In 2020, as Covid swept the nation, followed by lockdowns and then a summer of protests and riots, a strange series of political realignments and reversals occurred. To some of us who entered adulthood during the War on Terror, it felt like a bizarro-world inversion of the politics of that era, with liberals amplifying risks to justify an indefinite state of exception and conservatives warning of the dangers of politicized fearmongering. The suspension of civil liberties under emergency decrees was suddenly embraced across much of the left of the political spectrum (with exceptions for certain ideologically approved gatherings). Meanwhile, left-wing anti-authoritarian philosophers like Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault found new audiences on the political right.
The 2024 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was, among other things, a test as to whether these crossovers would have any lasting political repercussions. Although Kennedy staked out positions on a variety of issues, the main impetus for his run was the backlash against various draconian Covid policies, especially vaccine mandates, but also school closures and the censorship of dissenting views on medicine and public health. He staked out a critical position on pandemic-era governance to differentiate himself not just from the Democratic Party, with which he was affiliated until recently, but from Donald Trump, whom he accused of overseeing “the greatest restriction of individual liberties this country has ever known.”
While pandemic politics for the most part ended up sorting along partisan lines, there were pockets of discontent on the left side of the spectrum—for instance, parents in progressive districts who revolted against prolonged school closures and black Democrats who were suspicious of the segregationist implications of vaccine mandates. To the extent this internal unease with the party’s Covid turn found a candidate to represent it, it was Kennedy: a scion of the party’s most illustrious family and, for some decades, a prominent environmental lawyer in good standing in liberal circles.
Kennedy also promised to revive the somewhat forgotten but vibrant tradition of what we might call “left conspiratorialism,” with which his family name is prominently associated. (Oliver Stone’s JFK is perhaps the most influential cultural product to come out of this intellectual lineage.) After the rise of Donald Trump, liberal punditry revived Richard Hofstadter’s McCarthy-era patrician contempt for conspiracy theory as a fringe right-wing phenomenon. In the process, many seemed to forget that suspicion of the “deep state” has a long history on the left—and has contributed to some important achievements, including the exposure of nefarious programs like COINTELPRO and MKUltra.
“RFK Jr. was a problematic figurehead for the Covid backlash.”
Yet RFK Jr. was a problematic figurehead for the Covid backlash. For one thing, he had long supported the Green New Deal and a suite of other environmental policies loathed by fellow opponents of the Great Reset. This was on view in a March 30, 2020, tweet he has never deleted, in which he cheerily declared that the recently imposed lockdown “hasn’t just slowed [Covid], it reduced lethal air pollution.” In other words, he at first seemed—along with many on the environmentalist left—to embrace the emergency measures as a means of addressing health as well as ecological crises. His turn against Covid policies seemed to be propelled instead by the idée fixe that had already begun to make him a pariah pre-pandemic: his claims about vaccine safety.
When RFK Jr. began his crusade against childhood vaccination in the 2000s, it was a niche issue with a heterogeneous ideological appeal: Both conservative religious communities and affluent liberal enclaves were susceptible to the concerns he promoted, especially the supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The political weaponization of mandates in 2021 briefly made vaccine controversies a more prominent flashpoint than ever before, elevating Kennedy’s profile in the process.
At the same time, because it was Democratic politicians who spearheaded mandates, vaccine politics were rapidly polarized along partisan lines in a way that hadn’t been true previously. In this context, Kennedy gave a certain bipartisan imprimatur to anti-mandate activism, given that his family name was practically synonymous with the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, by the time RFK Jr. launched his presidential campaign in 2023, the most likely course of action for vehement opponents of obligatory vaccination was simply to vote Republican. And in any case, by then this cluster of issues had waned in significance almost as rapidly as it had come into the center of public debate.
The relatively high polling numbers enjoyed by Kennedy’s independent campaign until recently most likely reflected support from disaffected Democrats frustrated with the Biden presidency on economic grounds. The main source of his appeal to these voters probably wasn’t the unique positions he staked out, but his name. A subset of Americans disgusted with politics as usual heard in it a vague promise to restore the hope and optimism that, in our collective mythology, were extinguished by the assassination of his uncle and his father—a stark contrast with the dark mood that overtook the country under the senescent Biden.
In the latest indication of the memoryholing of Covid politics, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have made “freedom” the leitmotif of their 2024 campaign. They, along with most Democrats, have apparently forgotten that a few years ago liberals were mocking critics of lockdowns and mandates for fetishizing “freedumb.” Regardless, this has seemingly been enough to recapture a portion of the anti-Biden Democrats and depress Kennedy’s polls in the process. It seems likely, therefore, that his dropping out and endorsing Trump will redound mostly to the latter’s benefit, at least marginally.
The absorption of the non-Democratic part of the RFK Jr. base into the GOP is the latest indication that the ideologically eclectic Covid-era revolt against biomedical authoritarianism is defunct. What has replaced it is a revival of old conservative jeremiads against “big government” and related warnings about looming communism, now central to the Trump campaign’s messaging. Given the seriousness of the issues raised by critics of Covid policies, it is unfortunate to see them consigned to oblivion by one party and resolved into anachronistic bromides by the other. In this sense, RFK Jr.’s run should be remembered mainly as a missed opportunity.