Bobby's Bounce: RFK Jr’s Lesser-Evilism

 

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1656323009139953667

Oops. I didn’t see that one coming.

So, let’s talk about RFK Jr.’s decision to help Donald Trump win the presidential election.

Because, to be clear, Bobby is not just—excuse me, not even dropping out of the race. He could have done that, correctly denouncing the Democratic party’s anti-democratic legal and electoral tactics that made it impossible for his campaign to compete within the party or as a third party, and, indeed, denouncing the whole duopoly-enforced structure of American electoral politics that makes it impossible for any non-duopoly candidate to succeed. If he were really interested in building the possibility of a progressive third party, he could have stuck with his very recent critique of how  “President Biden[/Harris], President Trump offer no solutions” and ended his campaign without transferring allegiance to either of the duopoly parties or candidates. He could have approached Jill Stein—as he apparently did both Kamala and Trump—and tried to negotiate agreements on highlighting issues that were important to him in return for urging his supporters to vote for her.

Instead, he is re-positioning himself and his campaign as supporting elements of the campaign of one of the extant duopoly parties—the Trump-Republican Party campaign. He will take himself off the ballot in battleground states, in order not to “likely hand the election to the Democrats,” and he’ll stay on the ballot in “safe” red or blue states where it won’t make any difference. This mirrors the “safe states” strategy of previous “left” third-party candidates, and it defines him as an auxiliary Republican, just as it defined those candidates as auxiliary Democrats. Whether he or they want to admit it, it’s an abdication of any effective third-party building, and a capitulation to one of the two duopoly parties and to duopoly politics tout court.

So, why is RFK Jr. doing this? Why is he abandoning a third-party building effort and any pretense of duopoly non-partisanship, and instead—in an astounding turn for a Kennedy—dedicating himself to the defeat of Kamala and the Democrats, and the victory of Trump and the Republicans? Here’s his campaign-suspending address, with his three reasons highlighted:

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

Jim Kavanagh

So, it looks like we’re heading into a major war. With its assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief “ceasefire/hostage release” negotiator, topping off its incessant, deliberate slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza and its accelerated evictions and home demolitions in the West Bank, Israel has erased any scintilla of pretense that it is doing anything else but trying to “finish ’48”—-achieve the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine via extermination and expulsion.

Israel has crossed all and everybody’s red lines. Israel is telling the world it will kill anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at anytime of its choosing, and it does not give a damn about what anyone in the world thinks of it. It is acting with complete, insouciant, contemptuous disregard of international law, conventions, and common morality, certainly of the people and nations it considers its adversaries and of the countries on whose support it depends.