RFK Jr.: Son of the Sixties
Can somebody explain RFK Jr.'s appeal to the American right for me?
I must confess to not really getting the appeal to people on the right of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
He seems like a pretty standard 1960s-1970s hippie environmentalist (e.g., Obama seriously considered naming him head of the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008), just with above average inherited fame, looks, charisma, sex appeal, and erraticism and below average judgment (e.g., his intervention in Samoa that helped get 83 people killed by the measles in 2019 by helping bring about a sharp one-year decline in the vaccination rate, which led to an immediate measles epidemic).
Many years ago, I was on the fringe of a social circle that was into anti-vaxx, along with fellow-traveling institutions like Waldorf Schools. They were nice folks, but they seemed like rather silly post-hippies. I suppose they could have been vaguely classified as conservative in a sort of Tolkien-style English tory anti-technology manner, but not by usual American definitions. They definitely would have rejected the imputation that they were conservatives. They all saw themselves as progressive liberals, rightful descendants of The Sixties.
This is not to say that RFK Jr. doesn’t have some good ideas, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a knack for sorting his ideas into the good idea pile and the bad idea pile.
People like this can play a useful role if other people do their sorting for them and emphasize their valuable ideas and downplay their worthless ideas. But giving RFK Jr. an important managerial role rather than an advocacy role seems like the worst use of his talents.
So, I don’t get RFK Jr.
Can somebody explain his cult-like appeal for me?
Update: A friend writes:
RFK, hippie health stuff is huge on the right now. I think as the right becomes more populist it draws in more and more of the type who, because they distrust the government, are easy marks for other woowoo. They're also a lot more prone to celebrity worship. Part of this comes down to the right being more low-status overall. They've internalized that left is more cool and glamorous than them, and so they celebrate any famous "defector" they can get. And what's a bigger celebrity defector than a Kennedy?
Another friend writes:
The American right is always status hungry. They’re desperate for elites who joins them.
Having a Kennedy join them is insanely cool and they’ll overlook everything else. Like Trump being a dog and them overlooking everything because he’s now “one of us.”
The other thing is that the American right is increasingly post-Christian, and there’s a lot of New Agers, yoga women, and people who think that we need crystals and and a nature-based purity in our lives. It’s QANON-adjacent.
RFK Jr appeals to these people.
But in short:
MAGA is increasingly full of “back to nature” pagan ex-liberals, it’s fully of conspiracy theorists, and they love a celebrity who isn’t ashamed of being associated with them
RFK is all three
@avrilbradley23 tweets:
So, in "The Big Lebowski" (1998), Walter Sobchak is already right wing, but The Dude is still left wing ...
Now, they'd both be MAGA?
But what about Donnie? Which way is the Donnie Vote moving?
Anyone who thinks being "anti-vax" is right-wing hasn't really delved into the issue. I was born in 1949 and had the smallpox vaccine and the oral polio vaccine. My children, born 1975-1981, had only DPT, MMR and polio vaccines. No kids in those days were autistic nor were there peanut allergies. Now there are 72 recommended doses of vaccines for children and autism, allergies and auto-immune diseases have sky-rocketed. It's not unusual now for me to meet a grandparent at a cocktail party who tells me of an autistic grandchild . In my immediate circle of 6 women friends, one has an autistic grandchild and one has a grandchild with type-1 diabetes at age 7. RFK jr has taken on the vaccine industry. That's why many support him.
I do not believe RFK Jr is at all rightwing, nor do I see him as belonging to what currently poses as the left. He is also not anti-vax; that's a slur. He's anti-piss-poor-testing-and-quality-control, and thinks vaccines ought to be trialed like any other medicine before being injected into newborns. He himself is fully vaccinated, with the exception of the cvd jabs, as were his children.
As an activist lawyer, he campaigned for years against poisons in American food; yet no one calls him anti-food.
For telling the truth during and after Covid, for being slimed for his integrity, for being a man in a nation of twinkies, many supported his candidacy and applauded his endorsement of Trump.
Had he not made the huge mistake of abandoning his presidential run as a Democrat, we would have had a Very Different Democrat National Convention than the coronation we saw. Even with a few dozen delegates, he would have made the selection of the prostituting attorney quite impossible to pull off without an uproar. And had god peeled back the roof and forced the Democrats to obey the law and hold some form of democratic process, he would have made one hell of an opponent for Trump.