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DR. STRANGEKENNEDY  
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Rick Perlstein
November 27, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ The reactionary playbook frames all COVID-era public-health
measures as an elite conspiracy to enrich what it calls “a small
group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders.” It's also flypaper
for conspiracy theorists on the left. _

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - Caricature, by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

I had expected to write more columns in the run-up to the election on
the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I wanted to explore its
complexities and contradictions. But guilt got in the way. Democratic
campaigners were having so much success scaring voters with the thing
by depicting it as _simple_—a book of spells the next Republican
administration could cast to make democracy disappear—that I went
another way.

The election results, alas, have mooted my reticence.

Project 2025, as I’ve been saying
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remains a contradictory thing. The incoming
administration _does_ hope
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cast parts of it like magic spells—for instance, Trump’s
announcement that he’ll bring universities to heel by threatening
their accreditations (read all about that on pp. 320, 332, 351, and
486). On the other hand, the Heritage Foundation’s dreams of their
plan serving as Trump 2.0’s playbook seem to have proven hubristic,
with another, more politically supple outfit
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appropriately named America First Policy Institute) slipping into the
role Heritage imagined for itself, even if the project and
the Svengalis who compiled it
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valuable to do entirely without
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Which all leaves my original judgment
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much intact: Project 2025, in all its complexity, is a useful catalog
of what conservative tactics and policy plans look like now. Something
we ought to take advantage of—as a tool for informing our
resistance, and as a textbook about how conservatism in 2025 _works_.
And so, class, gather around. I’m about to tease out one of its more
subtle lessons.

GEORGE ORWELL ONCE WROTE AN ESSAY ABOUT CHARLES DICKENS
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contains an important insight into one of the strangest paradoxes of
politics: Why does conservatism so often clothe itself in the language
of liberalism?

Orwell’s insight starts with the question of why do the people atop
England’s class structure like Charles Dickens so much. Why is he
buried in the church
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monarchy performs its sacred rites? The argument Dickens struggled to
convey in all his work, after all, was the fundamentally dehumanizing
nature of Victorian England’s rigid system of social hierarchies. So
why would those who were most passionate about preserving them want to
have anything to do with his books?

Orwell answered, “All through the Christian ages, and especially
since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the
idea of freedom and equality; it is only an _idea_, but it has
penetrated to all ranks of society … Even the millionaire suffers
from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.
Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds
emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood.”

_MORE FROM RICK PERLSTEIN_
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Apply that to today’s conservatives. The ideal of freedom and
equality is something like the modern world’s official ideology—so
much so that conservatives are always pretending
that _they’re _the ones who honor that ideal best, even as they
work assiduously to undo freedom and equality. Think of the way
they’re endeavoring to give an authoritarian-run federal government
control over university curricula, which is the most illiberal goal
imaginable. That is explained, in the pages of Project 2025, as a
fight against universities’ alleged “illiberal chill.”

Or, as I’ve written here
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think of how they label efforts to loosen American incumbent racial
hierarchy—the project we call “civil rights”—a
conspiracy _against_ civil rights (for the people on the top of that
racial hierarchy).

Sure, some people just come out and _say_ that they think some kinds
of people are superior to other kinds of people, proudly devoting
their lives to keeping the inferior orders in their place. But that
only proves Orwell’s point: Those people tend to do so
under pseudonyms [[link removed]].

I CALL THIS CONSERVATISM’S DOG-AND-MUTTON PRINCIPLE: They are like
the hound Orwell describes who shows an adorably guilty face when
he’s caught with meat in his mouth. When right-wingers show the
public a face that hides their ugliness, it is sometimes, like that
pup, out of guilty conscience: They know at some level that
conservatism is not _moral_. Other times, they just do it because it
works: Making their ugly aims harder to see makes it easier to get
away them.

One example of the dog-and-mutton principle is the delight
right-wingers derive from recruiting figures formerly identified with
the left
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The claim that the left _used to be _open-minded and humane, but now
they’re a bunch of reactionary scolds, used to be Ronald Reagan’s
old schtick: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left
me.” Now it belongs to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his minions.

My colleague Emma Janssen has ably demonstrated
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the liberal-left tropes in Kennedy’s trick bag—his language about
unaccountably greedy agricultural and pharmaceutical
corporations—can only end up being wrenched to reactionary ends. If
there are still any RFK-curious out there among liberals, consider an
even deeper foundation to the insight: Whatever Kennedy’s previous
ideological identification, his project now is rightist at its
essence.

The goal of right-wing politics, aka “conservatism,” is a society
defined by authority and hierarchy, full stop. There is no particular
inherent policy content to this, as it has taken on a remarkable
elasticity of forms across history. For instance, though Americans
typically think of conservatives as idealizing “small government,”
it was Germany’s conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck who
invented the modern welfare state, in order to secure the loyalty of
the German working class for his internal project of
“Kulturkampf,” and his external project of colonialization. In
America, in the 1920s, many in the Ku Klux Klan called for a fully
socialized medical system—for the same psychological reason that
Donald Trump keeps around a retainer to squirt sanitizer on his tiny
hands: They were obsessed with germs, frantic to make sure the filthy
rabble invading our shores did not spread their cooties to _them_.

This obsession about pure bodies that RFK plugs into is a continuous
tradition on the American right, especially the far right, though
today it is a relatively obscure one. I once listened, baffled, as
Phyllis Schlafly for some reason launched into a lecture to me about
how pristine were the comestibles she put into the mouths of her
children. Before “living clean” became a woo-woo thing, it was
something people laughed about when it came to the right.

