From Counterculture to Culture and Back Again

On Robert Kennedy Jr. and the right.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks onstage during Bitcoin Conference 2023 on May 19, 2023, in Miami Beach, Florida. (Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Bitcoin Magazine)

After I wrote the last page and showered and ate lunch and feel calmed down now. Heard a song on the radio though—was turning away from rock and roll music which only wasn’t me and got a conservative station with a girl singing ‘Go ahead and hate your nabor, go ahead and cheat a friend’—but I heard, at the time, ‘Go and kill (or shoot) your nabor,’ which disturbed me greatly.

… Hurrah! Hurrah! Great day for democracy and capitalism! A 50 percent voter turn out is expected: Now THAT’S confidence in America. 

Diary of Arthur Bremer, would-be assassin of George Wallace
(Errors in original.) 
(Nixon won a 49-state landslide)

About that other Bobby Kennedy: When William F. Buckley Jr. was asked why Attorney General Kennedy refused to appear on Firing Line, Buckley’s television show, he answered: “Why does the baloney reject the grinder?” 

Anno Domini 2023: So much baloney, so few grinders.

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  1. Jmunozj

    I was a young man when I began teaching at a small college (Feather River) in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California. In a retirement speech to the graduates I said that I became Joseph Munoz while teaching.
    Raised by a farm girl from Pembroke NC, and a classical pianist, jet aircraft mechanic father … God, tradition & books were everything. Western traditions are like us , mortal, yet offer us things of incomparable beauty and stability in a world that changes
    at lightning speed.

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  2. Blathram

    This is an amazing column -- and one of the reasons I subscribe to the Dispatch. I'm commenting for the first time just to applaud. Before Donald Trump, and before I became interested in politics, I loved practicing yoga, until I experienced and then investigated its dark cultish recent past (at least since its adoption in America) and present. People within the "yoga world" or "wellness culture" have begun to identify its connections to anti-vax culture and (around the time of the 2020 election) Q-Anon. It's helpful to read this column and revisit the topic from a different perspective - not wellness influencers lamenting a weird "rightward/conservative" turn, but a conservative writer lamenting its adoption of anti-intellectualism (and weird yogis). Fascinating. I will keep coming back to this column. It feels full-circle for me. Thanks to the Dispatch for funding this kind of writing, and thanks to Kevin for the hard work.

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  3. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    “ You can listen to my conversation with my old podcasting partner, Charles C. W. Cooke, here. ”

    Best episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen in 2023! Just kidding, but in all seriousness I was really excited about this.

    Of all the topics to go long on, this was a good choice. Each of your points is clearly articulated and insightful. I wish I could respond positively to each paragraph, but I’ll confine myself.

    “ But deconstruction and all that stuff was hard work, and graduate school meant something like a vow of poverty, and so the voguish intellectual pursuits of Foucault and Derrida eventually were supplanted by the less-demanding pseudointellectual pursuits of identity politics, the ever-mutating and ever-expanding world of 2SLGBTQIA+, “white privilege,” and the like, which promised easier and more lucrative career paths to college-educated white progressives.”

    Very true.

    “ The right is politically incoherent in part because its regnant authoritarian tendency is at odds with its historical libertarianism and in part because it is rent by competing authoritarian visions:”

    So true. Good characterizations of each of those visions, by the way.

    “ Consider this strange encomium to Kennedy and his new book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. where I spent 15 very productive years as an editor and writer. It is written by Matthew Scully, who once was the magazine’s literary editor and who has had a notable, though not altogether happy, career as a speechwriter:”

    Thank you for addressing that! I read it just the other day and was surprised NR published it! Zero mention of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense, and typical mischaracterizations designed to appeal to certain populist right-wingers. I didn’t know who Scully was and was surprised to see he worked in the Bush admin.

    “ (Russians: Another case of strange new respect!) If you had asked a conservative in the 1980s what would define conservatism in the early 21st century, his answer would not have been AI-generated homoerotic Donald Trump pin-up pictures.”

    Sad but true.

    “ In 2016, I argued that conservatives had to choose whether theirs was going to be a movement of cranks and quacks and conspiracy-peddlers or a movement of meaningful conservatism. They made their choice, and I suppose they are learning to live with it—standing athwart history, barking at the moon with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the filth, waste, and imbecility for which he stands. Maybe they will choose to be something else, someday.”

    Boy I sure hope so.

    I notice you call them rightists. I suppose they still technically exist on the right, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that they aren’t even right-wing, let alone conservative.

    “ Rolling Stone is, of course, infamous for publishing made-up junk that accords with its half-educated political sensibility”

    That is EXACTLY what I thought of when I saw that name. Having been a student there when they published that story, it will probably be forever linked in my mind to the name “Rolling Stone.” Still, when I saw that RFK Jr. had gotten a piece retracted there, I thought, “Man! That’s how you know it deserved to be retracted.”

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  4. Pschneider_9332

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfnJi7yLKgE

    17:37 thru 18:54

    RFK is a "filthy, imbecilic, crank"?

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  5. Avatar photo
    ReneFerrerJr

    Wow.
    Thank you.

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  6. Lee

    "The opening section ran a bit long this week..." Um, yeah? 'Took me several sessions to get it all read.

    But, thanks!

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  7. DFG

    “You don’t get John Lennon without Mark David Chapman, Ram Dass without David Koresh, no Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada without Jordan Peterson, no Bill Ayers without Timothy McVeigh.”

    Overall a great piece but what the hell did Jordan Peterson do to get included in that rogue’s gallery? What did I miss?

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      I noticed that too. I mean, Peterson’s a bit of a weirdo and a crank at times, but in a list with Timothy McVeigh, he doesn’t quite make sense.

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  8. Betsybowditch

    When Flower Power climaxed in the Tate-LaBianca murders, a great many sentimentalists asked: “How could this happen?” The better question would have been: How couldn’t it?

    When I read Jack Teixeira, the National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents, foresaw a race war I was reminded that was Charles Manson's goal.

    He expected the murders to be blamed on African-Americans, who would rise up and be put down by the white establishment. Eventually everyone would turn to him to lead us out of this abyss. To jumpstart this, he had his crew place a victim's wallet under the toilet tank lid in a South Central gas station or someplace approaching the African-American community. Months later, it was still there when law enforcement descended.

    Of the two books I read as a teenager, "Helter Skelter" by Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson gang, and "The Best and the Brightest," by David Halberstam left a lasting impression and remain in print today. They address different aspects of the 1960s. In the case of the latter, Kennedy and Johnson had a brain trust who got Vietnam all wrong.

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  9. Cathy C

    Little guy's a cutie!

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  10. L O’Reilly

    After reading this essay I returned for the nth time to Irving Kristol’s brilliant and lucid essay “Countercultures” in Dec ‘94’s issue of Commentary. Give yourselves a gift and read it. It is to his eternal credit that KW in his personal life ( to the degree that I can speak to it ) is following Kristol’s wise counsel in resisting “ irrationalism and a derogation of reason” by “[ breathing ] new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies.” Having said all that, it is not clear to me, in the DeSantis v Disney battle, that the threat to economic liberty in the former’s position is worse than the insidiousness of the latter’s. KW often, and rightly, talks of trade-offs. Well, resistance often has its costs.

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