By: Copeland Jacobs, Staff Writer
During this last week of 2023, the year where nobody liked anything, we begin our look at the prospective candidates and their respective platforms, beginning with Joe Biden, and a look at the mixed-up world of RFK Jr.
Formerly Known as Bidenomics
I’ve ventured to the White House website to see what Joe Biden’s 2024 economic approach will be, as explained by his budget fact sheet. The page highlights manufacturing job creation and infrastructure, takes potshots at the usual political rogues’ gallery of Big Pharma and Big Oil, and goes into detail about healthcare and environmental policy.
What’s interesting about Biden and the economy is that according to AP, economic health indicators are good, but popular opinion is awful. This is probably because prices remain high, which Biden started blaming on corporate price-gouging, which isn’t what you’d hear from an economist, but a politician presenting himself as fighting against the cause of inflation.
As the year when nothing is popular closes out, it seems anti-corporate rhetoric is a bipartisan sport, if the fact sheet and Ron DeSantis’ clash with The Walt Disney Company are any indication. As I recall, from the articles I’ve read throughout the year, Democratic criticism of corporations tends to be economic, that they’re not paying their share of taxes, while Republican criticism tends to be cultural, especially in the case of the Disney-DeSantis episode.
Back to Biden, he’s never polled well on the economy, a weak spot which has drawn attacks from Republicans. It may simply be that as one AP article suggested, the ultimate arbiter of how one thinks about the economy is political affiliation rather than fact.
You can read Biden’s fact sheet yourself for the granular details. I won’t be getting too deep into the compare-and-contrast until I’ve scanned all the potential economic platforms.
The economic review begins in earnest next week with the head-to-head Biden-Trump comparison.
The Paranoid Candidate
RFK Jr.’s independent campaign is pulling in voters from either side, reports the Associated Press, but what unites his supporters isn’t ideological, but anti-establishment paranoia. Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer, penned a book lambasting Dr. Fauci, has hung out with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, and his Children’s Health Defense organization is suing multiple news media organizations, the AP included.
Kennedy also throws plenty of mud at the government and corporations, and this strong current of distrust and paranoia, combined with faith in Kennedy himself as a sort of Cassandra-like truth teller, is the only real uniting factor for his supporters according to the Associated Press.
Kennedy’s base is anti-vaxxers, but his worldview, and his supporters, reflect the history and traditions of conspiracism, which has been a fixture of the political fringe since time immemorial- Norman Cohn wrote an entire volume about medieval millenarian movements, some of which thought the Catholic Church was really a front for Satan, as crazy as it sounds- and conspiratorial ideas have occasionally elbowed their way into the mainstream, prompted by turmoil and disaster.
Let’s wind the clock back to the fifties when fear of nuclear annihilation was widespread, a good portion of the planet was under the jackboot of Stalinism, and every family had a fallout shelter. Back in the heyday of McCarthyism, Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style, then a symptom of the Cold War right-wing.
Think fluoridation hysteria, the John Birch Society, and the McCarthy simulacrum in The Manchurian Candidate raving about card-carrying communists1 in the State Department. The original Frank Sinatra-Angela Lansbury version is probably my favorite film and probably the only movie to rightly skewer McCarthyist fearmongering and portray communism in an aptly vile, if slightly absurd light.
Journalist Jonathan Kay pinpointed the event that pushed conspiracism to the left was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ironically, the death of a Cold War defense hawk like Kennedy at the hands of leftist Castro-sympathetic Lee Harvey Oswald led many on the left to pin Kennedy’s death on the right, or at least some vague and omnipresent cabal within the American government. Oliver Stone did a movie along those lines back in the nineties starring Kevin Costner.
According to historian Christopher Andrew and his co-author of The Sword and Shield, former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, the Soviet Union stoked these rumors- which they probably believed in spirit if not necessarily substance.
The Soviets pinned the ribbon of chief conspirator on far-right Texas oil industrialist H.L. Hunt. His son, who actually was named Bunker, had run a magazine advertisement around the time JFK visited Dallas, absurdly claiming JFK was a communist. His father went even further into brazen crackpot territory by claiming more people in America supported communism than in Russia on the eve of the October Revolution.
As Kay wrote, there was no conspiracy, nothing besides an incalculably lucky shot fired by one man. However, the assassination became lodged in American culture, with books about the conspiracy outnumbering factual works and showing no signs of stopping. Kennedy’s tragic death became the nexus of American conspiracy theories.
With this in mind, it isn’t hard to see how a member of the Kennedy family, beset with tragedy beyond JFK’s death, might come to believe the universe has it in for him and his relatives. What’s disturbing to me is how popular his dystopian fantasy and dangerous anti-vaccination statements are proving as the primaries crawl onward.
- According to historian Christopher Andrew and former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, as McCarthy was making waves with his fictional accusations, the American communist party’s support had dwindled from its peak of “marginal” in the Great Depression to “irrelevant.” And card-carrying communists were worthless to the KGB because nobody in America, left or right, trusted them with influential government jobs. There were highly placed Soviet spies like Alger Hiss, but none of them were stupid enough to advertise it on their resume.
Author: Tracy Sanders
