Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

RFK Jr hopes to heal the nation´s polarization with truth

May 09, 2023

On April 19, 2023, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced his candidacy for the nomination of the Democratic Party for the office of President of the United States. The announcement speech at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston lasted nearly two hours.

He is the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. He symbolizes an era in which we were more innocent, when the differences between good and evil seemed clearer, and when the differences among us were debated in the context of a common commitment to acceptance of truth. A time in which our nation was morally and economically strong, recognized as the leader of the democratic world by the peoples of the world, or at least so it seemed to us. A time in which we believed that the leaders in our various institutions should be respected and trusted.

He declares himself to be a Kennedy liberal, seeing this categorization as the simplest way to clarify his position in the context of the current ideological mutations and confusions. He repeatedly defends the Kennedy legacy, citing various admirable examples of moral declarations and decisions made by RFK and JFK, whom he refers to fondly as his father and his uncle. He declares that he knows of no policy position of JFK and RFK with which he disagrees.

His principal message to the American people is one of opposition to the corrupt merging of corporate and state power, which he views as a violation of the underlying spirit of the American Revolution, and which today is threatening to impose a new corporate feudalism in the USA. Drawing upon his experience as a litigation lawyer in the field of environmental protection, he declares that the regulatory governmental agencies (NIH, EPA, CDC, FDA, DOT, USDA, and CIA) have been captured by the industries that they are supposed to observe and regulate. He notes that the great majority of the people who work in the government agencies are committed, idealistic, and patriotic Americans. The problem is that those who can be seduced by corporate rewards are the ones who rise to the top of the government agencies. Understanding the source of the problem, he declares that he knows how to fix it; and as president, he will quickly fix it.

He stands opposed to the continuous wars in which the USA has become involved in recent decades. His critique is not informed by an anti-imperialist perspective, but by a realistic understanding that the USA does not have the resources to be the policeman of the world. In this regard, he is on common ground with traditional conservatives or “paleoconservatives” like Pat Buchanan. The continuous wars have cost us trillions of dollars, he declares, without attaining any declared foreign policy goals, and leaving the country in greater debt and without resources to invest in the national economy or needed social programs. The continuous wars have been caused by the capturing of the CIA and the intelligence agencies by the military-industrial complex. The continuous wars, he declares, constitute a systemic attack on the middle class, whose needs are ignored for the demands of war.

He laments the toxic and dangerous polarization of the country. He maintains that divisions among the people advance corporate interests, be they differences between blacks and whites, between Democrats and Republicans, or between rural and urban areas. He declares his intention to unify the people and heal the division by speaking the truth and by stressing the common values of Americans. He distances himself from the woke, rarely invoking the mantras of today’s radical left. He recalls his long-standing recognition of the serious problem of institutional racism, but he believes that priority ought to be given to the socioeconomic development of poor communities, black and white. He appears uncomfortable with phrases like “systemic racism” and “equity,” with reservations about how they are sometimes defined; he seems more comfortable with the Kennedy liberal call for “equality of opportunity.” He refrains from commenting on divisive cultural issues, like abortion or transgenderism, saying that a president ought not get involved in cultural divisions among the people; the responsibility of the president is to unify the nation by speaking the truth and stressing the common values of the people.

RFK Jr. is not the Kennedy magic reborn. His voice is hoarse, as a result of a rare non-life-threatening voice disorder that he has had since age 43. And he sometimes struggles with word pronunciation and selection, which is rather astonishing for us older folks who still recall the great oratorical skills of JFK. Moreover, RFK Jr. has been cast aside by the political establishment for his alleged spreading of misinformation with respect to vaccines; he is characterized in the media as an anti-vaccine activist. And he notes that he has many skeletons in the closet, acknowledging that he was a drug addict when he was a young man. But on the other hand, he speaks with common sense intelligence informed by scientific knowledge with respect to vital issues confronting the nation, something exceptional in American politics. And he speaks with credibility and apparent conviction as a patriotic American. Although stained, the Kennedy magic is present.

