Rebecca Traister writes:

[W]hen you get more granular than Kennedy’s banner ideas about the environment and corporate capture and the forever-wars industry, what you find is not just wrong facts, or even just the “nutcase” or “anti-vaxx” stuff, but inconsistency, hypocrisy, and a deference to the status quo.

The candidate’s environmental commitments, for example, go sideways when it comes to cryptocurrency. Kennedy delivered the keynote address at the Bitcoin 2023 conference this year, in which he said he would prevent bitcoin from being regulated as a security, even though it has proved wildly volatile and produces considerable CO2 emissions, which one 2022 study estimated to be comparable to those of the entire country of Greece. He has acknowledged the environmental pitfalls yet is still accepting campaign donations in bitcoin.

While he has railed at billionaires, he has described Sacks and Musk as “incredibly patriotic and incredibly committed to democracy.” He seems largely uninterested in many progressive economic-policy ideas, including a wealth tax, universal basic income, or a federal jobs guarantee, and regularly reaffirms that he is “a free-market-capitalism kind of guy.”

Kennedy’s anti-interventionist commitments seem to stop at his support for Israel, which he continually asserts. His positions on immigration and guns are so outside the liberal-left mainstream that people have suggested he is running in the wrong primary. When recently asked at a town hall what he would do to halt the proliferation of semi-automatic weapons, he replied, “I’m not going to take people’s guns away.” And during the Twitter Spaces conversation with Musk and Sacks in June, he said he was going to “seal the border permanently.” He told the Breaking Points podcast that he wants to shift spending out of a military-industrial interventionist mind-set and into “Fortress America — arming ourselves to the teeth at home.” [Continue reading…]

Michelle Goldberg writes:

A common theme among old-school liberals disenchanted with contemporary progressivism is that it’s sanctimonious and intolerant. But talking to Kennedy fans, I heard something more than just complaints about cancel culture. I heard an almost spiritual belief that Kennedy, by being brave enough to speak some unspeakable truth, could heal the hatred and suspicions that make Americans want to shut one another down.

For [David] Talbot [co-founder of Salon.com], a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the author of “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” that truth is that the American government killed both J.F.K. and R.F.K., along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Talbot compared the former president’s assassination to the body in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “It’s the tragic event underneath the floorboards, a corpse that’s stinking up our house of democracy,” he said. Being honest about it, he believes, “would be the beginning of a truth and reconciliation process that I think this country desperately needs. Any public figure who’s willing to say what should be said, to wipe the slate clean and get at this kind of truth about who really runs this country, about who benefits, is to be applauded, not to be smeared.”

This notion of wiping the slate clean — or [senior adviser, Charles] Eisenstein’s idea about returning to an aborted timeline — is a powerful one. Who wouldn’t want to reach into the past and undo the errors and accidents that have brought us to this miserable moment? As politics, it’s a harmful fantasy; movements that promise to restore a halcyon era of national unity always are. [Continue reading…]