by ANIS SHIVANI
“This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years. I’ve got a lot to talk about.”
– Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while speaking extemporaneously for almost two hours at his campaign announcement.
“People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible.”
– Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury—a Known Neurotoxin—from Vaccines.
If Joe Biden was hoping to sail through to renomination despite abysmal approval ratings, that’s not going to happen anymore, even if all the potential establishment candidates have backed out. Likewise, if the president still thinks he can avoid debating what I’m sure will be a serious challenger, backed up by rapidly rising poll numbers (RFK Jr. is already at 19%, within a few days of declaring), then he is sorely mistaken. Avoiding debate, and dismissing your opponent as beneath notice despite popularity, suggests a fatal flaw that will rear its ugly head at some point.
When I heard his campaign declaration speech, I was touched even more than my enthusiasm at comparable moments in Ralph Nader’s 2000 candidacy or the early days of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Kennedy is picking up the baton from these earlier iterations of protest against extreme corporate power allied with state tyranny. To these he is adding a unique poetic calibration of his own, which comes from his unmatched personal experience as the nephew and son of a slain president and a possible future president respectively.
I have never known him to play up his traumatic experience for cheap gain, and he is not likely to do so now. Rather, he appeals—like the older Nader in particular—because he speaks in a voice of reason harkening to a rhetorical style that has mostly passed from the American scene. I doubt that we have heard such eloquence and intelligence since the great charismatic leaders of the sixties, our latter-day politicians having spoken mostly in a narrowcasting language of transactionalism. That such language can have so much resonance among young people, as evidenced by the successful insurgent campaigns of the twenty-first century, suggests that political discourse has been unable to fill the vacuum in rational discourse.
It is likely that Kennedy, because he is able to connect apparently disparate developments into an overarching worldview—one that subverts the readymade divisions handed out to a compliant populace like addictive drugs—will soon develop the same kind of passionate following that his immediate predecessors did.
I was always bothered by the fact that recent national progressive campaigns have left the biggest elephant in the room—namely, empire—mostly out of the discussion. It always seemed ridiculous to me to imagine that we could attain Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free higher education, or whatever other welfare prescriptions of the moment were, while leaving the machinery of empire alone. It never computed to me that you could have surveillance, censorship, a uniparty system agreed on fighting new forever wars—in short, the whole apparatus of empire struggling to keep up with emerging challengers—and have the domestic goodies at the same time.
Kennedy is too smart to fall for such an obvious contradiction, and to sell a bill of goods to voters. He notes explicitly among his highest priorities that he will “start the process of unwinding empire” and turn attention to failures at home. To the extent that liberals have bought into the compulsions of the national security state in recent years with unquestioning obedience, because populist nationalism on the right is presented as an existential threat by the organs of the same national security state, liberals in fact create the conditions for a resistance to empire, mostly on the right, that takes distorted forms.
A healthy skepticism toward empire would follow the lines of what Kennedy is presenting as a sane alternative. He promises to seek immediate peace in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, because we all understand that other than the extension of empire’s destructive pathways there is no logical explanation for why we should stake everything, including the future of the human species, on that particular confrontation.
I was also always bothered—including during the anti-Bush 2000s campaigns—that the matter of civil liberties rarely crossed the lips of progressives promising the usual checklist of long-desired welfare initiatives. Kennedy, however, is clear that abjuring censorship, and in general restoring the entire Bill of Rights after the repeated crises of the present century, are prerequisites to promoting a healthy body politic that can iron out internal differences without every issue turning into partisan deadlock. The more we try to suppress dissenting opinion, on everything from foreign wars to public health, the more we turn into a dysfunctional regime where the act of voting is threateningly turned into a tool of abject compliance.
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