Birds of a feather

The theme of the next part in my realignment series (check out the last one here) will be the convergence between (at least some elements of) far right and far left. But there are two news stories to deal with first, and they bear on the same theme: one is the Slovak election result, which we’ll look at tomorrow. The other comes from the United States.

When we looked at the US presidential election a fortnight ago we focused on the Republican contest. But president Joe Biden also has opponents for the Democrat nomination, albeit well out of the mainstream: mystic Marianne Williamson and anti-vaxer Robert Kennedy, son of the assassinated attorney-general and presidential candidate of the same name.

That’s how things stand at the moment. But on Friday Kennedy revealed that he would be making a major announcement about his campaign next week, on 9 October, and the signs are that he is preparing to leave the Democrat contest and run as either an independent or a third-party candidate. Apparently he has held some conversations with the Libertarian Party, which has recently moved so far from its philosophical roots that it might not be a bad fit.

Until now, most of the angst about Kennedy had come from the Democrat side: the worry was that by attacking Biden in a primary campaign he would weaken the president for the contest against the eventual Republican nominee – expected to be Donald Trump. A few months ago, when Kennedy was consistently polling in the high teens, that seemed a real concern.

Since then his poll numbers have dropped off and the Democrat establishment has rallied strongly around Biden, who has refused to take Kennedy seriously as an opponent. But the New York Times report still leads with the claim that a third-party campaign “would set off alarms among Democrats worried about its potential to cause chaos in November 2024.”

My feeling is the opposite: that a serious Kennedy campaign would hurt Trump more than Biden. It’s been clear from the start (although it has become even clearer) that he and Trump appeal to a very similar voter base, hostile to liberal and democratic values and to what we used to call the reality-based community. As Aaron Blake points out in the Washington Post (reprinted in the Age), “Republicans like Kennedy a heck of a lot more than Democrats do.”

Blake also cuts to the heart of the Trump-Kennedy commonality by quoting from a recent poll in New Hampshire, the first primary state. “The survey also asked people to use one word to describe Kennedy, and the most popular words [among Democratic-leaning voters] were ‘crazy,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘insane,’ ‘nutjob,’ ‘conspiracy’ and ‘crackpot.'”

So Trump as nominee and an independent or third-party Kennedy would be competing for much the same sort of voters. Republican voters who like Trump’s themes but have some personal discomfort with him could potentially be seduced away. And if Trump were to lose the nomination (and not run as an independent himself), Trumpist defections to Kennedy could easily doom the official Republican candidate.

Whether this is a case of convergence between left and right is less clear. America’s major parties have long been ideologically eclectic; polarisation has reduced that somewhat in recent years, but neither Trump nor Kennedy could claim any clear philosophical pedigree. The authoritarianism of one and the unhinged conspiracy theories of the other are instinctive, not reflective. Trump was once a Democrat and Kennedy nominally still is, but both fit the pattern of far-right politics more than anything that could be called “left”.

While they might seem to be natural allies, it doesn’t follow that they will necessarily work together. As I remarked some years ago, adapting Tolstoy, “all moderates resemble one another, but each extremist is extreme in his or her own way.” And if they end up as electoral rivals, it’s likely that both of them would lose out.

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PS 10 October: Kennedy’s announcement yesterday was in line with expectations, declaring his “independence from the Democratic party and all other parties.” But unless he teams up with the Libertarians or some other existing party, getting on the ballot in most states will be a challenge.