According to some, RFK Jr. already has the support of 20% of Democratic Party voters, and the great majority of people have not yet had an opportunity to hear him. It seems to me that he has a viable chance to win the Democratic Party nomination and the 2024 presidential elections. He is challenging the sitting president of his own party, but not one who is highly popular or inspiring.

The ideological content of RFK Jr.’s discourse should have appeal among blacks and whites, among many in both major political parties, and among traditional conservatives and traditional social justice activists. His condemnation of industry’s capturing of the bureaucratic agencies could have resonance among leftists who demand true government regulation of industry and among conservatives disgusted with the ineffectiveness of large government bureaucracies. His opposition to continuous wars could attract support from traditional peace advocates of the left as well as conservatives influenced by traditional isolationist currents of thought, both growing in the context of continuous wars that have failed to achieve their objectives.

What is more, RFK Jr. puts forth a potentially appealing discourse in the name of the Kennedy legacy, a remembered and appreciated political legacy from a better time in the nation’s history. He declares that the Democratic Party needs to become again the Party of FDR, JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King. He promises to defend the poor and the middle class, black and white, with the help of Democrats and Republicans who are Americans first.

On the lockdown

RFK Jr. describes the lockdown as the biggest transfer in wealth in human history; as an attack on the country, the middle class and on civil rights by the big corporations and the superrich. He maintains that at the time of the COVID outbreak, the standard protocol was not mass lockdowns; rather, the standard protocol involved locking down the sick, protecting the vulnerable, and letting everybody else go back to work. The reason is that lockdowns wreak havoc on the economy and thus cause excess deaths resulting from unemployment, suicides, and depression. Today, this is confirmed by studies comparing nations that did mass lockdowns with those that didn’t.

The lockdown, RFK Jr. maintains, caused an economic cataclysm. He cites a Harvard study that finds the cost of the lockdown to the USA to be sixteen trillion dollars, and including a shift of four trillion dollars from the middle class to the superrich. Five hundred new billionaires were created, and previously existing billionaires increased their wealth by 30%. While social media companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft increased their wealth, some 3.3 million businesses shut down. Forty-one percent of black businesses shut down, most of them permanently. The lockdown, RFK maintains, was a war on the middle class launched by the big corporations.

The lockdown was also a war on the nation’s children. RFK Jr. cites a Brown University study showing that toddlers lost 20 IQ points. One-third of children are going to need remedial education throughout their schooling. In response, CDC has revised its milestones, so that, for example, a child no longer is expected to walk at one year, but at eighteen months; and instead of being expected to know fifty words in twenty months, it is now thirty months. So instead of fixing the problem, CDC is trying to cover it up. The only improvement registered during the pandemic was a drop in child abuse; but the reason is that child abuse is reported by schools, and the schools were closed during the pandemic. Which means that the kids were locked at home with their abusers.

The war in Ukraine

RFK Jr. maintains that we need to have a mature, national conversation about the war in Ukraine. A respectful conversation. We cannot be accusing one side of being Nazis and the other side of being admirers of Putin. We ought to recognize that everyone in our country loves our country, and we ought to respect differences of opinion.

There is, RFK maintains, a fundamental question that we need to ask, namely, Is this war in the U.S. national interest? He observes that leading members of the diplomatic community, like Henry Kissinger, have said that it is not in the U.S. national interest to push Russia closer to China. And it is not in the national interest to take steps that could lead to a nuclear exchange with a country that has more nuclear weapons than we have.

RFK Jr. observes that the people of the United States support the war in Ukraine for the right reasons. The people of the United States are a good people, who have compassion for the Ukrainian people, who have been brutalized for many years. Ukraine has been illegally invaded, and the people have shown valor in defending their country. We in the USA admire the Ukrainian people for their defense of their independence.

