Daniel Greenfield | August 26, 2024
On Friday evening, a Kennedy joined Trump on stage in Glendale, Arizona. The first major Trump rally after the DNC convention featured RFK Jr as an answer to the Republicans who had come out for Kamala at the showcase event for her political campaign. The Kamala campaign had enlisted a former Pence aide, Stephanie Grisham, a former discredited press secretary, and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, while Trump brought out Camelot on stage. But what happened at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale went beyond a matchup of names.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was more than the heir to a storied last name and acronym, he was the most successful third party presidential candidate since Ross Perot took on Bush and Clinton. Earlier in the summer before the Biden coup, RFK Jr had been polling as high as 10% despite media coverage that veered between hostile contempt and determined disregard. And he had done it without Perot’s massive fortune or the media’s endless willingness to give the billionaire airtime in the eventually successful hopes of kneecapping Bush and aiding Bill Clinton.
While there were other third party candidates in the race, RFK Jr polled so well because he was seen by his supporters as representing a genuine alternative to the two-party system and whose idiosyncratic views were authentically his own in sharp contrast to candidates like Cornel West or Jill Stein who just represented even more left-wing versions of the Democratic Party ticket.
Prior to his endorsement of Trump, there had been talk of meetings between the Kennedy scion and both presidential campaigns, but in a compelling speech, RFK Jr laid out his reasons for breaking from the party so tied to his family and rejecting overtures from the Kamala campaign.
“Democracy,” RFK Jr said, had become “little more than a slogan ” for the Democratic Party. “In the name of saving democracy, a Democratic Party set itself to dismantle it,” he charged, describing constant legal battles by the DNC to keep him off and force him off state ballots.
Similar stories had been previously told by No Labels, a Democratic organization which had sought to field an alternative bipartisan ticket, and by Rep. Dean Philips: Biden’s actual primary opponent, as well as any Democrats or third party candidates who had challenged Biden.
RFK Jr then went on to describe a rigged “sham primary” for Biden followed by a “palace coup” for Kamala and the installation of a “candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate” who “has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic.”
The former candidate compared the actions of the Democrats to that of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in trying to keep him off the ballot and off the air with the media maintaining “a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me” and government agencies partnering with Big Tech firms to suppress him on social media in which a federal judge recently described as “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”
The Biden-Harris campaign and now, post-coup, the Harris-Walz campaign, has argued that it is defending democracy and that its opponents, especially Trump, are threats to democracy.
“Are you ready to vote for democracy?” Biden began his remarks at the DNC. He warned of “clear and present threats to our very democracy”, claimed that “democracy has prevailed”, “democracy has delivered” and that “we came together in 2020 to save democracy” by presumably voting for him. Now, “democracy must be preserved” by voting for Kamala.
“We saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024,” Biden claimed at the DNC. “The vote each of us casts this year will determine whether democracy… will prevail.”
Democracy, to Biden and many Democrats, isn’t the act of voting, but voting the right way.
In his speech however RFK Jr laid out a different vision of democracy, not as outcome, but as process. To Biden, any process, no matter how undemocratic, that ends with him or his party winning, means that democracy has prevailed. RFK Jr however argued that a party that his family had long belonged to and even defined had abandoned the process of democracy.
Due to election rigging, “relentless, systematic censorship and media control”, RJK Jr argued that he could not compete, but he made an argument for a system where candidates could compete. That’s a democratic system rather than the current Democratic Party system.
When RFK Jr walked out onto the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena in the suburbs of Phoenix to endorse Trump, the media predictably ignored the event and smeared the former candidate, but he was standing for what he believed in: the core values of democracy, not Democrats.
The two visions of democracy have long been on a collision course as they are in every leftist system. Communist dictatorships from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Democratic Kampuchea, (Pol Pot’s genocidal dictatorship), and the people’s democratic dictatorship in Communist China called themselves democratic while being ruthlessly brutal.
That is the path that RFK Jr may well fear America’s own Democrat establishment is on.
The Harris-Walz campaign, even more than the Biden-Harris campaign, showed the country what a closed system that calls itself democratic looks like, while RFK Jr showed what an open system that offers more than a one way street should be like. In a country that is increasingly centralized, where decisions are made from the top down, open systems are disappearing.
RFK Jr is not saying anything that most Democratic Party insiders don’t already know is true.
“We went through a very open process, a very inclusive process. It was bottom-up, I don’t know if you know that. That’s what I’ve been told to say!” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a behind the scenes contender to replace Biden, joked with the Obama vets of Pod Save America, some of whom had played a role in the Biden coup. He then called Kamala’s takeover “30 minute convention.”
While Trump and RFK Jr have fundamental policy differences, each had to fight their way through a process that was anything but a “30 minute convention”. That is an open process.
By taking the road that he did, RFK Jr had made the decision to fight for what he described as the “core values” of democracy rather than democracy as “little more than a slogan.”
“I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960,” RFK Jr began his speech ending his pursuit of the presidency. On Friday, he attended his first Republican rally.
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