This Isn't Nothing

n the wake of the Democrat convention, Alan Dershowitz, the most prominent living Jew, announced (here and here), specificially at the second link, "I am no longer a Democrat. I am an Independent."

Also in ther wake of the convention, Bobby Kennedy Jr, the most prominent living Kennedy and namesake of his martyred father, endorsed a Republican candidate for president and reiterated his previous departure from the Democrats.

“The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism and unjust wars,” he went on. “We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the full world against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.”

As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag and Big Money,” Kennedy lamented.

Although the Kennedys identified as Catholic, and it suited the hierarchy of the US Catholic Church at the time to tolerate this, they were never very Catholic in their personal affairs. The Democrats began to lose the Catholic vote early in this century, and prominent US bishops have now distanced themselves from prominent Catholic Democrats, in some cases, like Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco, going so far as to deny Speaker Emerita Pelosi communion. The liberal Cardinal Gregory has called Joe Biden a "cafeteria Catholic", which has Biblical echoes in the Old Testament prophets declaring that the Almighty no longer supports the kings of Judea.

So Bobby Jr's departure from the Democrats has less to do with the Catholics, who had already left the New Deal coalition, than it does with the Kennedys, who up to now had unanimously lent their glamour and prestige to the old Democrat coalition. Whatever Bobby Jr's siblings may say, the Kennedys are no longer unanimous, and it looks like Bobby Jr is the last flamboyant public Kennedy in the old, Joe Sr mode in any case.

This is simply a continuation of the conflicts that first emerged in the 1968 and 1972 Democrat conventions, in which the New Left gained control of the Democrat party and began to shed much of the old New Deal coalition:

The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left's inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent. There were lots of reasons for that, one of them being that most big union leaders didn't want to be in that stinky tent with a lot of hippies, feminists, dashiki-wearing black militants and "fags." (That last comes from AFL-CIO leader George Meany's description of the New York delegation to the disastrous 1972 Democratic convention: "They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO representatives!") Also, not a small matter: The New Left opposed the Vietnam War; again, most labor leaders supported it.

Still, the inability to forge a political movement that was as much about class as race and gender rights haunts the United States today. We saw the shadows of that struggle even in the 2008 presidential campaign, as supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traded charges of "racism" and "sexism," but few paid attention to the increasing openness of white working-class voters, especially men, to pick a Democrat again in a time of profound economic crisis. . . . The decline of the labor movement hobbled the Democratic Party, and so far nothing has come along to replace it, to represent the great majority of Americans who are disadvantaged by the ever-increasing power of corporate America and the wealthy.

This, of course, is the point Bobby Jr made while endorsing Trump. At the same time, Bobby Sr's opportunism when he campaigned on a New Left agenda before his assassination in 1968 allowed a Kennedy nostalgia movement to hijack rhe Kennedy brand, when neither Joe Sr nor John was anything like a New Leftist. This is the mistake David Axelrod makes when he says Bobby Sr "battled fiercely & eloquently against poverty, injustice and for economic fairness", or Bobby Jr's siblings make when they endorse "the values that our father and our family hold most dear".

The image of Bobby Sr, martyred after only briefly hoppimg on Eugene McCarthy's 1968 momentum, has been a key underpinning of the post-New Deal Democrat narrative. With his namesake publicly renouncing the post-New Deal party, it's sn underrated step in dispelling the Kennedy myth. In this, Bobby Jr isn't just a traitor to the Democrats, he's a traitor to his class. As the link just above suggests, the New Left has a strong class identity, and it would prefer not to truck with the working class. The new-style Democrats like the Kennedys because they're rich, not because they stand for anything.

And let's not forget that the rift between Alan Dershowitz and the residents of Martha's Vineyard has a strong class bias. Martha's Vineyard residents have confirmed that they are, indeed, shunning him, for reasons much like the complaints of Bobby Jr's siblings:

You defended and gave cover to this president who relentlessly disrupts and destroys all that we value and causes massive and lasting damage to our political system, our courts, our standing in the world, the environment and more.

Again, there's a strong sense that Dershowitz is a traitor to his class -- and indeed, if Dershowitz identifies as a New Deal Democrat aligned with labor, Jews, Catholics, and other ethnics, and middle class prosperity, this might well be the case.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're at an inflection point in the alignment of US political parties equivalenmt to the pre-Civil War period.