This is the time of year when we give thanks (well, those of us who know to whom to give thanks) and put a wrap on another liturgical year. It’s also the time of year when we commemorate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. One of those who has done so–and deservedly–is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nephew and our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, who posted family pictures on X. He got a sympathetic response, which isn’t a given on social media (maybe the nastiest loudmouths have migrated to Bluesky.) I’m glad he took the risk; no matter what you think of the Kennedys, they’ve been through a lot.
There’s a lot of other garbage on X these days. We’re regaled with antisemitism which I never though would see the comeback it has, and coming from the left, no less. We’re also seeing the comeback of racial theories on the right which I also never though would come back either. The left has made race an obsession to conceal the fact that this is a class-based crusade of theirs, and to see the right concede the point is totally disheartening. The most bizarre manifestation of this is the concept that only those who are descendants of people who came over before we became in independent republic (the “old stock colonials”) are “real Americans.”
As someone who can trace his ancestry back to Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, I have something to say about this. At the risk of being called a “race traitor” I need to push back on this. And I’ll start by stating the obvious (which is always dangerous to do in this country): the ship has sailed on that for a long time, at least in terms of getting control of the country back. And it was RFK Jr.’s grandfather, chief among others, who got the ball rolling, as I noted in Camelot Not Quite: My Reflections on JFK, Fifty Years After:
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.
The “old stockers” I see aren’t up to the standard of the Boston Brahmins that were sickened by Joe Kennedy, and are not always up to the pedigree I ran with while living in Palm Beach. But this last group–sybaritic and insouciant–were more part of the problem than part of the solution. If you’re on top of a society and you–and the society–want to stay there, you have an ethic of work and service, so that those under you will respond in kind. Today our elite opinion is that they deserve the loyalty while giving little in return; they’ve found out that their idea isn’t shared by many of us.
Complicating this issue is the fact that a large part of the “old stock” is Scots-Irish, whose concept of life is at odds in many ways with the WASPs that came to settle closer to the coast. Trying to put the two together is like mixing oil and water, but that’s another hard lesson from living on the earth. Today the Scots-Irish at the top of the list is JD Vance, but he has to live with the fact that his Indian wife’s family has, relatively speaking, accomplished more in 25 years that his has in 250.
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.
I think it’s sad that a family who came to prominence in breaking the “Establishment” (to use an old 1960’s term) has settled into sycophancy and trashing those in the family who won’t go along it. I can’t say I agree with everything he’s doing, but, in a country whose medical costs continue to soar concomitantly with a decline in life expectancy, something isn’t right and needs to be fixed, and some of his proposals make sense. We experienced a pandemic where the chief goal of Big Pharma was to insure that no drug to counter it–vaccine or remedy–was not covered by a U.S. Patent is simply disgusting.
In the meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving.
Positive Infinity 