Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Allure of Anti-Establishmentarianism

The rising popularity of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known charlatan and conspiracy theorist riding on nothing but good old-fashioned nepotism, is a strong signal that our established institutions are suffering a severe trust deficit. His recent propagation that the Covid-19 virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashnenazi Jews and Chinese populations should have excluded him out of the realm of Polite Discourse, but he remains a contender for the 2024 US Presidential race, with significant support among right-leaning voters. Not only that, he has become a fixture of popular podcasts - among the shows he has appeared on include The Joe Rogan Experience, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, The Lex Fridman Podcast, Honestly with Bari Weiss, The Rubin Report, and Bill Maher’s Club Random. How an heir to America’s most powerful political dynasty became the face of the “anti-establishment” is a question I am still baffled by. This essay is an attempt to figure out a coherent answer to it.

In an episode of Commentary Magazine’s daily podcast, editor-in-chief John Podhoretz calls RFK Jr. “the Pied Piper of Conspiracy Theories”. Among the multitude of crazy beliefs held by Mr. Kennedy include: SSRIs are responsible for school shootings, vaccines cause autism, Anne Frank had it better than those of us living under the vaccine mandates, “climate change deniers” such as the Koch Brothers should be prosecuted as war criminals, the CIA is responsible for the assassinations of his father and uncle, Robert and John F. Kennedy, the CDC, NIH and FDA are in bed with “Big Pharma”, “Big Pharma” being a “criminal enterprise”, and that “neoconservative” warmongers in the “military-industrial complex” would like to keep the Russo-Ukraine War going indefinitely. If he has not the last name Kennedy, we would all dismiss him as a kook who spends too much time online and need to touch grass.

But, surprisingly enough, Kennedy has got much more going for him than his last name. According to polls taken by The Economist and YouGov back in June of this year, Kennedy is polling higher than any major 2024 Presidential candidate. I would contend that, much like Donald Trump, Kennedy is exploiting our political polarization and lack of trust in established institutions to drag America further into the morass. The United States has no shortage of populist figures seeking to overthrow the tyranny of “the establishment”, and Kennedy fits neatly into that tradition. He is not just the “podcast Presidential candidate”, he is the Covid-19 Presidential candidate.

As a launch pad for his Presidential candidacy, Kennedy published two books. The first, titled The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, is a predictable conspiracy tract alleging a global attempt to “silence” Covid dissent spearheaded by Gates and Fauci. The second, A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and Covid: An Attack on Science and American Ideals, is mercifully shorter but still contains the same kind of kooky anti-vaccine beliefs from the typical hermit who “does his own research” on the Internet. Kennedy’s appeal lies not just in the overwhelming distrust that Americans hold against their institutions during the pandemic. Although running as a Democrat, he is enjoying significant support on the Right, thus projecting a bipartisan appeal. In reality, his actual appeal is to the political independents who are fed up with both Trump, Biden and what they deemed to be “the Blob”. Former Trump advisor (and self-avowed Leninist) Steve Bannon had encouraged Mr. Kennedy to run "for months, believing he could be both a useful chaos agent in the 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vaccine sentiment around the country". Although it is difficult to characterize him as either far-left or far-right, Kennedy and his candidacy is part of a larger program, where elements of the political extreme sows doubt into the public mind regarding the legitimacy of American governing institutions and ideals. In this respect, he does Trump one better: while Donald is squarely pegged into the right wing of American politics, Kennedy can draw easy support from both the right and the left.

Western politics, especially that of America, is plagued by what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in his book of the same name, calls a Legitimation Crisis. Originally published in 1973 under the title Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism), it argues that advanced capitalism - the system where in the market becomes heavily influenced by the state - is subject to endemic crises of trust, for the individual has been reduced to a mere consumer and participant in an overwhelming political machine:

“The most advanced capitalist countries have succeeded in keeping class conflict latent in its decisive areas … broadly filtering the dysfunctional secondary effects of the averted economic crisis and scattering them over quasi-groups (such as consumers, schoolchildren and their parents, transportation users, the sick, the elderly, etc.) or over groups with little organization.

