RFK Jr. Is a Bellwether

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a tangle of biographical ironies. He is an anti-elite renegade bearing the most elite surname in politics. Once feared for his left-wing radicalism when Barack Obama considered him for a Cabinet appointment in 2008, he has now been nominated to lead a major department for a right-wing administration. A notorious vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is set to direct health policy under the president who oversaw Operation Warp Speed, the country’s most successful vaccine-development program.

These inconsistencies, along with Kennedy’s colorful history of interactions with the animal kingdom, have made him the object of relentless derision in the press. I’m not interested in taking Kennedy’s side in these debates; he has said many things that are plainly wrong. But Kennedy embodies several trends across media, politics, science, and society, all of which require careful attention to understand how America is changing—and what sorts of people are, like Kennedy himself, poised to take advantage of those changes in the future.

The first, and most obvious, phenomenon to loft Kennedy to power has been the long shadow cast by COVID. Much of his popularity is an echo of pandemic anger over perceptions of government overreach, including lockdowns, mask mandates, extended school closures, vaccine requirements, and what many see as the hypocritical and inconsistent application of these rules.

Kennedy’s outspoken position on vaccine safety has revealed—and also helped drive—the GOP-ification of the anti-vax position. Until just a few years ago, vaccine skepticism was nonpartisan. It was associated both with a hippie approach to health, which chiefly appealed to affluent lefties, and with the doctrine of political liberty, which appealed more to conservatives. In Kennedy, these anxieties are fused. He both exaggerates the risks of vaccine ingredients and also frames his objection to vaccination policies as a defense of personal choice. President Joe Biden “violated one of the central principles of freedom” with the vaccine mandates, Kennedy said in a video posted to X earlier this year. Those views align him with the Republican Party, which has become much more distrustful of science and scientists in the past few years.

Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism must be placed in a broader context to understand its political power. A lifelong crusader against corporations, Kennedy has few good things to say about almost any technological invention. He has voiced histrionic fears about nuclear reactors, said that Wi-Fi can cause “leaky brain,” suggested that chemicals in the water supply might make kids transgender, wondered aloud if Prozac might contribute to school shootings, and posted support for the so-called chemtrails conspiracy, which holds that the government uses the contrails, or condensation trails, of jetliners to spread toxic chemicals. At the same time, he is a big fan of products and behaviors that predate, say, modern agriculture. In October, he pledged to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of, among other things, “raw milk,” “clean foods,” “exercise,” and “sunshine.”

This primitive romanticism is the core of the modern Republican Party. To the extent that any single attitude unites the motley coalitions under Donald Trump, it is a pervasive distrust of incumbents, establishments, and legacy organizations. In Pew Research surveys, less than half of Republicans say they believe that higher education, Big Business, tech firms, the media, the entertainment industry, or unions have a positive effect on society. Although more than 60 percent of Democrats say they trust a variety of news organizations, including CNN and The New York Times, there is not one media company that more than 60 percent of Republicans say they trust, including Fox News.

One common explanation for Democrats’ recent losses among young and nonwhite voters is the “diploma divide.” College-educated Americans are moving left while less-educated Americans are moving right. Kennedy’s rise reveals a similar but distinct phenomenon, which is the “institutional-trust divide.” As the Vox writer Eric Levitz pointed out, young, nonwhite, and less-educated voters tend to have less trust in major institutions. They are more interested in “a paranoid vision of American life and a populist contempt for the nation’s political system,” he wrote. And these are precisely the groups that are moving fastest away from the Democratic Party. One might say that Democrats have become the party of bureaucratic rules, with their emphasis on guardrails and their appeals to democracy, while the GOP has become the party of anti-establishment rulers—swashbuckling outsiders who pledge to use their power to burn down the system.

Kennedy is also at the forefront of fitness politics. Since joining the Trump campaign, Kennedy has launched a spin-off movement: MAHA, or “Make America healthy again.” Brad Stulberg, a personal-development author and faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told me that he sees MAHA as emblematic of an emerging phenomenon, which he calls “performative health.”

Whereas personal health is a just-the-basics approach to diet and exercise, Stulberg defines performative health as “a macho aesthetic” that messily combines a distrust of FDA-approved therapies, an enthusiasm for supplements, and a fixation with manly strength, especially strength that can be captured by front-facing cameras in gyms and posted to social media. Performative health is overtly masculine, Stulberg told me, and Kennedy is its champion, with his exercise videos, his relentless criticisms of the FDA, his reliance on vitamins and supplements, and his endorsement of testosterone-replacement therapy.

How can someone be a skeptic of federally approved therapies that have gone through rounds of clinical testing but also an outspoken fan of infrequently tested (or untested) supplements and risky drug regimens? One possibility goes back to institutions: Therapeutics that carry the stink of FDA and Big Pharma are automatically questionable. Another explanation is that supplements, vitamins, and antiaging treatments sound like tools for the already strong to get stronger, whereas pharmaceutical companies make therapies for sick people. By this somewhat Nietzschean calculation, supplements help the healthy (thus: good), whereas drugs are a corporate conspiracy to entrap the weak (thus: bad).

Although this is certainly a simplistic worldview, it might hold appeal for some young men wh