After Camelot

Did you think the US elections couldn’t get any weirder?

The Republicans are countering the Democrats allegation of being weird by welcoming RFK Jnr onto their ticket, a man with a worm in his brain who recently admitted dumping a dead bear in Central Park (see Greg Palast’s ‘I was on the phone with RFK Jr. When he lost his mind’.)

Robert F Kennedy Jnr says he wants to respond to America’s health crisis by forming an alliance with a man whose diet consists of McDonald’s. Kennedy is a conspiracist who has claimed (among a great number of other things) that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people and is at the forefront of a movement whose disinformation has contributed to the return of Measles, which in 2000 had been declared eliminated in the US but has now come back with a vengeance. Stop and consider that this is the man who wants to deal with the USA’s health crisis.

But in the world of American political sub cultures he will play well in three ‘tribes’.

The vast tribe of tie-dyed refuseniks, Dead Heads and stoners who have veered over the years from one giant conspiracy to another edging their way into now believing RFK is somehow speaking truth to power. These people started reading Noam Chomsky and ended up reading Naomi Wolf. Before welcoming RFK Jr to the stage on Friday, Trump promised, if elected, to release all remaining documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy. This is like catnip to conspiracy culture but also represents its complete collapse from a standpoint of thinking critically about power and the state – to being wholly consumed by the far-right while still allowing people some vestiges of rebel status. The Venn Diagram of these sub-cultures has crossover to some on the ‘left’ spouting about Ukraine who see RFK and Trump as allies.

The second group is older, for who the Kennedy name still holds some aura. The generations of Kennedy may be greatly diminished – the decline and shift from RFK to RFK Jnr is astonishing and epochal – but in the mythology of America RFK Jnr rides on the coattails of not just his father and his uncle but the enduring myth of them as ‘outsiders’ and rebels.

His entire family were swift to disown him.

The third group are the influencers, the health gurus mired in pseudoscience, those genuinely concerned with the multiple health crisis facing American society from Big Pharma to diet-related illness. For this group the anti-vaccine rhetoric was a gateway drug to the libertarian right, and the idea of a state response to the pandemic was a sign of a coming socialism. In the hyper-individualism of the vast online alternative health scene the story is of heroic self-promotion, self-healing and self-development – collective action is an anathema.

Kennedy’s hypocrisy given his previous statement on Trump is astonishing but in MAGA’s post-truth world nothing matters. His endorsement is already being framed as an act of selflessness and a chance to ‘Unite America’.

It is easy to mock Trump and deride RFK Jnr. Very. But the movement they represent is rich and diverse pulling in huge swathes of disaffected people struggling to make sense of the world. Callison and Quinn Slobodian, authors of ‘Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol‘ describe the constituents of this new movement as: “hippies, antiwar activists, libertarians, constitutional loyalists, anti-state monarchists (Reichsbürger), neo-Nazis, alternative medicine practitioners, anti-vaccination campaigners, and apolitical left-liberals.”

It’s important to realise that for many of this diverse new tribe it doesn’t see itself as being right-wing at all. The self-perception is of being a critical thinker not fooled by ‘the establishment’ and the ‘elite’ (despite, obviously Trump and Kennedy being just the personification of establishment elite nepo-babies).

Naomi Klein explains: “Despite claims of post-partisanship, it is right-wing, often far-right political parties around the world that have managed to absorb the unruly passions and energy of diagonalism. folding its Covid-era grievances into preexisting projects opposing ‘wokeness’ and drumming up fears of migrant ‘invasions’. Still, it is important for these movements to present themselves (and believe themselves to be ruptures with politics-as-usual; to claim to be something new, beyond traditional left-right poles.”

So here we are in a situation where a man whose entire family was synonymous with the Democratic party endorsing Trump, stepping aside in key swing states in the hope of a glimpse of power. It might work. Despite ridiculing these people (guilty) the DNC was a largely policy-free zone where the message seemed to be ‘forwards not backwards’. As Sarah Kenzidor (‘Distant Vibes‘) has observed: “The Democrats have gone from “Vote Blue No Matter Who” to “Vote Blue No Matter What.” They’ve gone from chastising the “low information voter” to creating a new political ideal: the “no information voter”. Harris cultists responded to the news of a campaign without policies in two ways: denying that it is true or insisting that it is fine, because “all that matters is winning”.

For some of us that rhetoric and that strategy (“get the Tories out”) might seem familiar.

The certainty of the ‘vibe-shift’ crowd seems like massive over-confidence and an inability to see where America is and where it is going. The contrails of post-corona politics have hit people harder than is being acknowledged and now mingle with a strong strain of old-school Red Fear paranoia:

Trump-Kennedy is playing out in the world where theories about Big Pharma and George Soros and Bill Gates mingle with anti-semitism and QAnon, which Trump was hinting at again yesterday. This is the conspiracy election, the ascent of the diagonalists.

Comments (3)

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  1. Daniel Raphael says:

    As ever, incisive and well-informed…far more informed than are most Americans.

  2. SleepingDog says:

    Hmmm… “all that matters is winning” sounds like a certain Scotland national football coach, and we all saw how that turned out. Just say no to dark arts.

    But for all the feverish overdetection of communism in political parties owned by capitalists, there are USAmericans who say they want private corporations to own science, own the Internet, software and commons. And global science is an idea communism, along with the open software movement and the digital commons. They’re not wrong to identify these as communism (like freely sharing disease research and vaccines). World capitalism depends on such communism (all the Internet walled gardens failed, it runs largely on free and open source software, and was built from state-funded science; privatised for-profit science gave us alchemy, communism gave us chemistry). So lots of capitalists support communism, it’s good for business, and improves public health (which is being degraded and destroyed by capitalism), and provides many things for free they can monetise like parasites, just like they exploit people, non-humans, resources, the environment in countries with quite different political-economic systems.

    But the USA was just as bankrupted as the USSR by the Cold War (which Reagan might have not realised until after becoming President). Their debts just haven’t been called in yet (though apparently they’re having a fire-sale to the Saudis).

  3. Edward Cairney says:

    What’s the alternative? To be fair Trump for all his flaws, didn’t start any wars but they started to spontaneously combust when Biden became president. If they can put an end to the forever wars, that’ll do.

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