Why RFK Jr is so seductive America fell for a true outsider

America’s two-party system effectively functioned so long as the country was more or less defined by tense but clarifying polarities: coastal city and heartland small town, north and south, industrial and agricultural, rural and urban-suburban — even, at a certain post-war point, suburban vs everyone else. Democrats and Republicans sometimes shifted their different constituencies, but the shift occurred along clear ideological or geographical lines.

But the dissolution of American small towns, the conversion of cities from affordable, if gritty, havens to gleaming, exorbitantly priced enclaves, the rise of the increasingly unaffordable suburb in every region, the head-spinning transformations of the information economy, the new centres of gravity spawned by Silicon Valley and the digital revolution — all have made the two-party system nearly irrelevant and almost totally dysfunctional. If ever a country needed a parliamentary system, in which its increasingly fractured reality could resolve itself into a cohesive factionalism, it is the Not-So-United States of America. But the two-party system will never be dislodged from American life. American idealism needs the conceptual simplicity of two parties the way it needs a simple framework of good and evil.

The result is Donald Trump, the first of what is sure to be many party leaders who are barely of their party at all. In this American moment of hybrid cars, and sexually hybrid people, and hybrid work-patterns, and hybrid economies, American leaders are also becoming hybrid as their party’s frameworks disintegrate.

Trump is, clearly, composed of stark contradictions: a populist cosmopolitan, a louche devotee of God, a tribune of both the moneyed class and the working class. In her understated, endlessly self-correcting, self-adjusting and repositioning way, so is Kamala Harris, whose withdrawal from public scrutiny is an invitation to be all things, no matter how contradictory, to all people. Both Harris and Trump, then, are de facto third-party candidates breaking the boundaries of what their parties stand for, as they appeal to a country whose various boundaries — geographical, economic, cultural, personal — are being broken apart and reconfigured every day.

Enter RFK Jr, who was, for a time, the thing itself, the political figure the entire country has been waiting for, the very figure each party both fears and longs to assimilate and cultivate: the synthesising, unifying, bold and original alternative to a desiccated two-party system.

Kennedy’s announcement, in April 2023, that he was going to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination struck terror into the party. And for good reason. Kennedy had all the trappings of the deus-ex-machina hybrid candidate. He was, nominally speaking, a staunch liberal Democrat. But beneath that, he embodied the power of legend thanks to his lineage; unlike Jeb Bush, he was not merely a dynastic descendant, but a mythic transcendent, his family history well-shrouded in the manifold mysteries of the past. Most important of all, though, he possessed a rare and precious energy that has vanished from the American scene. He represented a counterculture. More specifically, he embodied the essence of a counterculture. He was a walking, talking “Fuck you”.

America has always thrived on countercultures, in politics, society and the arts. But in politics, it hasn’t had one since the Sixties. Occupy Wall Street couldn’t even come up with a leader’s face to put on its often-admirable sentiments. In society, a counterculture hasn’t thrived since the various waves of feminism and gay rights, the LGBTQ movement being a set of ultra-refinements. Black Lives Matter? BIPOC? More ultra-refinements. The entire woke movement was a commercially restless status quo simply turning over on its side.

The absence of a counterculture in art is even more telling. From America’s Ashcan artists, to abstract expressionism, the Beats, pop art, and the Happenings of the Sixties, America’s defiant art movements often fuelled, to one degree or another, its political and broader cultural changes. But for the past 50 years, as titanic sums of money overtook art, society, culture and politics and put even the most diabolical American energies at the disposal of PayPal: Zip. Nada. Rien. Nichevo. The last time any American came close to hearing a consequential, beautiful, original, startling, profound “fuck you” was, probably, when Ben Kingsley pronounced the first of those two words with two syllables on that semi-countercultural phenomenon, The Sopranos.

If, on every point of the political spectrum, that chthonic phrase seems to be at the core of people’s politics, if casting a vote has now become synonymous with throwing a punch, it is because America has been, for the past 50 years or so, in search of a counterculture. Unable to find it in art, popular or high, people turn politics into a form of art brut. And since the heart of a counterculture has been to confront structures of power with the simple, deconstructing, levelling fact of biology — King Lear’s “poor bare, forked animal”; Montaigne’s “kings and philosophers shit” — it is no wonder that “blood” and “murder” are often on Trump’s lips, it is no wonder that he is consumed by the idea of immigrants cooking and devouring household animals. “Fuck you” is, after all, the fundamental biological act. But it has been RFK Jr who has elevated biology to its preeminent countercultural role.

Kennedy’s entire politics are centred on biology: his anti-vaxxer convictions; his warnings about cancer-causing cellphone towers and radiation; his belief that endocrine disruptors — chemicals found in plastic and pesticides — are affecting children’s sexual development; his certainty that emotionally blunting psychiatric drugs are behind the rise in school shootings. The bear and the whale, and even the seemingly compulsive sex, are run-offs from his political and intellectual obsessions. The promise of the countercultural turn to biology is twofold: the chance to clear away rotting structures of civilised power by returning to “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”, and the sheer democratic power of being physical, which is a gift everyone possesses. For a brief span of time, Kennedy seemed to offer both.

Kennedy is gone from the national scene now, felled by character flaws that are as fascinating to analyse as they are impossible to tolerate. No one wants Sardanapalus to be president of the United States. But his popularity is proof of concept: America is teeming with Olivia Nuzzis, vulnerable to the seductions of outlaw defiance. Hybrid outsiders will continue to make their way to the increasingly accessible inside of American politics until, one day, if things keep declining as precipitously as they are, the American eagle is replaced, to the huzzahs of Bacchanalian voters declaring Year One, with that legendary icon of a once-flourishing counterculture: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.