In 2016, Donald Trump stormed into the presidential race as a true maverick candidate. He upset first the Republican primaries, then the general election race against Hillary Clinton, the establishment Democrat who thought she was entitled to the presidency.
Eight years later, Trump is no longer the maverick. He is an established—if not establishment—candidate, finishing his four-year involuntary hiatus from the White House. This time, there is another maverick on the campaign trail: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of former Attorney General and Sen. Robert Kennedy Sr., this Kennedy is no newcomer to politics. Like Trump before him, he knows ‘everyone,’ having moved in the inner circles of American politics since he was a child. However, he has never held elected office—another political character trait he shares with Trump—which, in theory, should make it difficult for voters to evaluate him.
His formal inexperience does not seem to weigh against him. Although he has lost some voter support since announcing his candidacy in October last year, since April he has remained relatively steady, typically polling in the 8-9% bracket. This is leaps and bounds better than any other third-party candidate since Ross Perot 32 years ago.
Like his father and his uncles John F. and Ted Kennedy—a decades-long U.S. senator from Massachusetts—Robert Kennedy Jr. is a Democrat. However, when it came down to the presidential primaries this past winter, the party made sure to kick him out. In an effort to show what an outstanding candidate Joe Biden was, going into his re-election campaign, the party machine decided to protect him from any meaningful competition.
If Kennedy had won the primaries—and under fair circumstances, he very likely would have—he would have been hard for Trump to beat. Kennedy is not a typical establishment candidate, nor is he a party-loyal Democrat. He showed this beyond reasonable doubt in 2020 when he bravely opposed mandates to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
Sometimes, his rhetoric has been clumsy and misguided, like in the speech in 2022 when he ridiculously compared the push for vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and invoked Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank. At the same time, his criticism of vaccine mandates, rhetorically crude as it may be, has not been without merit.
The number of lives saved by the vaccine is highly uncertain—reports for the United States range from less than 300,000 to 3 million, which means that it is statistically impossible to correlate vaccines with lives saved. With that said, there is no doubt that the vaccine had widespread preventative effects and likely helped contain the pandemic, especially in dense urban areas.
However, from Robert Kennedy’s perspective, the problem is not the vaccine itself, but the role government played in the rollout. The vaccines were not put through the regular, rigorous testing protocol before being released to the public. This made it difficult to defend vaccine mandates, whether issued by governments or by employers.
One reason why Kennedy’s opposition to mandates—not necessarily the vaccine itself—is now earning him relatively large support among American voters, is that there seems to be some emerging evidence suggesting a correlation between the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic and the vaccine. Furthermore, it is Robert Kennedy’s right under the Constitution of the United States to speak his mind on vaccine mandates, or any other issue that comes to his mind. However, during the COVID pandemic his foremost contribution to the public discourse was to make it legitimate to oppose not the vaccine itself, but any mandates forcing people to take it.
The distinction is crucial, yet—perhaps not surprisingly—it has been lost in the high-pitch cacophony over the vaccine. Proponents of mandates refuse to listen to Kennedy’s distinction, while mandate opponents from time to time turn themselves into full-blown vaccine opponents. They tend to contribute to the confusion by making no distinction between bad consequences of the vaccine and the vaccine itself.
At the same time, the emotionally laden public debate over the COVID vaccine has also crystalized a support base for Robert Kennedy. Within that support base, we can find both left-of-center voters who oppose the big corporations—and thereby ‘Big Pharma’—and libertarians who praise Kennedy for his brave opposition to forced vaccinations.
Those who are skeptical of ‘Big Pharma’ often connect vaccine mandates with an insatiable profit hunger within the pharmaceutical industry. On the face of it, they make strange bedfellows with libertarians, who by the very virtue of their ideology should praise the capitalist pursuit of profits. On any normal day, these two constituencies would be fighting each other tooth and nail in the political arena.
But this is not a normal day. This is not a normal presidential campaign. After the experiences that many people had during the pandemic, when government simply ordered businesses to shut down and schools to close, causing people to lose their livelihood and disrupting children’s education, anyone who is skeptical of authoritarian government could easily find a maverick like Robert Kennedy appealing.
