Michael Collins and Eámon de Valera. She recited Yeat’s poem celebrating the famous love affair between the revolutionary heroes Charles Parnell and Kitty O’Shea…”
He credits his Irish upbringing for his sympathy for the little guy, and concludes that:
“So long as any American is suffering from poverty or injustice, the American experience is diminished for all of us. Both our faith and our national heritage require us to fight for the poor, even if we are going to lose, and even if it means breaking the law.”
Now, what other books did Bobby pen? Before he won over the right with his treatise on The Real Anthony Fauci, he dropped Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy on the American electorate in 2004. For any of my readers well-versed in the history of American electioneering, you may recall RFK Jr’s infamous and incendiary article accusing George Bush of stealing the 2004 election as well.
So his progressive bonafides are solid, and his speech was bereft of too many direct references to the vaccine issue that will doubtlessly be used by the Biden admin to undermine this challenge from the populist left.
In the speech, lockdowns were framed as a giveaway to the rich and an assault on black businesses across America. Vintage populism!
Parallels to the 1968 election were littered throughout the rally. Bobby rhetorically places himself in his father’s position, a crusader from the left against his own party’s hierarchy. Ultimately, his electoral strategy aims to rebuild his daddy’s coalition, that multiracial, populist coalition between Appalachian poor whites, ghetto blacks and Mexican union men.
I think this fundamentally misreads the American situation, particularly in the 21st century.
Creaming your jeans over the prospect of this commanding, Chavist coalition is not a contrarian instinct at all. Talk to any democrat, and they’ll tell you that they dream of retaking the farm states with a populist policy that will send the GOP to the ash-heap of history. And the right-wing commentariat salivates at the idea of wooing the Latinx masses with child-tax-credits, or blacks with economic opportunity zones.
The magic promise of the Kennedy clan was that they had the ability to cut across the political lines that hardened throughout the 1960s. So RFK Jr can do a speech against corporate power, while adding in a few lines expressing concerns about the national debt, or woke imperialism. His father, as Jr notes, won both the California and South Dakota primaries, uniting urban and rural voters. He carried the torch for American liberalism, all while wiretapping Saint Martin Luther King and naming Joseph McCarthy to be the godfather for his first kid.
There is something about this universalistic mindset that is very holistic and Catholic, peculiar to the Ellis Island mind that enveloped American culture through the 20th century with the disappearance of the WASPS. They dream of multiracialism in a time of strife.
But Kennedy’s death killed this dream, and subsequent developments brought about the present polarised nightmare.
RFK’s speech was clearly designed to appeal to the traditional base of the democratic party, white southerners and northern ethnics(with a few appeals to African-Americans for good measure). The poor whites behind RFK bolted for Wallace, and the civil rights bureaucracy destroyed their power centres. This realignment fully set in when Appalachia abandoned the party of the New Democrats. Those peckerwoods eventually found themselves on the republican party’s plantation, where we lay our scene…
But the essential ingredient for Kennedyism would be the subaltern “nation of immigrants” the ADL paid old John to lionise in book form.
Robert Whitaker, a paleoconservative trailblazer, had this to say of the Kennedy coalition:
“American society is ... generally split increasingly into a coalition of the rich and poor against the middle… One thinks of the Chicano with a picture of the enormously wealthy John Kennedy on the wall of his shack.”
The bioleninist, Jouvenelian structure of American politics was significantly advanced by the Kennedy ascendancy. The black and (to a lesser extent, Latino) constituents they enfranchised are now enthralled to centrist democratic political machines.
The structure and priorities of the regime, and thus the Democratic Party fundamentally changed, and I will explore this in a future piece on Reuel Schiller’s Forging Rivals.
Ultimately, I have contempt for the Kennedy clan as a bunch of freebooting bootleggers who advanced the pernicious culture of Ellis-Island/Cold-War liberalism, key factors creating the current woes of the west.
But I wish Camelot’s prodigal son luck. His tilting at windmills may provide lessons for western nationalists yet.
The dream is dead. Civil rights killed it.