Our paper has already covered the candidacy of Cornel West, a liberal on the left wing of the major parties who is masquerading as a socialist. Today we will address our homegrown American Hitlerite, Robert F. Kennedy Junior. This towering clay-faced gargoyle straight from central casting has arisen to represent the disaffected but unconscious labor aristocracy and petit-bourgeoisie. He is the vomit, the detritus, thrown up by the impending collapse of the political system, by its failure to address the most pressing needs of the great masses of people, by its tottering illegitimacy, and by the two-party system’s failure to suppress the roughly one-quarter of each party’s constituency who despise their own party’s political orthodoxy.

Should RFK’s candidacy fuse with the bourgeois monster, the extreme right head of the fascist hydra that is even now stirring and drawing up plots to become the only head of that horrific abomination, he will graduate from a historical curiosity, a Hitler-in-miniature, to a full fledged fascist demagogue. As his campaign continues, he professes a more-and-more open dedication to Nazi ideology — on July 28 of this year, his official Twitter account tweeted out that he had tried to seek Secret Service protection: “Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request.” This, of course, is a reference to the popular white supremacist “numerical code” 1488, which is short for the 14 words (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) and the 8th letter of the alphabet (“H”) twice, for “Heil Hitler.” It should universally raise alarm when a potential presidential candidate openly employs the slogan of David Lane, who was one of America’s most infamous and successful Neonazi terrorists.

The policies this ornate gutter spout of a politician professes to support amount to little more than a grab-bag of reactionary positions masquerading as vague anti-establishmentarianism. Even his otherwise-correct positions are arrived at not through the application of consistent principles, but rather as a stopped clock accidentally displays the correct time twice a day.

The best known of the Kennedy rainspout’s positions is a firm commitment to various pseudoscientific conspiracy theories regarding vaccines, Wi-Fi, and COVID-19. He has also denied the well-demonstrated medical connection between HIV and AIDS, and parroted the “chemicals are turning the frogs gay” conspiracy, which falsely connects gender dysphoria to endocrine disruptors in the groundwater.

Economically, he is purely reactionary. He warns of “corporate feudalism” and rhetorically champions the break-up of big businesses and programs to help “small and medium businesses.” In other words, a literal return to the small production that created Hitler’s popularity among Germany’s small business owners and artisans in the 20s and 30s! This is the economic core of his political program, and it explains his appeal to reactionary petit-bourgeoisie professionals, smallholders, and so forth, and their ideologically similar stratum of the labor aristocracy. De-classed proletarians and sub-proletarians in the rearguard of their class may also rally behind him. Our little Hitler, if he can muster any popular energy, will ride this tide of discontent.

He is an advocate, like the fascist ideologues of the past, of class peace. “There is a growing coalition in this country,” he told UnHerd magazine, “of populist forces, on the Left and Right, that are convening now and finding common ground. And I think that really is probably the only thing that’s going to rescue American democracy.” In the same interview he decries the “financial industry” and bemoans the vanishing middle class. Identical language was used by the Strasser brothers, who were early leaders of the Nazi party, when they spoke of, “breaking the shackles of finance capital.”

His position on the environment — which one would expect to be developed and complex (he was an environmental lawyer) — is little different from that espoused by the Nazi ideologists. Like Richard Walther Darré, the Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture who popularized the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil,” RFK Jr. advocates for the “soulless nationless oil companies” to be dissolved as “enemies of mankind.” Which mankind? RFK believes that the U.S. imperial government and the People’s Republic of China are engaged in a secret arms race to produce ethnically-targeted diseases. Which ethnicities does he think they intend to target? The political category, “Caucasians,” which isn’t even an ethnicity in the context of RFK’s usage of the term! He’s on tape asking why COVID-19 doesn’t affect Jews or Chinese people to the same degree that it affects “Caucasians” when there is ample evidence to demonstrate it does. However, like any conspirator with an agenda, he’s quick to dismiss any science that doesn’t support his views.