Add to this the vitriolic campaign against Donald Trump, topped off by a sham trial that gave Vladimir Putin a run for his money, and it is easy for a right-of-center voter to look for someone who is perceived as ‘speaking truth to power.’ Trump himself may be too off-putting for some conservatives, and his support among libertarians has been scant at best. Even though he is rising in their eyes, Kennedy is certain to appeal to many of them, simply by virtue of his maverick status.
When it comes to Kennedy, libertarians are a particularly interesting community of voters. In addition to his opposition to forced vaccinations, he also speaks of the need to ‘get corporations out’ of people’s food, environment, and government. There is a strong strain of anti-corporate sentiments in the American libertarian movement, strong enough in fact to make it difficult at times to distinguish them from the far left.
Robert Kennedy is also an outspoken opponent of “forever wars”—a term that libertarian firebrand Sen. Rand Paul has been using for many years now. The libertarian movement has been opposed to what they see as American military imperialism ever since former Cato Institute president William Niskanen came out against the war in Iraq some 20 years ago.
Here, again, Kennedy manifests his anti-establishment ambitions:
We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return to its proper role of defending our country.
Specifically on Ukraine, he pinpoints the issue:
[The] most important priority is to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, victims of a brutal Russian invasion, and also victims of American geopolitical machinations going back at least to 2014. We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia?
An answer to his two questions could be that the two are indistinguishable: a weaker Russia is necessary for Ukrainian sovereignty. However, that answer misses Kennedy’s point: what he is really asking here, is what business America had to get involved in Ukraine ten years ago, or more.
By shedding light on that part of the Ukrainian conflict, Kennedy again draws attention to what is often seen—especially among libertarians—as unwarranted international interventionism by the American government.
In other words, there are many reasons for libertarians to like Kennedy. This is probably the reason why he, not the Libertarian Party’s own presidential candidate Chase Oliver, is polling close to 10%. The Libertarian Party made a mistake in rejecting Kennedy as their presidential candidate.
With that said, there are a number of reasons why Robert Kennedy is not as appealing to libertarians—or conservatives for that matter—as he may seem. One of the problems is his support for environmental regulations and higher taxes on, e.g., gasoline and diesel.
Another—bigger one—is Kennedy’s economic policy plan, which is full of refurbished left-wing platitudes. He wants to raise the federal minimum wage, use lawfare to force businesses to unionize, provide child care to “millions of families” on taxpayers’ tab, provide interest-free student loans, and use government power to lower the prices of pharmaceutical drugs.
This is the side of Kennedy’s campaign that libertarians refuse to discuss. I am not surprised. The libertarian movement in America is notoriously poorly educated on economic issues. Their understanding of the welfare state is weak at best, and their comprehension of monetary policy is usually fanciful. At the same time, nobody is excused from the decisions he makes in his life, or on Election Day, simply because he did not know better.
If anything, Robert Kennedy represents the dream of individual freedom and economic security that often characterizes a teenager. It is an unrealistic amalgamation of individually realistic, often respectable ideas, which should discourage educated voters from supporting him in the first place. However, after conversing on social media with a number of libertarians about Kennedy, my impression is that they have picked and chosen his emphasis on individual freedom and on reining in corporate power as a sufficient set of reasons to back him.
I would wager that a survey of left-of-center Kennedy supporters would yield a largely similar outcome. People on the left are more prone to using government ‘for a good cause’ and compel their fellow citizens into doing what ‘is best for them.’ Therefore, Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccine mandates is an eyesore to some leftists who may otherwise consider voting for him. To others, though, it may add a touch of appealing anarchism to his campaign.
So far, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not seem to have a realistic path to the White House. However, in the unlikely event that Trump’s campaign is ground to a halt by ongoing court cases, and if Democrat voters finally realize that Biden is a political zombie with advanced cognitive deficiencies, Kennedy might carve out a path to the frontline.
It is unrealistic, but given his already-established voter base and the fact that he is unfettered when it comes to the political establishment, it would be foolish to dismiss him entirely.
