RFK Jr. and the Architecture of Electoral Revolution: VotePact on Steroids

RFK Jr.'s run for the presidency can be both an opportunity or a peril. Or it could be part of a larger strategy to upend the establishment. Needed: A challenger to Trump's phony populism.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s run for the presidency, which he officially launches on Wednesday in Boston, has generated excitement among some of the most thoughtful people I know. And I’m sure alarm in others for obvious reasons.

I can’t claim to be immune from some level of anticipation about such a run, but there are serious issues and I would argue contradictions in his candidacy, some of which have been raised and some of which to my knowledge have not that desperately need to be outlined. I raise a few below. Seriously assessing such issues leads me to expand on my long held position that the VotePact strategy is likely the most promising way to challenge the establishment. Indeed, it should be widened.

One friend, Meryl Nass, who has worked with Kennedy, is very excited about his presidential run.

Others, such as the thoughtful socialist scholar Victor Wallis, who happens to live in Boston and tells me he will attend Kennedy’s announcement, have praised Kennedy’s bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci which was released in late 2021. He views Kennedy’s candidacy mainly in terms of how it may force open the public discussion of the health issues. While many are accusing Kennedy of disinformation, his backers charge far more damaging disinformation has come from the government, major media and Big Pharma. That’s clearly true on the subject of Covid origins.

Another friend, Cindy Sheehan, “supports Kennedy but not his presidential run”. Cindy rightly notes the numerous ways that the DNC rigged 2020, 2016 and past elections. And it’s been fairly widely reported to be already set to rig 2024 even worse. It would be exceedingly unlikely that the DNC would allow Kennedy to gain the nomination.¹

Kennedy seems aware of this but has not articulated a strategy to combat it that I’m aware of. In his recent interview with Jimmy Dore, he ultimately simply said that he needs to try this run.

Max Blumenthal, I was surprised to see, recently seemed to want Kennedy to make the Democratic base more vibrant. I can understand that, but it’s not a clear goal: There has been a serious school of thought in the left, perhaps best articulated by the late Bruce Dixon, that past candidates, like Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders were “sheepdogging” — keeping people on the left in the Democratic Party where they could be controlled and their labors would invariably come to little or nothing at all.

Thus, it’s possible that Kennedy, if he runs for the nomination, loses and then endorses the nominee will be taking “sheepdogging” to a ridiculous new level. Kennedy would then go from being possibly the most prominent critic of pandemic policies to the most critical endorser of a second Biden term. This assumes Kennedy gets meaningful traction and Biden wants his endorsement.

RFK Jr. and Trump

Kennedy himself has drawn a parallel between his candidacy and that of Donald Trump, effectively arguing on Jimmy Dore’s show that if Trump and MAGA could basically take over the Republican Party, then why can’t Kennedy and his supporters take over the Democratic Party. While there is a certain logic to this, it may be seriously flawed in at least two ways: Trump was endlessly featured in Big Media in 2015-2016 which had the effect (some, not me, would argue completely unintended) of building excitement for his candidacy. It seems unlikely that Big Media would act in a similar manner toward Kennedy, though twisted attacks upon him, which have already begun, may help build his candidacy to a degree — and some online indy media outlets with some reach will doubtlessly be promoting Kennedy’s candidacy with some effectiveness. And of course, Kennedy could spark a real grassroots movement, using local meetings, yard signs and internet platforms.

Secondly, Kennedy, and virtually everyone else from my POV, has failed to properly understand Trump. I simply don’t buy that Trump was an antiestablishment figure who got rolled over by the deep state. As I’ve argued, Trump did things for the establishment that no conventional president could have done. This means that the establishment benefitted from Trump’s presidency — and might benefit from another one. As I wrote in 2014:

The mantra of “change” is being used to peddle the never-ending use of the Reversible Straitjacket of the Democratic and Republican establishments. This manifests itself as “seesaw politics” and what I’ve called [in 2004] the guillotine pendulum, helping ensure the continuity of what some call the Deep State.

This guillotine pendulum is useful for the establishment in that it allows the overall system to be brazenly hypocritical as it takes a guise in whatever president happens to be in power, using the rhetoric de jour to advance whatever Machiavellian policies are called for.

(Kennedy has pointed specifically at challenging the nexus of government and corporate power, which is indeed a central problem. But in terms of actually challenging the polices of the establishment, I have not yet seen Kennedy articulate exactly how he would do that beyond saying that his background as a lawyer who sued numerous government agencies gives him unique insight. I would suggest that massive forced exposure of state secrets from Day One would be key to putting the establishment on the defensive and opening the door to mass prosecution of establishment officials.)