In this way the social identity of classes breaks down and class consciousness is fragmented. The class compromise that has become part of the structure of advanced capitalism makes (almost) everyone at the same time both a participant and a victim. Of course, with the clearly (and increasingly) unequal distribution of wealth and power, it is important to distinguish between those belonging more to one than the other category.”

By keeping individuals’ material needs satisfied and spiritual needs wanting, advanced capitalism creates a division not just among human beings, but between a person’s assigned role in the system and his personal longings. The Internet, despite being first devised for military purposes, is perhaps advanced capitalism’s greatest success. Human-to-human communicative action is largely mediated, and ruined, by social media sites. Our deepest yearnings such as love is mediated through online dating apps, sex mediated through Internet pornography, and heartbreak through curated Spotify playlists.

But despite all of this, advanced capitalism, and the liberal democratic politic that accompanies it, could not subsumed a fundamental human instinct - spiritedness, or thymos. In the context of ancient Greece, thymos refers to a sense of righteous anger, a need and desire to fight against the perceived injustice of the world. It can also refer to the rage, grief, horror or sorrow of any individual who is faced with insurmountable atrocities. It is the Chest in the C.S. Lewis’s warning of “Men Without Chests”, and what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama deems the engine behind The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. Per Fukuyama and contra Lewis, today’s politics suffer not from a dearth of thymos, but an overflowing of it.

RFK Jr.’s campaign is riding high on this tidal wave of spiritedness. Like Trump and unlike his great uncle, Kennedy pursues a politic of fierce resentment against the establishment class, but not JFK’s message of unity and national obligation (Ask not what your country can do for you…) If John Kennedy inspires trust in the American project’s legitimacy, Robert Jr. fuels distrust in the same governmental institutions prided by the American masses. While JFK took a strong stance against the Soviet Union, RFK Jr. is more than willing to swallow its successor state’s blatant lies against Ukraine. As he bulldozes every inch of trust that Americans have for their institutions, Kennedy seems determined to tarnish the legacy of his own family as well.

But Kennedy is right in pointing out that the same institutions have misused public trust, and the men and women running it have been hopelessly irresponsible. In October of last year, Emily Oster, Professor of Economics at Brown University, published a story in The Atlantic titled “Let’s Declare A Pandemic Amnesty”. The central message of the piece was “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.” Human reason would say yes, but human thymos replied with a resounding “Go Fuck Yourself!” Robert Kennedy Jr. represents that growing “GFY!” crowd - consisting of parents angry that their children missed years of their education due to mismanaged lockdown policies, of epidemiologists like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Robert Malone, who are maligned by the public health authority for dissenting against the illusory Covid “consensus” regarding lockdowns and vaccine mandates, of Canadian truck drivers maligned by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, of families having to miss their loved one’s funerals and weddings because of the limited gathering rules, of disgruntled “essential workers” seeing their employers such as Walmart and Amazon profiting massively while their living condition worsens. These folks, undeterred by their different politics, find their appeal in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man with a trustworthy surname and an abundance of charisma.

Of course he is a charlatan - all populists are, to one extent or another. But the legitimation crisis that gave rise to his candidacy must be considered with bitter self-regard. Has Covid-19 brought out the authoritarian personality in all of us? Have the pandemic-response institutions such as the CDC, NIH and WHO done all that they can to consider all possible responses, or have they succumbed to inevitable groupthink? To what extent have we given away our freedoms in exchange for a measure of safety, either from the virus or from the Covid legal regime? What part have we played in perpetuating our legitimation crisis? And by supporting a candidate like Kennedy, are we further pulling ourselves toward the point of no return?

However much I dislike Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign, I urge those who share my distaste to reflect upon why he became so popular. And if Mr. Kennedy happens to be reading this lousy essay, I urge him to practice some humility, as well as mercy to those he criticizes. RFK Jr’s a Catholic, like myself, so he is all too familiar with the Matthew passage (7: 3 - 5, KJV) where Christ says:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.