“The past isn’t gone, it’s still being fought about.” That’s what Faulkner might have said about the hostilities between Democratic congressman Joe Kennedy III and commentator Hugh Hewitt after Hewitt’s column, “The Party Of Robert F. Kennedy Is Gone.”
Hewitt argues not only that Bobby is no longer with us, but that the party that produced him no longer exists. Having raised him and his older brother, and heeded his speech after Martin Luther King had been murdered, the Democratic Party has altered itself beyond recognition, and is no longer with us, he argued.
RFK’s grandson, now reportedly eyeing a primary challenge to Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., shot back that the party is still pretty much as his grandfather left it, and that Hewitt’s idea is “grotesque.”
Fortunately, there are among us some people who remember in real time RFK and his brother — who voted back then for them and their party, cried for four days at their televised funerals, and can attest to the claim that, like the two brothers, the party that made them is gone.
After Bobby was murdered, the party collapsed, and then veered sharply left for the next two generations. It allowed the civil rights movement to collapse into identity politics, endorsed the concept of something for nothing, defined the enforcement of law as forced occupation, and swallowed in its entirety the whole of the Left’s cultural revolution.
The Democrats have become the party of gender confusion, which would not have been an easy sell, one would guess, for Jack or for Bobby. They have also become the party of late term abortion, extended by Democrats just this past winter to cover the whole nine-month span.
If this is your idea of the party of John or of Bobby, then there’s a bridge in Massachusetts that I’d like to sell you.
Speaking of which, that last and least of the Kennedy brothers played his own part in destroying the world that had created his brothers. Ted Kennedy acted to transform the process of judicial nominations from the boring affairs they once were into a real-life “Hunger Games,” starting with his blast against Robert Bork in 1987 and continuing through the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas disgrace three years later. That latter episode introduced new levels of slander, hearsay, and soft porn into the process for what sadly would not be the last time.
The underlying cause in each case was to preserve abortion, which is now the only great cause that unites the whole Democratic Party. Just ask yourself, if you have a moment, if this is the party of Bobby.
This in itself is a great tragic matter, as the party of Bobby and the Democratic Party as it existed between 1933 and 1966 at the latest has reason to claim in the great court of history that it was the greatest political body that ever existed at all. In thirty-plus years, it confronted four immense crises — the Depression, the war, the post-war world order, and the civil rights struggle — and mastered all four as well as was possible.
But it then fell to pieces, leaving both parties to struggle uncertainly through the succeeding four decades for a replacement consensus that never arrived. In its time, the Democratic Party of RFK and JFK succeeded in being humanely compassionate, ferocious in war, creative in building new kinds of alliances, and resourceful and wise in confronting the violence that attended the movement for civil rights legislation — which thankfully all but died out almost completely once the great laws were passed.
The Party of Bobby died soon after he did, which was a great pity. Nothing since then has ever replaced it, and we really could use it again.