Trump being part of the establishment has profound consequences for the strategy of creating an architecture of electoral revolution as I argue below.

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Kennedy’s Limited Foreign Policy Crit

A recently widely cited tweet of Kennedy’s has drawn praise from many.

While it’s certainly a breath of fresh air compared to anything coming out of the circles around Biden or almost any major politician, it’s a remarkably pragmatic crit. I’ve seen such pragmatic crits fail over and over as the US Empire manages to use various mechanisms to assert its power, it looks like a bumbling Empire until it’s not. So, to me, if anything it doesn’t go far enough, after all, some people benefitted a great deal from the Iraq and Ukraine wars. Part of the problem with this is that when a crit seems good but is pragmatic and/or doesn’t withstand real scrutiny, the establishment will point out contradictions which will be used to dismiss any meaningful crit.

A particularly notable shortcoming of such a crit is that it omits the role of the pandemic and the exposure, as I’ve argued for three years, of the role of biowarfare. If it is part of the US establishment arsenal that it could cause or threaten epidemics, then we need to redefine what counts as foreign policy, military policy — or even domestic policy. It would be highly ironic if Kennedy doesn’t make such connections given the work he’s done on the pandemic. Doing so in a manner understandable to a propagandized public needs to be a major undertaking.

Interestingly, the tweet above links to a Reuters piece titled “Oil leaps 6% as OPEC+ shocks markets by cutting output target.” A strange hook for an environmentalist. More generally, I’m not sure I know Kennedy’s views on lots of subjects. What’s his position on Israel? Venezuela? Medicare for all? Has he thought through such positions, including how the pandemic has impacted them?

The Architecture of Electoral Revolution: VotePact on Steroids

The VotePact strategy is that people from the “left” and “right” team up, syphoning votes in pairs from establishment Democrats and Republicans. I’ve long advocated this and it was tragic that Ralph Nader didn’t adopt this in his runs for the presidency. He was in a strong position to appeal to people on either side of the partisan divide. The only time this was meaningfully tried with any resources was by a PAC backing Gary Johnson called the “Balanced Rebellion” in 2016 (not by Johnson himself) and that helped him get more votes than any independent candidate since Ross Perot. If an independent candidate used this strategy as the core of their campaign, I argue they could win.

Taking the VotePact idea to its extreme, its ideal version would be if there were an antiestablishment candidate in the Democratic primaries (there are now arguably two: Kennedy and Marianne Williamson) — and one in the Republican primaries. Then, on the assumption that these antiestablishment candidates lose (given that the DNC and RNC will use every mechanism to ensure that outcome) they team up. They either launch a joint independent run or endorse an independent run. See my recent interview with the women of The New View.

In the 1990s, I thought of VotePact as the intersection of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. The recent “Rage Against the War Machine” protest largely organized by the People’s Party and the Libertarian Party show such a fusion is increasingly possible, even necessary. At minimum, such an effort gives people “somewhere to go” and therefore some leverage over the Democratic and Republican establishments.

But part of what’s greatly needed now is an actual populist, a real antiestablishment figure to challenge Trump. (I don’t think Ron DeSantis will do.) This would serve many purposes including setting the record straight about what Trump as president did (name John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, back Israeli and Saudi aggression, give massive tax breaks to the rich, rubber stamp the Federalist Society’s Supreme Court pics) and didn’t do (stop funding the creation of potential pandemic pathogens, rebuild the infrastructure, go after Big Pharma and hedge fund crooks, ditch NATO, bring the troops home).

One unique benefit of VotePact is that it is assassination and impeachment proof. Both the president and vice president would be equally (though possibly in different ways) distasteful to the establishment.

One final note on the Kennedy candidacy, and in particular the contrast to Trump’s endless showmanship: Kennedy’s vocal issue, his spasmodic dysphonia. This would seem to be a serious liability. But I view it as an opportunity. We’ve had quite enough of smooth talking politicians. Serious truth can sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. What we need are people with sufficient integrity to implement decent policies. Can Kennedy give voice to that? 

1. There is at least one possible historical counterexample to this. Robert Parry has argued that Robert Strauss, who was DNC Chair in 1972, was a mole and actually helped ensure that George McGovern became the Democratic nominee so that Nixon would win the election. This may be of no relevance to the situation with Kennedy since he may be in a far better position to withstand attacks from any Republican nominee.