RFK Jr.’s Polling Strength Undermines Democrats’ ‘Party of Science’ Claims

R obert F. Kennedy Jr.’s entry into the Democratic presidential race and the surprising level of support his campaign has generated force his party to confront two dismaying realities.

The first is obvious: Democratic voters are not eager to see the incumbent president, Joe Biden, run for a second term in the White House. Either the institutional mechanisms that should spare the incumbent president this embarrassment have atrophied, or a sizable minority of Democrats no longer responds to them. The second is even more existential from the Democratic perspective: RFK Jr.’s presidential bid takes aim at the very idea of what it meant to be a Democrat in the Trump years.

Although the condescending affectation predates the Trump era, it became common in the closing years of the last decade to hear Democratic lawmakers explicitly position themselves as the last lonely defenders of free inquiry, dispassion, and rationalism — the “party of science,” as Washington governor Jay Inslee once put it. Only Democrats, they insisted, could be trusted to defer to experts in a crisis, restore empiricism to its proper place, and safeguard the environment and public health against the troglodytic masses. RFK Jr. shatters this presumption.

Kennedy’s crusade against vaccines preceded the advent of the mRNA technology that produced some of the most popular and widely adopted Covid vaccines. He was an avid proponent of former British doctor Andrew Wakefield’s infamous 1998 study that purported to establish a causal link between the ubiquitous measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. More than a decade’s worth of cohort and case-control studies refuted Wakefield’s findings, but RFK Jr. remained unmoved. He persisted in his claims that not only are vaccines a ticking time-bomb coursing through the veins of their unwitting adopters, they are also the vehicles through which elites introduce an “injectable chip” or “subdermal biometric tattoos” into their subjects.

In an interview this weekend on ABC News, Kennedy’s views on vaccines were censored by the network ostensibly to protect the viewing public from being exposed to — gasp! — “false claims.” As Rich observed, this was a mistake for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that the combination of paranoia and arrogance that contributes to an “editorial judgment” like this lends Kennedy’s views a kind of perverse credibility. This censorious impulse is a throwback to a Trump-era mania, in which ill-equipped content managers were compelled to render judgments about the veracity of assertions they had no business evaluating. Previously, that exercise was aimed at the reckless Right. Not anymore. Now, the media’s Democratic allies must shield the public from the irresponsibility of one of their own. With RFK Jr. attracting a measurable level of Democratic support, that project has become an urgent one.

“The Democrats are the party of truth,” averred the prominent evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad. It’s not hard to find Democratic partisans issuing similar claims in support of the notion that Democrats evince a preternatural commitment to honesty and reject conspiratorial logic. That self-soothing testament put Donald Trump’s irrational suspicion of the simplest explanations for events in stark relief. But it’s due for reevaluation now that the “party of truth, facts, and science” is dealing with the nascent popularity of an avowed conspiracy theorist in its ranks.

The bullets that killed RFK Jr.’s father weren’t fired by Sirhan Sirhan on live television in 1968, according to the late senator’s son. Rather, the guilt to which Sirhan admitted and of which his parole board is convinced is, to RFK Jr., all part of the conspiracy. The theories about what really happened to Bobby Kennedy abound. Was there a second gunman of whom Sirhan may or may not have been aware? Had the convicted murderer been subjected to “coercive hypnosis”? These questions have prompted several inquiries into the attack over the decades, none of which reached RFK Jr.’s conclusions about what really happened to his father.

Kennedy has promoted the view that the Covid vaccines were concocted only to enrich the medical establishment, that 5G cell towers are designed to “control our behavior,” and that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is engaged in an effort to “genetically modify” humanity. He’s called for the imprisonment of the “treasonous” Koch brothers “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” He’s said that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.” He once called for jailing skeptics of the climate-change consensus, thereafter moderating merely to embrace the forced liquidation of assets owned by America’s “soulless, nationless oil companies.” He has advocated annulling the charters of conservative and libertarian advocacy groups that take advantage of their First Amendment rights in ways he dislikes. He has even accused the GOP of engaging in “a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election” in 2004.

All this would have to get a fair hearing from the public if RFK Jr.’s relatively strong polling among Democrats proved sustainable, and that might be a serious blow to the psyches of those who consider themselves members of “the party of truth.” But it might also prove a public service.

In the pre-Covid age, aggressive and even violent anti-vaccine agitation was the province of the American Left, and it found its most receptive audience among the affluent, educated elite that was one of the Democratic Party’s core constituencies. Kennedy’s menacing zeal for the environmentalist cause won him numerous awards; he was named one of Time Magazine’s “Heroes for Change” and one of Rolling Stone’s top 100 “agents of change.” Before Trump, the big tent under which Democrats congregated included a space for cranks who were, at the very least, open to arguments about George W. Bush’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks, Halliburton’s prohibitive influence over U.S. policy-makers, Diebold’s nefarious voting machines, and Russia’s responsibility for the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.

The Trump years papered over these points of philosophical agreement between the activist Left and what has become the MAGA Right. Much of that phenomenon is attributable to the centrifugal force of negative politics: The demands of partisanship forced paranoiacs to eschew paranoia and skeptics to suspend disbelief. The Trump effect persists, which limits the reach of RFK Jr.’s message among Democratic voters, if only artificially. It’s unlikely that he will generate much traction in his quest to unseat Joe Biden — the party will make sure of that. And yet, in the effort alone, Kennedy has helped reveal how much of the Democratic Party’s self-image today is a fabrication of recent vintage.