 “In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, volkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature’s purity,” wrote historian Peter Staudenmaier in Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents. In an interview with Tablet Magazine, RFK made another typical Hitlerite statement: “[9/11] was also the beginning of the biosecurity state, which is a more potent enemy to justify this huge diversion of a big slice of our GDP to the same people, the intelligence agencies, the military agencies, and the associated industries, including the pharmaceutical industry…. They now control the media…. If you look at Anderson Cooper, he is not working for CNN; he’s working for Pfizer.” It’s apparent that RFK Jr. shares the same antimodernism and embrace of hokum as the original Nazis, and other fascist thinkers such as Julius Evola. 

Yet another commonality RFK Jr. shares with the Hitlerites of old is his ardent support of Zionism. “[O]ne of the primary themes of this campaign is to bring the Democratic Party back to its traditional support for Israel,” he’s on record as saying. “There’s nobody who is running for president today who is a stronger champion for Israel than myself.” Does this put him at variance with his Hiterlite forebears? Not at all. “[A]fter Hitler’s taking of power in Germany, when all anti-fascist forces in the world and the great majority of the Jewish organizations proclaimed a boycott against Nazi Germany, contacts and collaboration existed between Zionist leaders and the Hitlerite government,” reported a 1969 information bulletin of the Communist Party of Israel. Fascists, like Zionists, believe in unscientific racial theories and generalizations like “national character” (Volkstum). The colonizing terrorism enacted by Zionist settlers in Palestine is indistinguishable from the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum. These are theories RFK also appears to put stock in, based on the various conspiracies he endorses. In 1937, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazis, wrote: “Zionism must be vigorously supported so that a certain number of German Jews is transported annually to Palestine or at least made to leave the country.”

This is the man being pushed by the mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie’s extreme right elements like Joe Rogan, himself a sad caricature of Evola. This is RFK Jr. — our little Hitler.

To deny, however, that the candidates are different — to simply and blankly shout at the masses that they should ignore the imperialist elections — is to make a different kind of mistake. We must analyze and consider the positions of each candidate, determine what class-forces they represent, and articulate actual responses to their policy considerations. To stop our argument a stage short, to argue flatly that the political system is worthless without explaining in detail why and how, is to surrender the entire battlefield to the liberals, who will do their best to rehabilitate it in our absence.

There are also those who call themselves Communists who believe that, first and foremost, the duty of a Communist to achieve real reforms, now, for the working classes, the poor, the nationally and sexually oppressed. They are wrong. Winning reforms is not an end in itself. This debate was already fought, many times, in the past two centuries — from Bernstein’s initial betrayal all the way up through the economists blasted by Lenin. We will fight it again now. Winning reforms is a goal only insofar as it assists the organizing of the revolutionary classes and prepares them for the final battle with their intractable enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie. So, our question should never be, “how can we win reforms,” but must always be “how does this or that action further the cause of organizing the people for revolution”?

The political crises of the last decade have dealt sledgehammer blows to the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system. Debates over the Electoral College began as angry mutters from the Bernie supporters and took on new life after the 2016 general election when the Clinton dynast, Hilary, won the popular vote but lost the election. This breathed new life into the debate from 2000, in which Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election through the interference of the U.S. Supreme Court. We must not let up in our criticisms of the U.S. electoral process. Having shed its democratic disguise, we can’t afford to give the ruling class time to craft a new one.

In 2024, there are two “outliers” — candidates who have been thrown up by the “crisis in democracy.” These third-party candidates will run against the big machines, although in this case, like Bernie, one will run from “inside” the Democratic party. On the right flank we see another political dynast from a ruling house, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., our own little American Hitler; on the left flank, Bernie Sanders’ one-time vocal supporter, Cornel West.

How should we Communists treat the campaign of Dr. Cornel West? Our guest contributor, P. D. Goselin, wrote that Dr. West’s candidacy may “bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people.”

Dr. West is a bourgeois academic. West enrolled in Harvard in 1970, entering the social ranks of the ruling class, rubbing shoulders with the big, the “haute,” bourgeoisie. From Harvard, West went on to his graduate studies at Princeton. He is firmly ensconced in the world of ruling-class academia, and has worked as a professor at various Ivy-league institutions. That being said, he remains a left-wing public intellectual, and not a genuine progressive force. He was at one time an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and has claimed to be a socialist, although it’s not quite clear what trend of socialism he claims to follow. Materially, he appears to be another in a long line of imperial socialists or Revisionists, seeking minor social reforms to the domineering U.S. Empire.

