Democrats need tough liberals like Bobby Kennedy 

Bending laws and norms to the breaking point, President Trump is ordering political show trials of critics, stifling free speech, subjecting Spanish-speaking citizens to police state tactics and choking our economy with tariffs. 

Trump’s MAGA followers greet his autocratic power grabs with vindictive glee — finally, we’re on top! Everyone else is asking: Where are the Democrats?  

The party establishment seems adrift, unwilling to make a clean break with flawed policies like Bidenomics, climate alarmism and tolerance of illegal immigration and social disorder that have thoroughly alienated working class voters. 

Democrats need a new breed of leader — liberals tough enough to challenge progressive orthodoxies and move the party back to the  political mainstream.   

For inspiration, they could do worse than look back to Sen. Bobby Kennedy’s (D-N.Y.)1968 presidential campaign. Although tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet, Kennedy’s run offers Democrats valuable clues for building a bigger, cross-class coalition.  

Then as now, the nation’s civic fabric was ripping apart. The country was convulsed by antiwar protests, campus takeovers by student revolutionaries and the “counterculture” rebellion against traditional social and sexual mores.   

President Lyndon Johnson stunned the country in March by declining to run for reelection. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination the next month by a white man sparked rioting and looting in major cities. Our society’s wheels seemed to be coming off the bus. 

The 42-year-old Bobby Kennedy jumped into the presidential race, incensing antiwar liberals who had rallied around Sen. Gene McCarthy (D-Minn.). But primary voters saw Kennedy as their best hope to prevent the New Deal Coalition from cracking and to return to the optimism and excitement of his older brother Jack’s “New Frontier.”  

Most relevant to his party’s contemporary dilemma, Kennedy had a singular ability to reach across the nation’s racial chasm, winning support from both Black and white working-class voters.

The story of how he did it is engagingly told in “Bobby Kennedy, Liberal Patriot,” a new monograph by my Progressive Policy Institute colleague Rick Kahlenberg and Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute.

Kennedy’s approach, they note, synthesized liberal goals like codifying civil rights, fighting poverty and taxing the rich with solid middle-class values of work, family, faith and patriotism.

As attorney general, Kennedy had worked to protect civil rights leaders, integrate schools and enforce voting rights in the south. However, in 1968 he parted company with liberals calling for racial preferences, saying they inevitably would fracture working class solidarity.  

With the passage of landmark civil rights laws, Kennedy came to believe “poverty is closer to the root of the problem than color.” Like King, he believed pursuing colorblind policies would be the best way to fight Black and white poverty, create more equal opportunities for all citizens and eventually erase the color line. 

Like Bill Clinton a generation later, Kennedy stressed the dignity of work and criticized welfare programs as “demeaning and destructive” of self-esteem and family stability. “But instead of welfare, instead of the dole, instead of a handout, what we need in the United States is to provide jobs for all of our people.”

On crime as well, Robert Kennedy’s views were closer to those of working-class families than college-bred elites. He was not afraid to invoke “law and order” which the latter still mistake for (or at least construe as) veiled racism.

“The real threat of crime is what it does to ourselves and our communities. No nation hiding behind locked doors is free, for it is imprisoned by its own fear,” he said in Indiana.

As Kahlenberg and Teixeira note, Kennedy’s views were shaped by profoundly patriotic sentiments. While a critic of Lyndon Johnson’s escalations in Vietnam, Kennedy had no use for protesters who burned the flag or spelled America with a K.  

At Notre Dame, students booed Kennedy when he denounced student deferments from the draft. He never let misgivings about the war shade into the acrid anti-Americanism of student radicals.

“Astonishingly for a peace candidate, RFK polled (in Indiana) as well among those who favored LBJ’s conduct of the Vietnam War as among those who opposed it,” the authors say.  

Kennedy’s toughness also revealed itself in a tendency to challenge audiences rather than pander to them. Asked by a medical school student who would be the ones paying for his plans to fight deprivation and poverty, he shot back, "You are. You are the privileged ones.” 

Kennedy considered being an American a privilege that obliged citizens to give something back to their country. His call for a domestic Peace Corps foreshadowed Clinton’s voluntary national service AmeriCorps program.

The high hopes Kennedy aroused — he was mobbed Beatles-style at campaign events — were crushed when he was assassinated in June after winning the California primary.  

That November, Richard Nixon (R) rode white backlash into the White House, marking the beginning of blue collar America’s long march away from the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, much of Kennedy’s pragmatic, tough-minded liberalism was reprised by Bill Clinton and the New Democrats under the rubric of “opportunity, responsibility and community.” 

At this anxious moment for our country, Kennedy’s history should be required reading for Democrats who want to make their party great again. 

Will Marshall is founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute.