Who are the Elites?
An investigation
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the son of a famed United States Senator and Attorney General. He is the nephew of an American president every single adult American knows something about. He grew up with wealth, mingled with celebrities, and even married one. He became, through his familial connections, a well-regarded environmental lawyer, and was a rumored candidate for various high offices in New York. He graduated from Harvard.
Now, he’s being nominated for a very important cabinet position. He may or may not be confirmed.
Is Kennedy elite? Yes, very much so. But a recent back-and-forth on social media highlighted, for me, a misunderstanding left-liberals have of the term. Donald Trump, as a former and future president, is an elite, and many extremely wealthy elites celebrate his rise and hope their taxes get cut. An elite accrues cash and power, and Kennedy and Trump have both. That is a true story, if one that has been sanded down, since both men now belong to a movement that has found success through an explicitly anti-elite posture. Or one that is, if riven with hypocrisy, genuinely anti-elite in the viewpoints it espouses. Kennedy himself is the embodiment of this. Certainly, if an elite can be defined as someone who, in addition to hoovering up money and power, is credentialed and properly reverent of long-standing institutions and ideologies, Kennedy is an oppositional force.
What he says makes a certain kind of elite—the professional class and corporate elite, culturally left-leaning—deeply nervous.
He has a long-running disdain of vaccines that predated his skepticism of the Covid vaccine, which was developed under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. He reviles a public health establishment that, for a period in the 2020s, was venerated by many cultural elites. On foreign policy, he holds conventional elite views on Israel (hawkish, anti-Palestinian) but has broken with the consensus on Ukraine, blaming the American government for escalating the war there and vowing, if he ever were president, to dramatically slash America’s military budget. To this day, among certain liberals, Kennedy is more hated than any of Trump’s cabinet nominees. They can accept Mike Waltz or Marco Rubio, but not Kennedy, the former Democrat. Nor Tulsi Gabbard, another apostate who has repeatedly flouted foreign policy consensus. At one time, Gabbard was a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, and if one plotted her and Kennedy’s policy stances on a range of issues, they’d probably still be closer to your median Democrat than Rubio’s or even Liz Cheney’s. But that hardly matters. Davos would have Cheney before Kennedy.
Notably, other anti-elite politicians have warmed, to some degree, to Kennedy. Bernie Sanders does not want fluoride yanked from the water supply and supports all vaccines, but he praised Kennedy for criticizing the corporate food industry for fueling America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics. Sanders represents an older strain of leftism that professional class liberals in academia, politics, and the corporate world have implicitly rejected, one sprung from the midcentury: a healthy skepticism of corporate consolidation and “party line” narratives. The trouble with Kennedy is he is wrong about the vaccines that have existed for many decades and eradicated diseases like polio. Vaccines have granted modern societies longer lifespans. Kennedy is also wrong to downplay entirely the success of the Covid vaccine. For older adults, it was a godsend, and those who were vaccinated were less likely to die.
But the professional class elite—the college-educated, higher-income Democrats broadly—should ponder why Kennedy has a following today and how he ended up in Trump’s embrace. It’s not a straightforward story. Mainstream voices have long bemoaned that trust in institutions is falling and misinformation is spreading. We are awash in lies and fabrications, and only aggressive regulation of social media can save us; the adults must come stomping through the room, they insist.
Reality, though, remains far more muddled. Covid is the prime example, and one that liberal elites have never seriously contemplated.