The Suspension of RFK Jr.’s Campaign

Well, it’s done now:

His speech was one of the most interesting–if a little too lengthy–speeches of this campaign cycle. He hits our country’s establishment on a number of fronts, especially the way his own party–the party of his uncles Jack and Teddy Kennedy and his father Bobby–relentlessly squeezed him out of the primary process and repeated that during his independent campaign. Part of that was refusal of Secret Service protection, which was a brutal rejection given the family’s history.

It’s probably worth going back a couple of generations, to his grandfather Joe, who set himself to break the power of an oligarchy, one with more going for it than the one we have now:

Turning to Jack Kennedy, to understand the political idea of Jack, Bobby, Ted and their descendants, you have to go back to their father, old Joe Kennedy.  This was a man with an axe to grind.  Growing up in Boston, he was rejected by Boston’s very WASP Brahmin aristocracy, Ivy Leaguer though he was, because he was a) Irish and b) Catholic.  That induced hatred, hatred that passed down to the sons.  His ambitions for them were in no small measure to prove that he could beat the WASP’s at their own game, and he was largely successful, although his family paid an enormous price in the process.  In some ways their signature accomplishment was Teddy’s promotion of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, when legal immigration was opened up to more than white Europeans.  My guess is they figured that, if the first wave of immigration couldn’t finish the WASPs off, the second would.

It’s ironic that the immigration that his uncle Teddy made possible is represented by the Democratic candidate for President who has spurned RFK Jr.. But, like the Jews and civil rights, RFK Jr. is finding out that gratitude is a scarce commodity.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will probably be the last Kennedy to take on the establishment the way his grandfather, father and uncle did. The rest of the clan is satisfied to trash him while integrating themselves into the current oligarchy. But my warning on the 50th anniversary of Jack’s assassination–an act we almost saw repeated–stands:

In that respect Jack Kennedy’s legacy—or more properly his father’s—was fulfilled, but sad to say they and those who have come in their wake forgot that, if you arrange another’s Gotterdammerung, don’t forget to leave Valhalla before you torch it.