From Vaccine Skeptic to Presidential Candidate
U.S. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at the Libertarian National Convention at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, on May 24, 2024.
Photo: Bastien INZAURRALDE / AFP
In 2016, Donald Trump stormed into the presidential race as a true maverick candidate. He upset first the Republican primaries, then the general election race against Hillary Clinton, the establishment Democrat who thought she was entitled to the presidency.
Eight years later, Trump is no longer the maverick. He is an established—if not establishment—candidate, finishing his four-year involuntary hiatus from the White House. This time, there is another maverick on the campaign trail: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of former Attorney General and Sen. Robert Kennedy Sr., this Kennedy is no newcomer to politics. Like Trump before him, he knows ‘everyone,’ having moved in the inner circles of American politics since he was a child. However, he has never held elected office—another political character trait he shares with Trump—which, in theory, should make it difficult for voters to evaluate him.
His formal inexperience does not seem to weigh against him. Although he has lost some voter support since announcing his candidacy in October last year, since April he has remained relatively steady, typically polling in the 8-9% bracket. This is leaps and bounds better than any other third-party candidate since Ross Perot 32 years ago.
Like his father and his uncles John F. and Ted Kennedy—a decades-long U.S. senator from Massachusetts—Robert Kennedy Jr. is a Democrat. However, when it came down to the presidential primaries this past winter, the party made sure to kick him out. In an effort to show what an outstanding candidate Joe Biden was, going into his re-election campaign, the party machine decided to protect him from any meaningful competition.
If Kennedy had won the primaries—and under fair circumstances, he very likely would have—he would have been hard for Trump to beat. Kennedy is not a typical establishment candidate, nor is he a party-loyal Democrat. He showed this beyond reasonable doubt in 2020 when he bravely opposed mandates to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
Sometimes, his rhetoric has been clumsy and misguided, like in the speech in 2022 when he ridiculously compared the push for vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and invoked Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank. At the same time, his criticism of vaccine mandates, rhetorically crude as it may be, has not been without merit.
The number of lives saved by the vaccine is highly uncertain—reports for the United States range from less than 300,000 to 3 million, which means that it is statistically impossible to correlate vaccines with lives saved. With that said, there is no doubt that the vaccine had widespread preventative effects and likely helped contain the pandemic, especially in dense urban areas.
However, from Robert Kennedy’s perspective, the problem is not the vaccine itself, but the role government played in the rollout. The vaccines were not put through the regular, rigorous testing protocol before being released to the public. This made it difficult to defend vaccine mandates, whether issued by governments or by employers.
One reason why Kennedy’s opposition to mandates—not necessarily the vaccine itself—is now earning him relatively large support among American voters, is that there seems to be some emerging evidence suggesting a correlation between the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic and the vaccine. Furthermore, it is Robert Kennedy’s right under the Constitution of the United States to speak his mind on vaccine mandates, or any other issue that comes to his mind. However, during the COVID pandemic his foremost contribution to the public discourse was to make it legitimate to oppose not the vaccine itself, but any mandates forcing people to take it.
The distinction is crucial, yet—perhaps not surprisingly—it has been lost in the high-pitch cacophony over the vaccine. Proponents of mandates refuse to listen to Kennedy’s distinction, while mandate opponents from time to time turn themselves into full-blown vaccine opponents. They tend to contribute to the confusion by making no distinction between bad consequences of the vaccine and the vaccine itself.
At the same time, the emotionally laden public debate over the COVID vaccine has also crystalized a support base for Robert Kennedy. Within that support base, we can find both left-of-center voters who oppose the big corporations—and thereby ‘Big Pharma’—and libertarians who praise Kennedy for his brave opposition to forced vaccinations.
Those who are skeptical of ‘Big Pharma’ often connect vaccine mandates with an insatiable profit hunger within the pharmaceutical industry. On the face of it, they make strange bedfellows with libertarians, who by the very virtue of their ideology should praise the capitalist pursuit of profits. On any normal day, these two constituencies would be fighting each other tooth and nail in the political arena.
But this is not a normal day. This is not a normal presidential campaign. After the experiences that many people had during the pandemic, when government simply ordered businesses to shut down and schools to close, causing people to lose their livelihood and disrupting children’s education, anyone who is skeptical of authoritarian government could easily find a maverick like Robert Kennedy appealing.
Add to this the vitriolic campaign against Donald Trump, topped off by a sham trial that gave Vladimir Putin a run for his money, and it is easy for a right-of-center voter to look for someone who is perceived as ‘speaking truth to power.’ Trump himself may be too off-putting for some conservatives, and his support among libertarians has been scant at best. Even though he is rising in their eyes, Kennedy is certain to appeal to many of them, simply by virtue of his maverick status.
When it comes to Kennedy, libertarians are a particularly interesting community of voters. In addition to his opposition to forced vaccinations, he also speaks of the need to ‘get corporations out’ of people’s food, environment, and government. There is a strong strain of anti-corporate sentiments in the American libertarian movement, strong enough in fact to make it difficult at times to distinguish them from the far left.
Robert Kennedy is also an outspoken opponent of “forever wars”—a term that libertarian firebrand Sen. Rand Paul has been using for many years now. The libertarian movement has been opposed to what they see as American military imperialism ever since former Cato Institute president William Niskanen came out against the war in Iraq some 20 years ago.
Here, again, Kennedy manifests his anti-establishment ambitions:
Specifically on Ukraine, he pinpoints the issue:
An answer to his two questions could be that the two are indistinguishable: a weaker Russia is necessary for Ukrainian sovereignty. However, that answer misses Kennedy’s point: what he is really asking here, is what business America had to get involved in Ukraine ten years ago, or more.
By shedding light on that part of the Ukrainian conflict, Kennedy again draws attention to what is often seen—especially among libertarians—as unwarranted international interventionism by the American government.
In other words, there are many reasons for libertarians to like Kennedy. This is probably the reason why he, not the Libertarian Party’s own presidential candidate Chase Oliver, is polling close to 10%. The Libertarian Party made a mistake in rejecting Kennedy as their presidential candidate.
With that said, there are a number of reasons why Robert Kennedy is not as appealing to libertarians—or conservatives for that matter—as he may seem. One of the problems is his support for environmental regulations and higher taxes on, e.g., gasoline and diesel.
Another—bigger one—is Kennedy’s economic policy plan, which is full of refurbished left-wing platitudes. He wants to raise the federal minimum wage, use lawfare to force businesses to unionize, provide child care to “millions of families” on taxpayers’ tab, provide interest-free student loans, and use government power to lower the prices of pharmaceutical drugs.
This is the side of Kennedy’s campaign that libertarians refuse to discuss. I am not surprised. The libertarian movement in America is notoriously poorly educated on economic issues. Their understanding of the welfare state is weak at best, and their comprehension of monetary policy is usually fanciful. At the same time, nobody is excused from the decisions he makes in his life, or on Election Day, simply because he did not know better.
If anything, Robert Kennedy represents the dream of individual freedom and economic security that often characterizes a teenager. It is an unrealistic amalgamation of individually realistic, often respectable ideas, which should discourage educated voters from supporting him in the first place. However, after conversing on social media with a number of libertarians about Kennedy, my impression is that they have picked and chosen his emphasis on individual freedom and on reining in corporate power as a sufficient set of reasons to back him.
I would wager that a survey of left-of-center Kennedy supporters would yield a largely similar outcome. People on the left are more prone to using government ‘for a good cause’ and compel their fellow citizens into doing what ‘is best for them.’ Therefore, Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccine mandates is an eyesore to some leftists who may otherwise consider voting for him. To others, though, it may add a touch of appealing anarchism to his campaign.
So far, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not seem to have a realistic path to the White House. However, in the unlikely event that Trump’s campaign is ground to a halt by ongoing court cases, and if Democrat voters finally realize that Biden is a political zombie with advanced cognitive deficiencies, Kennedy might carve out a path to the frontline.
It is unrealistic, but given his already-established voter base and the fact that he is unfettered when it comes to the political establishment, it would be foolish to dismiss him entirely.
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