However, RFK Jr. maintains that as American citizens we have a right to know what our government’s chief objective in this war is. We were told initially that the objective was humanitarian. That is a good reason to be there, and such an objective implies trying to minimize bloodshed. However, Biden more recently has stated that one of our objectives is regime change in Russia, a strategy, RFK notes, that did not work well for us in Iraq. The declaration of a strategy of regime change is consistent with the political machinations in the Ukraine since 2014, engaged in by neocons around Biden who are associated with the regime change strategy in Iraq. In this vein, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently stated that the objective is to wear down the Russian armed forces, so that they are incapable of mobilizing anywhere.

RFK Jr. notes many of our actions seem to have the objective of prolonging rather than shortening the war, in accordance with the objective of regime change. He argues that if the objective is to exhaust the Russians, that is completely antithetical to a humanitarian objective. If the objective is regime change, this means that the Ukraine is a pawn in a conflict between two great superpowers. If the objective is not regime change, then we need a discussion with the President and the Secretary of Defense; they need to tell us exactly what we are doing there.

The costs of the war in the Ukraine, RFK Jr. maintains, are in excess of what can be reasonably justified. We have committed 113 billion dollars to the Ukraine. By way of contrast, the annual budget of the EPA is twelve billion; CDC, eleven billion. Meanwhile, fifty percent of Americans could not put their hands on a thousand dollars in the event of an emergency. Moreover, we have veterans living below the poverty line, or homeless, or committing suicide.

In an interview by Freddie Sayers on May 2, RFK Jr. declared that the Russians have repeatedly offered to settle the conflict in accordance with the 2014 Minsk accords, which call for the Donbass to be autonomous regions within Ukraine. Without justifying the barbaric Russian invasion, one should nevertheless understand the Russian action from their vantage point, taking their valid security concerns into account. RFK Jr. noted that the Russians have seen: the expansion of NATO to the east, in violation of promises to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union; U.S. support for a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014; and the killing of thousands of Russians in the Ukraine by the Ukrainian government since 2014. RFK Jr. argued that a settlement to the conflict could be quickly negotiated, but you cannot do it from the vantage point of neocon assumptions, from which your objective is regime change.

RFK Jr. will bring the troops home

RFK Jr. observes the that the U.S. government is paying six billion dollars a day in interest on debts owned by the Chinese and Japanese in order to finance war, bank bailouts, and lockdowns. In addition, in the last fifteen years the USA has printed ten trillion dollars, ten times more than what was printed during the entire twentieth century. This causes inflation, and inflation is a tax on the poor. In the last two years, food costs have doubled. He declared that we are starving the American people, cutting them off from aid that we should be providing, and instead spending money on being the policeman of the world.

We now have 800 military bases around the world, RFK Jr. notes. We spend $8.8 trillion per year in military expenditures. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were supposed to get a peace dividend. Some projected a decrease in the military budget from six trillion dollars to two trillion, but instead we have increased it to 8.8.

There is a long tradition in American politics of opposition to foreign wars, RFK Jr. observes. The founders of our nation warned against foreign entanglements, maintaining that trying to be an imperial power abroad would destroy democracy at home. Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation of the military-industrial complex. RFK campaigned against the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King argued that there is a direct link between war abroad and poverty and oppression at home.

JFK maintained that the principal duty of a president is to keep the nation out of war; he undertook initiatives like the Alliance for Progress, USAID, and the Peace Corps, in order to portray an image of the USA as a leader rather than a bully. RFK Jr. noted that no U.S. president stands close to JFK in the number of statues of him or boulevards named after him in Africa and Latin America. If people throughout the world love our country, RFK Jr. declares, that’s good for our economy and for our national security.

The Iraq war, RFK Jr. observes, did not attain any reasonable foreign policy goals. No weapons of mass destruction were found. We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. We may have killed one million Iraqis; no one knows the number. Iraq today is an incoherent country, in which the government and the police are corrupt. The war created ISIS, and it created two million refugees going up into Europe, causing Brexit. This is the cost of the Iraq War. In the USA, we have nothing to show for it, except a devastated middle class.

