RFK Jr. isn't a spoiler for Joe Biden
Plus: pay-to-stay laws, 'promises that bring despair,' and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
RFK Jr. isn’t a spoiler for Joe Biden
Perhaps the most baffling political narrative of the past 12 months or so is the notion that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going spoil the presidential race for President Biden. If you’ve been wise enough to stick your head under a rock and thus missed all 2024 election coverage to date, here’s a taste:
Politico Playbook: 3 reasons Dems worry about RFK Jr.
CNN: DNC heightens attacks on RFK Jr. as a spoiler who will help Trump
Salon: Democrats are right to be worried about the RFK Jr. effect
The Daily Beast: How Dems are already quashing a nightmare RFK Jr. scenario
New York Post: RFK Jr.’s sister ‘concerned’ his candidacy could hand Trump victory
The gist is that Democrats are worried about Kennedy’s ability to muster voter enthusiasm, a few wins he’s had on the ballot access front, respectable polling (c. 10-15 percent in national polls), and a non-negligible war chest. “All [RFK Jr.] can do is take away votes from President Biden and make it easier for Donald Trump to win,” said Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis (D). Per the DNC, he’s “funded by MAGA donors to be a stalking horse for Donald Trump.”
I will admit I’ve not looked into RFK Jr.’s funding sources, though my instinct is it’s not as simple as the DNC suggests. But even if I’m wrong on that, all I can say is I think these MAGA donors are getting a real bad deal. For my (much smaller pile of) money, it’s pretty obvious that if Kennedy spoils this race for anybody, it will not be Biden. It’ll be former President Donald Trump.
I don’t have airtight data to back this up, granted, and a lot could change between now and November. Still, polling allows for my read on this, and even if the quantitative case is uncertain, I find the qualitative case quite strong. (Relatedly, I find Kennedy’s claim that the Trump camp has repeatedly asked him to be veep entirely plausible.)
It’s mostly about vibes. After all, as Astead Herndon aptly summarized at The New York Times, Kennedy has long since made a name for himself in conspiracist, antiestablishment circles:
If you knew about RFK, Jr., before he ran for president, it was probably because of [his] advocacy. And it’s not just vaccines and autism. It’s conspiracies about 5G wireless and Wi-Fi, that they can get into your body and cause cancer. It’s election denial long before Trump turned that conspiracy mainstream. This is a man whose life has been defined by mistrust.
When I was first becoming politically aware, during the George W. Bush administration, that description would’ve read as left-wing (as indeed it did for Kennedy himself in that time). Yes, there were some very distrustful right-wing types c. 2002, but theirs was not the dominant conservative mood. Republicans then were vocally opposed to big government, but not if it wore a uniform, and they were much more normie when it came to stuff like vaccines. Two decades ago, RFK Jr.-style conspiracism would’ve read as dirty hippy stuff.
It doesn’t anymore. Now, all that is very right-coded. As Times columnist Ross Douthat has argued, the right and left have in a real sense switched places:
One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A.
The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.
It’s true that Kennedy’s overall policy record isn’t really right-wing, let alone conservative. But I don’t think it’s far enough afield to matter—not in the Trump era. RFK Jr.’s environmental stuff is anti-free market, but so is Trump’s base in many ways, and climate policy isn’t controversial the way it was 20 years ago. RFK Jr. isn’t consistently pro-life, but again, neither is Trump.
As I wrote for CT a few months back, when Kennedy was still trying to primary Biden, I don’t think such policy quibbles outweigh the vibes. For many voters, presidential selection is more about self-expression than mundanities of governance, and at that level, the statement one makes by voting for RFK Jr. is much closer to Trump support than a ballot for Biden.
2. What I'm reading this week
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, by Nadya Williams (forthcoming in October)
3. A recommendation
Give this piece from Reason’s Emma Camp a read. It’s about pay-to-stay laws, on the books in dozens of states, wherein people are charged for their own prison stays:
In Florida, prisoners are charged $50 for every day of their original sentence—meaning they keep getting charged, even if they are released early. When former inmates inevitably fail to pay this massive bill, it can prevent them from ever moving on from their period spent behind bars.
“Where I’m at today, I’m truly being stopped by one single barrier and it is a dollar sign,” Shelby Hoffman told WFTS Tampa Bay, a local news station. Hoffman was hit with a $127,000 bill for a 7-year prison sentence—even though she only served 10 months. Since her release from prison, Hoffman has gotten clean and rebuilt her life. She’s soon to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. However, she can’t start her dream career as a case manager because of her outstanding pay-to-stay bill.
I understand the theory here, of course. I can even see how it’d be cast in a “libertarian” light, as a way to let the general tax-paying public avoid footing the bill to punish others’ crimes.
But the practice simply does not match the theory, as for many people it will not be possible to pay a $50 day rate when they have no income because they are in prison. That means the cost either follows inmates after they’ve served their time, as here—functionally imposing a punishment too severe for the scale of the crime—or else the bill goes to their families—functionally punishing people who did not commit the crime at all.
There are good ways to cut down on the cost of our criminal justice system, but I do not think this is one of them.
4. Recent work
Destabilizing primacy | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
From the book of C.S. Lewis poems I’ve been reading a bit:
Lines During a General Election
Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear
All that; it is their promises that bring despair.
If beauty, that anomaly, is left us still,
The cause lies in their poverty, not in their will.
If they had power (‘amenities are bunk’), conceive
How their insatiate gadgetry by this would leave
No green, nor growth, nor quietude, no sap at all
In England from The Land’s-End to the Roman Wall.
Think of their roads—broad as the road to Hell—by now
Murdering a million acres that demand the plough,
The thick-voiced Tannoy blaring over Arthur’s grave,
And all our coasts one Camp till not the tiniest wave
Stole from the beach unburdened with its festal scum
Of cigarette-ends, orange-peel, and chewing gum.
Nor would one island’s rape suffice. Their visions are
Global; they mean the desecration of a Star;
Their happiest fancies dwell upon a time when Earth,
Flickering with sky-signs, gibbering with mechanic mirth,
One huge celestial charabanc, will stink and roll
Through patient heaven, subtopianized from pole to pole.
“ There are good ways to cut down on the cost of our criminal justice system, but I do not think this is one of them.”
That’s not really the real purpose though, is it?