What Democrats can learn from Bobby Kennedy
Of all the what-ifs of post-war American politics, none is more haunting than the vision in which an assassin did not shoot down Robert Kennedy while he was running for president in 1968. Had Kennedy lived, runs this counterfactual history, he would have become president, and America would have left Vietnam years earlier. There would have been no Nixon administration, no Watergate scandal to sharpen cynicism and no successful Republican “southern strategy” to deepen racial division. The Democrats would have become the party of the multiracial working class, rather than of the multiracial professional elite.
Now, as his father challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination, Robert Kennedy junior is challenging President Joe Biden. You might hear echoes of the father’s politics, as when the son inveighs against “the warfare machine that is bankrupting our country” or against the Democratic Party for “inviting Wall Street to strip-mine the American public”.
But unlike his father, this Kennedy has little chance of the nomination. Rather than falling in love with him, leftish journalists are tearing him apart for his opposition to vaccination and his yen for conspiracy theories, including about the murders of his father and his uncle, John Kennedy. Having supplied the tragedy in 1968, history is offering up the farce.
2023-09-07 09:20:20
Post from www.economist.com
