Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
American politics is so intensely stupid and nasty that it sometimes seems as if somebody made a series of wishes with a monkey's paw. The dark moral of "The Monkey's Paw," a 1902 short story by the English writer W.W. Jacobs that became a pop culture trope, is that you should be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
In 2008, the widespread wish for an African American president who would usher in a new "post-racial" politics yielded to an era of heightened obsession with and tensions over race. In 2016, the ancient dream of a capitalist outsider who would run government like a business delivered a man who ran the government like it was in the business of promoting and enriching him. In 2020, the notion that a non-military threat could unite a divided country around a common challenge gave way to sharp polarization over the management, treatment and origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And then there's the dream of the third-party or independent candidate who can break the Republican-Democratic duopoly and deliver rational politics and policies unbeholden to special interests and fringe ideologues. Few scenarios are more attractive to Americans exhausted by the partisan bickering and sclerosis that define Washington.
The hitch is that while voters and donors love the idea in the abstract, many recoil in the face of a flesh-and-blood third-party candidate. Organizations such as No Labels and the Libertarian and Green parties rightly highlight voter hunger for an alternative to Donald Trump and President Biden, but they have struggled to find a human as popular as the wish.
In some respects, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks just like what people are longing for. He rejects both parties. And he claims to want to break the stranglehold of government bureaucracy, the cult of experts and the outsize power of corporate interests.
But while the wish is for a passionate centrist independent of the extremes, Kennedy in reality is a crank who attempts to transcend left and right by peddling a dog's breakfast of conspiratorialism from across the ideological spectrum.
Long before Trump, RFK Jr. was the original election denier, insisting that Republicans stole the 2004 election. Before COVID-19, Kennedy was already famous for falsely claiming that all vaccines are dangerous and that some cause autism. He also stands by his claim that cellphones and Wi-Fi cause cancer despite the lack of evidence of an increase in cancer rates amid exploding use of those technologies.
Kennedy's default position is that official explanations are suspect, which is another way of saying that all conspiracy theories -- from 9/11 trutherism to fringe theories about the assassination of his own father to the idea that the COVID-19 virus was engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people -- deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's as if his entire political persona were designed to monetize what the political historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics." It's a testament to the pervasiveness of the paranoid style that it's difficult to figure out which party Kennedy will take more votes from.
"Our campaign is a spoiler all right," Kennedy said last week while announcing his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, in Oakland. "It is a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump."
But there's the rub: The same duopoly that Kennedy is running against ensures that he can be a spoiler for only one candidate. Hofstadter also said, "Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die." And the party they sting is the one they are closest to. As of now, it looks like Kennedy wants to sting leftward, at Biden. His choice of Shanahan -- a progressive, young, Asian American, California-based tech lawyer -- is one indication. Another: Timothy Mellon, the biggest donor to Kennedy's Super PAC, is also the biggest donor to Trump's. It seems unlikely that spoiling Trump's candidacy would be his priority.
In Jacobs' story (spoiler alert), the protagonist uses the monkey's paw to wish for 200 pounds to pay off his mortgage. The next day, he learns that his son was fatally mangled in an industrial accident and receives a bereavement payment in that amount. After the funeral, the grieving father wishes his son brought back to life. But as he hears a knock on the door, he realizes that the fulfillment of his wish would be a disfigured abomination and, panicked, makes his last wish. When he opens the door, no one's there.
If you've ever fondly wished for deliverance from our two-party system, the man you hear knocking is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
First posted April 3, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.