Aug 14, 2023
The Other Populist in the Race
The American Conservative reports:Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has raised eyebrows as the first right-sympathetic populist to run as a Democrat since William Jennings Bryan. Launching with twenty paid staff and functioning now with seventy, Kennedy’s campaign has latched on to several issues important to mainstream Republicans—Covid tyranny, censorship, government surveillance—as well as to the dissident right: public health threats posed by chemicals in food and water, ending forever wars. The difference is the right frames these issues as matters of social cohesion and public order, while Kennedy uses the language of democracy and freedom.
We meet at Pier 26 in Manhattan on the Hudson River, a body of water that has played a central role in Kennedy’s career as an environmental activist. He was named one of TIME magazine’s “Heroes of the Planet” in 1999 for his work as a prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, a Hudson River conservation group. He later founded the Waterkeeper Alliance as an umbrella organization for similar groups in other rivers, lakes, bays, and watersheds. When he resigned as its president in 2020, the Waterkeeper Alliance had hundreds of branches in dozens of countries.His environmentalism defies a neat ideological framing. Free market capitalism, he says, “is the core solution for every environmental problem, because a true free market promotes efficiency, efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution is waste.”Read the full interview here.If you resonate with this message please subscribe to our newsletter to learn more.
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