This week’s confirmation hearings on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services present the Democratic Party with a conundrum: He is a ghost of the party’s past. Unlike some of Trump’s other controversial picks—like military veteran and Fox News personality Pete Hegseth—RFK is no lifelong doctrinaire conservative, arguably not a conservative at all.
“He is a ghost of the party’s past.”
This means the Democrats who are trying to figure out how they should come down on his nomination face a dilemma. He is more closely aligned with them on an array of issues than any other nominee a Republican president would be likely to put forward, and yet the stances that drew him into the MAGA orbit are at odds with the party’s claim to represent “the Science.”
If you turn the clock back just a few years, Kennedy was clearly more at ease with California liberalism than any sort of Republicanism, least of all MAGA. Even many of the beliefs that set him at odds with the mainstream were once coded as progressive, and found a friendly audience among left-wing talking heads.
In 2005, RFK appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and received a mostly friendly interview with the comedian-turned-newscaster. The subject of that appearance was Kennedy’s claim that the deleterious side effects of vaccines are underestimated. Stewart listened politely as his guest explained his theory that vaccines led to a substantial increase in autism rates. He noted that he was working on stories for Rolling Stone and Salon on the topic, and complained to Stewart that an ABC News story he had worked on was re-cut to minimize his hypothesis, which he suggested might have to do with the network’s revenue from pharmaceutical ads. Stewart was, if not completely won over, at least receptive, declaring: “With so many passionate people on the case of it, it would seem there must be something there. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Stewart wasn’t alone: Before the pandemic, which scrambled partisan views, vaccine skepticism was often found among progressive figures. Bill Maher, for instance, once sparred with former Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist, a medical doctor who defended vaccination from the host’s insistence that people shouldn’t vaccinate themselves against swine flu. But in recent years, the Democrats have become the party of defending scientific consensus, and vaccine skeptics have gravitated to the GOP, the decisive factor in Kennedy’s defection.Nonetheless, the former Democrat remains out of sync with most of his new party—and aligned with many in his old one—on a host of issues. Former Vice President Mike Pence opposes RFK’s nomination in part because of his lifelong support for a right to abortion. (Kennedy has been trying to assure GOP lawmakers that he’s changed and will now support efforts to limit abortion.) Some in conservative media have also blasted Kennedy for his prior statements of support for a single-payer health-care system.
RFK is also quite a departure from the Republican Party line in his skepticism towards Big Agriculture and America’s industrial food system. Even The Atlantic admitted that Kennedy’s views on things like cutting down the supply of processed food in our schools could be beneficial to Americans—though also noting that he would have more power to achieve these goals if he was nominated to lead the Department of Agriculture.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has admitted that he thinks that what RFK is “saying about the food industry is exactly correct. I think you have a food industry concerned about their profits, could care less about the health of the American people. I think they have to be taken on.” But Sanders also called Kennedy’s views on other issues “dangerous.” New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who is a vegan and fellow critic of the industrial food system, admitted to similarly conflicted feelings. “I’ve heard him say a lot of things that are absolutely right,” Booker told reporters last year when asked about the Kennedy scion.
The problem is that RFK’s other views, although once palatable to the likes of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, have become difficult for the party to stomach. And while Democrats’ knee-jerk defense of the scientific establishment often merits criticism, they aren’t wrong to look askance at some of Kennedy’s views. He and his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, have been a sort of headquarters for pseudoscience about vaccination, especially as it relates to autism.
Despite what Kennedy claims, there is no scientific basis for stating that autism is caused by any kind of vaccination. Autism rates have exploded in recent decades, but that’s mostly due to changes in the way we diagnose kids who in the past would’ve just been seen as socially awkward or cognitively atypical. Kennedy has also taken his autism pseudoscience in less well-known directions. He’s a promoter of a communications method for nonverbal autistic people called Spelling 2 Communicate, in which a facilitator holds up a letter board that then allows the autistic person to type out his thoughts. While it sounds reasonable on its face, the method is rooted in techniques that do little more than ventriloquize nonverbal people, who have proven unable to communicate without the facilitator prompting or nudging them.
As a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet, Kennedy would have more power than ever before to marshal federal resources in favor of his views. For Democrats, that means potentially having an ally who could help protect access to abortion and access to government health care programs while also promoting healthier diets and food systems to the extent his position allows it.
But it also means elevating a man who has become a firehose of false claims to the most important public health agency job in America—a role in which he could wreak havoc by working to curb the administering of useful medications by exaggerating or fabricating risks.
Wherever you come down on the choice, one thing is certain. RFK’s nomination is another sign that the Republican Party is becoming a much more diverse institution. Years ago, you would have only seen RFK elevated to the position of cabinet secretary if a left-wing vegan like Dennis Kucinich somehow made it into the White House. The GOP is increasingly open to the same kind of woo. Meanwhile, for better and for worse, the Democrats have taken up the role of defending the scientific and medical establishment.