Remember the classic scene
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or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb _(1964)? The
loony general Jack D. Ripper is explaining why he’s launched a nuke
to take out the Soviet Union—because they are just _this_ evil:
“A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids
without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice.
That’s the way your hard-core commie works.”

That foreign substance was fluoride, introduced into America’s water
supply after World War II, generally considered responsible for
causing as much as 40 percent fewer dental cavities in children. Now
Robert F. Kennedy wants it gone, just like General Jack D. Ripper.
Kennedy is a scion of that old-line right-wing purity of essence
obsession. But he couches it in the language of the left-winger he
used to be. “The Republican Party is now the party of labor unions,
the party of working people, of the American poor,” as he put it in
the same interview
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which he announced his intention to do away with fluoridated water,
and also to make vaccine-taking optional and potentially bring back to
life some of the most dread diseases in modern history
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Whatever the original tributaries of his ideas, they have etched a
mind that is right-wing in its deepest structures. It is almost
Nazi-like. Everything Kennedy says about health presumes the existence
of two kinds of human beings—one pure and superior, the other impure
and inferior. Two kinds of governments, too: one that protects the
purity of its superior subjects with things like “vaccine choice,”
the other that forces impure foreign substances into everyone’s
bodies, even the superior people who don’t want them, because those
substances are just agents of _control_. Superior people consume
their own, superior agents of health, which is actually _expensive_,
requiring special foods, special supplements, special exercises. Sorry
about that, working people and the American poor.

Note how often vax-deniers say they don’t need to be inoculated
because they are inherently strong. For someone like Kennedy, the boss
who appointed him, and the followers who venerate them both,
truly _public_ health—policies that aim at equal outcomes for
everyone—is the health of the rabble, looked upon as something
disgusting.

What they consider to be “healthy” has nothing to do with the
democratic but inherently messy practice of peer-reviewed science.
The _rhetoric_ of Kennedy’s cockamamie public-health populism
talks about liberty. But ultimately, it is “health” imposed,
top-down, by the charismatic leader—or those who manage to cozy up
to him as his clients.

TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE FOOLED. Jake Tapper of CNN, for example: “The
new focus on Americans’ unhealthy diets (and the roles of Big Ag and
Big Food) is absolutely overdue and welcome,” he tweeted
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Trump’s announcement that he would make Kennedy his secretary of
health and human services.

Of course, were someone like Jake Tapper serious about his concern for
our food system, he could have featured heroic critics like Marion
Nestle [[link removed]] on his shows all
these years. But, as Kamala Harris used to say, these pundits not
serious people. Even if the consequences of their clownishness are all
too serious.

Calling reaction “liberal,” because the people espousing it used
to be liberal, or bear some vestigial liberal position—for now—is
something the study of Project 2025 can help us with. It can help, for
example, those simple folk over at Axios_, _Mike Allen and Jim
VandeHei, who breathlessly report
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how “Trump’s liberal cabinet … captures the dramatic ideological
transformation of the Republican Party.”

Tulsi Gabbard used to be a Democrat, you see. RFK Jr. is cool with
abortion, supposedly (though it actually depends
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what day it is). The hedge fund billionaire appointed Treasury
secretary used to work for George Soros, though working for Soros in a
financial role has zero to do with Soros’s liberal activism.

But talking about Trump’s cabinet like this sure makes them sound
less threatening, just like a dog’s surface adorableness, caught by
his master in the act of raiding the larder, shouldn’t distract from
the viciousness that will be visited upon a stranger who gets in his
way.

The phantasmagorical vision of Kennedy’s pretense to making the
public healthy by decimating existing institutions of public health is
all over Project 2025. A grimly humorous example is in the Department
of Homeland Security chapter, which recommends the Coast Guard readmit
all personnel “dismissed from service for refusing to take the
COVID-19 ‘vaccine’”; the scare quotes are theirs. The reason: It
will make for “improvements in the recruiting process.” Because
nothing makes normal people more thrilled to spend weeks inside an
ocean-borne tin can than sharing it with hosts for a deadly pathogen.

So it is that, as so often with the craziest right-wing ideas,
they’ve dressed up their attempts to eviscerate any reasonable
public-health measures to fight the next global pandemic in the
language of humanitarian uplift.

In the State Department chapter, for example, the pandemic is
described as something that was exploited by “international
organizations” to “trample human rights in the name of public
health.” Later in Project 2025, COVID is a case study in the
violation of “transparent, scientifically grounded, and more nimble,
efficient, transparent, and targeted response that respects the unique
needs and input of patient populations and providers.”

And I mean, yes, pandemic public-health measures were far from
transparent, far from perfectly conceived and executed. But the
language, straight out of a Harvard School of Public Health textbook,
is the tell that something other than tender concern for the
vulnerable is afoot. I mean, do you really think anyone at the
Heritage Foundation really cares about the “unique needs and input
of patient populations and providers”?

The HHS chapter includes this line: “We must shut and lock the
revolving door between government and Big Pharma.” It sounds like
something Bernie Sanders would say. Read the whole chapter, and you
recognize it as part of a saga meant to frame _all_ COVID-era
public-health measures as an elite conspiracy to enrich what it calls
“a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders.” Calls
to ban pharmaceutical advertising, for which RFK has also received
praise from some on the left, sound great, too—but in context, they
come off as a Trump-style vengeance play against a rival power center:
something to use as a bargaining chip to bend Big Pharma to their
will.

It’s terribly dangerous, and the danger goes far beyond RFK.
Authority and hierarchy are what it comes down to: just one more way
that Donald Trump shall be as God. Even if he has to make RFK choke
down a Big Mac to prove it.

* RFK jr.
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* conspiracy theories
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* Big Pharma
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* George Orwell
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* Dr. Strangelove
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