What Democrats can learn from Bobby Kennedy
The father—not the son—was the party’s last great populist
![Cartoon with three figures: one speaking passionately, another in their shadow, and a curious donkey watching.](https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=80,format=auto/content-assets/images/20230909_USD020.jpg)
Of all the what-ifs of post-war American politics, none is more haunting than the vision in which an assassin did not shoot down Robert Kennedy while he was running for president in 1968. Had Kennedy lived, runs this counterfactual history, he would have become president, and America would have left Vietnam years earlier. There would have been no Nixon administration, no Watergate scandal to sharpen cynicism and no successful Republican “southern strategy” to deepen racial division. The Democrats would have become the party of the multiracial working class, rather than of the multiracial professional elite.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The lessons of Bobby Kennedy”
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