By Jack Butler
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Today, Massachusetts voters get to choose the victor of
the state’s Democratic Senate primary. Incumbent Senator Ed Markey is hoping
for victory in the face of a challenge against Joseph Kennedy III, since 2013 a
member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts, and since birth a
member of the Kennedy clan (he is the grandson of RFK).
There is little hope for a Republican in this race in the
fall; in all likelihood, the contest’s winner will keep the seat for Democrats.
Markey and Kennedy are, moreover, of little distinction ideologically. Both
support Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, for example, and have thus
resorted to accusing the other of being somehow insufficiently faithful to
progressive ideals. Support within the Democratic Party has divided in
unpredictable ways, giving little indication as to which candidate is more
“progressive”: Representative Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez has endorsed the
far-older Markey, while House speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed the
much-younger Kennedy. At any rate, for a conservative not from Massachusetts,
there is almost no reason to be interested in this race — except in one
respect.
It was not surprising that Joe Kennedy decided to eye a
Senate seat. The Kennedy clan has been consistently involved in politics for
decades; in addition to Joe’s grandfather, two of his great-uncles were
senators. But none of them succeeded in getting a law passed requiring that a
Kennedy serve in the Senate if one is available. That has not stopped this
Kennedy from invoking his family’s legacy against Markey, claiming to have done
so only after jabs from Markey against Kennedy’s father (who was a member of
the House from Massachusetts) and ads from Markey paraphrasing JFK. So
obviously the perception remains that the Kennedy aura remains potent, for
those who can successfully appropriate it.
My question is: Why? What is it about what Joe Kennedy’s
relatives did that qualifies him for a seat in the U.S. Senate? We hear
a lot about their failures nowadays, but one of the underappreciated features
of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution was the abolition of
primogeniture and entail the former inspired and the forbidding of titles of
nobility that the latter enshrined. These were all social mechanisms that had
facilitated familial, inherited aristocracy in the Old World and would have
done so in the new. To be clear, some of that made its way over here anyway.
But one aspect of the American promise is that it shouldn’t matter who your
family is; anyone can become anything here. Kennedy’s hopes depend on
Massachusetts voters forgetting all that and turning a Senate seat in Massachusetts
into a Duchy of Kennedy. It is, rather, “the people’s seat,” as Scott Brown
once retorted
to a debate moderator who called the office he was running for (and won) “Teddy
Kennedy’s seat.”
Again, Ed Markey is not exactly the best candidate, from
a conservative perspective, through which to assert this small-r republican
principle. But when there are two candidates functionally indistinguishable
from each other and the main case one of them is making for himself is his last
name, go with the other one. At one time, it might have meant something
different to be a Kennedy — Joe’s grandfather Robert once challenged Teamsters
head Jimmy Hoffa, and his great-uncle JFK cut taxes and was willing to “pay any
price, bear any burden” on behalf of liberty abroad — but apparently nebulous
appeals to the name itself are all that remain. In which case such appeals
should be rejected, as Massachusetts voters seem likely to do today.
Perhaps Worchester voters will play a critical role in
this.
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