He began his candidacy by a call for a “united front” strategy against fascism. This was a self-conscious reference to the United Front strategy of the 1930s Comintern. It’s not clear exactly what West wants to unite in his united front, since he has publicly recognized the Democrats as “milquetoast neoliberals,” but the sentiment is that all democratic elements, all radical elements, and all progressive elements — those bourgeois and capitalist forces dedicated to democratization, all anti-capitalists, and all socially progressive forces, regardless of class — must combine to stand against the encroachment of the Trumpist clique into mainstream politics.

Even since beginning the draft of this article, West has revised his campaign goals. Those he lists on his campaign website are Dismantling the Empire, Unleashing Democracy, and Saving the Planet, which sound vague and hopeful.

In a previous iteration of his website, he listed a goal to End the Wars, which included disbanding NATO. This version of his anti-imperialist platform was manifestly more politically advanced than the one that is now contained under Dismantling the Empire. Although his call for the dissolution of NATO and the end of the U.S. global military presence remains unchanged, he has added “increasing humanitarian aid to poor and vulnerable peoples,” which all Communists recognize as a neo-colonial stratagem in the U.S. Empire’s strategy of global domination.

Unleashing Democracy reads like a litany of late 1920s social-democratic programs: quality education, housing, a living wage, paid leave; curbing inflation, supporting unions, expanding social security, forgiving all student debt. These are all obviously desirable elements of a program, but on their own, again, do nothing to advance the cause of revolution. Still, they are political goals that Communists can, with some reservations, generally support. For our purposes, the most exciting part is the brief line that he will democratize unaccountable monopolies and oligopolies “with workers’ control.”

Lastly, there is a somewhat meaningless Save the Planet plank, which promises “invest[ment] in clean energy” and ending fossil fuel subsidies. Even if keeping such promises was possible, West’s demands are far too minor in the face of mounting ecological catastrophes.

In only a few days, West has reduced his demands from their previous iteration, which amounted to a meager but passable socialist minimum program, to nearly completely writing out any mention of economic justice. Further, West has no corresponding maximal program, a commitment to Communism, or any kind of socialist construction. This is no surprise, as he is not a Communist, nor, really, any kind of socialist. He has, in the past, made a number of anti-Communist remarks. In these things, Dr. West is not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses — those workers who profess some degree of Marxist education or self-education, such as the membership of the DSA — of workers in the U.S. Empire.

To that end, if his candidacy attracts a widespread following in the intermediate working masses — the not-yet-Marxist but class-conscious — it would not be correct to ignore it. Because his minimal program has some policies with which Communist organizations can present principled, limited agreement; because his positions are not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses who must be educated as to the correct, Marxist positions; because West can bring these issues to the forefront of public discussion, if West’s campaign is at all successful, it would not be incorrect for local and regional Communist organizations to support those initiatives while maintaining their revolutionary commitments. That is to say any truly Communist organization should not endorse him. To do so would be to join forces with our bourgeois class enemies. But we may loudly proclaim those parts of his program with which we agree — and just as loudly denounce those parts with which we disagree.

Of course Dr. West is not “correct” in any of his policies or positions. But if those policies and positions become topics of widespread discussion among the intermediate working masses, this will present an opportunity for Communists to explain the correct positions — so long as we: 1) are not seen as unduly pessimistic, 2) maintain operational and formal integrity apart from any campaign, and 3) maintain, at every turn, a commitment to a maximum program and never stray from explaining the necessity of revolution. It is not, therefore, that Dr. West can lead the masses. It is, rather, that Dr. West can be instructive for the masses. Through Dr. West, Communists can teach and help the proletariat and working classes to achieve that basic consciousness which they currently lack in the United States: consciousness of their class-in-itself, of their shared commonalities, of their shared economic, social, and political interests. Were our movement more developed, Dr. West would represent a regressive element that we would otherwise clearly shun, and clearly demarcate ourselves from. As it is, should a genuine connection between Dr. West and the masses manifest, and we have little reason to believe it will not, we should be prepared to make use of that connection and publicly state our agreement such as it is with his program. We should be preparing for the hour that Dr. West betrays the people or is betrayed by the bourgeois political class and be ready to make use of it to further help instruct the people.