While the USA was spending trillions of dollars destroying roads, ports, and hospitals, the Chinese were spending trillions building roads, ports, and hospitals, RFK Jr. observes. China is today replacing the USA as the principal trading partner of many nations in Africa and Latin America. Many countries, like Brazil and Saudi Arabia, are looking for alternatives to the U.S. dollar as the international currency. Some calculate that the fall of the dollar from its privileged position as the most widely used international currency could cost the USA 750 billion dollars per year. This is part of the cost of U.S. involvement in continuous wars.

RFK Jr. notes that our strategy in the Middle East in recent decades has been to create allies in the region, with the support of Saudi Arabia, our biggest investor and number one ally, as a bulwark against the expansion of the influence of Iran in the region. However, Saudi Arabia and Iran recently signed an agreement, brokered by China. Although the agreement is good for the peace and stability of the region, it indicates the complete collapse of our entire policy in the region. We no longer have a coherent foreign policy in the Middle East.

RFK Jr. declares: “I am going to bring the troops home. I am going to close the [military] bases. And I am going to start investing in the U.S. middle class and our country. And I am going to make our nation an exemplary democracy again.”

On misinformation

RFK Jr. reports that his father was saddened to learn that people in authority lie. We now all know, however, that the government lies to us. We take it for granted. In 1963, when JFK died, about 80% of Americans said they trusted their government. Today, 22% does. And 22% trust the press, the lowest percentage ever. Everybody now knows that the media lies to us.

Therefore, the people are driven to look for other sources of truth. When the corporate-controlled media and the corporate-controlled government see the emergence of sources of truth that they do not control, they have to label them misinformation, because they threaten the orthodox paradigm. The corporations and the government have to censor the people or lie about what’s true and what’s not true. This amplifies the polarization, hatred, fear, and insecurity among the people. Censorship not only doesn’t work; it’s dangerous.

On the political tendency to not speak truthfully

RFK Jr. observed the historic tendency for politicians to make promises without telling the whole truth. For example, promising health care or student aid without mentioning the long-term costs to the nation and to future generations. He maintains that his father successfully bucked this tendency in his 1968 presidential campaign. He demonstrated that it is possible to unite the nation by telling the people the truth.

RFK Jr. believes that every nation, like every individual, has a darker side and a lighter side. The easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our anger, our bigotry, and our greed, and all the darker angels of our character. But sometimes there are politicians who do what his father tried to do, which is to talk to people in a way that calls them to transcend their narrow self-interest, their anger and their bigoty; and to see themselves as part of a community and part of a noble experiment, which helps them to find the hero that we all have within us.

Inspired by the example of his father, RFK Jr. does not hesitate to speak on conservative television and media circuits, so that he can speak to their audiences. He believes that the national division can be overcome by speaking the truth to the people and stress the common values that Americans have.

Can President RFK Jr. do it alone?

RFK Jr. declares that as president he will fix the bureaucratic corruption and bring the troops home. It seems to me that if he forms a cabinet and an advisory team dedicated to these objectives, he would be able to carry them out, in accordance with the constitutional authority granted to the executive branch of government. And they would constitute considerable and important reforms.

However, long-reaching economic policies would require the support of Congress. For example, tax incentives to favor corporate investment in the national economy. Or economic policies in support of direct government investment in the national economy, in the infrastructure, in education and health, and in a social safety net. If his discourse proves to be popular among the people, a good number of Democrats and Republicans likely would go along. But would it be enough for more than sixty percent majority, necessary for the enactment of the program without political trading?

The political reality is that RFK Jr. is running against the political establishment, and the great majority of the Senate and the Congress have attained their success in the American political system by making their peace with the political establishment. So it would seem necessary for the Kennedy campaign to support the candidacies of citizens who identify themselves as “Kennedy Democrats” in the congressional and senate elections of 2024 and 2026. This perhaps would be necessary for the fulfillment of the “peaceful revolution” in which RFK Jr. places his hopes for his country, and in defense of which he puts his life and the honor of his family on the line.

Knowledge, ideology, and real socialism in our times

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