Just a few months ago one could hardly imagine a more improbable headline than “Kennedy Defeated in Massachusetts.” That the defeat should be overwhelming (55%-45%) and at the hands of an elderly career politician only adds to the unlikelihood.
Yet that is precisely the fate that befell the last living champion of America’s most famous political family of the last sixty years, when Robert Kennedy’s grandson, four-term Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III, was humiliated in his home state by his failed attempt to oust Senator Edward Markey in the recent Democratic primary.
Beyond the perceived arrogance and sense of entitlement that characterized Kennedy’s bid to overthrow a fellow Democrat with whom he had no significant policy differences, beyond the decline of the Kennedy brand over time—the big story here is how Markey pulled off this shocking upset.
He did it by making a brilliant political alliance with the most glamorous star of the Democratic party’s progressive left—Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC)—for whom he had earlier stepped forward as a much-needed Senate sponsor for her Green New Deal legislation.
By virtue of this singularly astute political move, Markey was instantly transformed from an exemplar of the “old politics” into a hero for Progressives everywhere—and for the powerful environmental movement in particular, who with passion poured money and manpower into Massachusetts to oppose the upstart Kennedy ,who had ineptly tried to straddle a variety of green issues dear to the Progressives.
A most interesting sidebar to this high-profile contest was the surprising intervention of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose ringing endorsement of Kennedy violated a long-standing tradition of not getting involved in primaries between members of your own party.
Clearly Pelosi wanted to show her clout by being a better picker of winners than AOC, and Kennedy’s seemingly assured win was a safe place to do it. Her endorsement, however, proved useless to Kennedy and damaging to her, and it will certainly further energize young Progressives in their frequently successful and continuing efforts to primary aging stalwarts of Nancy’s caucus, in support of the larger cause of remaking the Democratic Party in their own image.
This tension between progressive” and “establishment” Democrats, so well exemplified by AOC and Pelosi is not a new thing, but rather the latest manifestation of a wrenching struggle for the party’s soul that goes back to the most tumultuous convention in party history—Chicago 1968.
There is no better description of the origins of this conflict, than that provided by Theodore White in The Making of the President 1972 in a chapter entitled “From the Liberal Idea to the Liberal Theology,” in which he describes “how a liberating idea becomes an intellectual prison”.
In a nutshell, amidst the chaos of the 1968 convention, the embattled nominee Hubert Humphrey authorized concessions to angry insurgents supporting Eugene McCarthy regarding rules and delegate selection procedures that would have unforeseen consequences ending in requirements establishing fixed quotas based principally on race and gender that would bind all future Democratic Conventions. Thus, was created the foundation of the identity politics that has bedeviled the Democratic Party ever since.
In 1968 Progressives lost the nomination, and the attendant disruption elected Richard Nixon. But the procedural concessions they won allowed them to seize the party machinery in 1972 and propel the surprising nomination of George McGovern—a famously pyrrhic victory that led to Nixon’s forty-nine state landslide.
A half-century later, in strangely similar circumstances, the Progressives of Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic nomination to the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton, and the attendant divisiveness certainly aided Donald Trump’s narrow victory. But the Sandernistas did win significant procedural concessions that bore important fruit in the writing of the Democratic Party platform in 2020.
Only future historians will know how far this analogy will run, but the pattern of internal Democratic conflict across three generations is abundantly clear.
In reflecting on the Kennedys’ apparent “last hurrah,” we should note that it was the assassination of young Joe’s grandfather in June 1968 which set the stage for the maelstrom that would engulf the Democratic Party just two months later in Chicago.
Sophocles never plotted a more ironic multigenerational story line. Had that senseless murder of RFK not occurred, the final curtain for Camelot would have been very different, as would the history of the United States.
Bill Moloney is a fellow in conservative thought at Colorado Christian University 's Centennial Institute and a former Colorado Commissioner of Education. He studied at Oxford and the University of London.
Robert F. Kennedy campaigning for President, 1968