It’s almost certain that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not be the next Democratic presidential nominee, but the momentum of his campaign is a dramatic contrast to the uncertain prospects that Joe Biden can win a second term. While RFK Jr. is best known for denouncing vaccines, a major factor in his appeal to progressive Democrats has drawn scant media attention: He is making headway with denunciations of President Biden’s slide into fervent militarism.
It’s a deep concern, well below the radar of the D.C. press corps, that is causing many one-time Biden supporters to seek an alternative. Kennedy is now drawing support from a sizable proportion of Biden’s 2020 voters. An appreciable number of them see Biden as a leader who stubbornly, even recklessly, prefers arms buildups and confrontational rhetoric to genuine diplomacy.
While there isn’t much of an antiwar movement right now, there is a lot of antiwar sentiment — and Kennedy is deftly playing to it. His website lists “peace” as a priority, declaring that “it is not too late for us to voluntarily let go of empire and serve peace instead, as a strong and healthy nation.” The first pledge at the top of his home page is: “We will end the forever wars.”
Kennedy is calling for a halt to “the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening.” I agree with the gist of that message — it’s a central theme of my new book “War Made Invisible” — but RFK Jr. is a deeply flawed messenger.
Recent in-depth pieces by two prominent progressive writers — Naomi Klein in the Guardian and Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine — have presented devastating briefs against Kennedy’s faux populism. Yet his campaign has been gaining traction with Democratic voters. Especially among grassroots activists, a big reason is his critique of the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
As I’ve learned in recent weeks from fellow antiwar Democrats around the country, many are willing to overlook Kennedy’s specious and dangerous claims about vaccines because the stakes are so high in foreign affairs. The issues are existential for humanity, as relations worsen between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Washington is far from blameless. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has proclaimed a goal of weakening the Russian military, while Biden has explicitly called for regime change.
Sixty years ago, in his landmark speech at American University, President John F. Kennedy drew lessons from the U.S.-Soviet confrontation over the Cuban Missile Crisis that had occurred just eight months earlier. “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” Kennedy said. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
But such lessons seem to have been lost on President Biden. With good reason, many progressive Democrats and others worried about the escalating dangers of nuclear war are appalled by Biden’s current approach.
The Biden administration is plunging ahead with a program for “modernizing” nuclear weapons with a price tag of $1.7 trillion over the next three decades. And Biden has officially reneged on a 2020 campaign promise to end the nation’s military doctrine of potentially being the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.
The president won plaudits for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan nearly two years ago, but he has moved in hawkish directions since then. Pentagon budgets have soared with his blessing. A year ago, Biden sent a strong signal when he fist-bumped Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, amid the Saudi-led and U.S.-supported war in Yemen that has resulted in close to 400,000 deaths since 2015.
Such alliances are part of a pattern. Last month, Biden dramatized priorities when he effusively welcomed Indian President Narendra Modi to the White House as a military partner against China, despite Modi’s horrendous record of human-rights abuses.
Meanwhile, the reality that RFK Jr. is receiving enthusiastic support from some leading MAGA Republicans should not surprise us. Steve Bannon has called Kennedy “an excellent choice” to join a ticket headed by Donald Trump. While that’s unlikely, top Republican strategists are gleeful at Kennedy’s momentum, which they see as boosting the chances that the GOP can win the White House next year.
Kennedy is notably adept at pandering across the political map, with an ideological dexterity that has him appearing with eminent rightwing figures. As Rolling Stone reported in late June, the Heal the Divide super PAC, which uses superlatives to laud Kennedy while supporting his run, “is just one example of the nominally Democratic candidate running a campaign that’s awash in support from backers of Donald Trump.”
But numerous antiwar activists are now flirting with — or even embracing — the Kennedy 2024 campaign. I disagree with doing so, but the appeal is understandable. Kennedy is correct when he directly faults Biden for reckless militarism in the midst of the escalating dangers of nuclear war. The president keeps rolling dice that are loaded to come up omnicide.
Norman Solomon is cofounder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” was published last month.