Tragedy and Farce*

[*Editor’s note: On March 4, 2022, Russia enacted a law that criminalizes public opposition to, or independent news reporting about, the war in Ukraine. The law makes it a crime to call the war a “war” rather than a “special military operation” on social media or in a news article or broadcast. The law is understood to penalize any language that “discredits” Russia’s use of its military in Ukraine, calls for sanctions or protests Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It punishes anyone found to spread “false information” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison.]

The academic director of the Russian International Affairs Council, Andrey Kortunov, on why it’s unlikely that there will be a new leader in the White House in 2024 who would be comparable to the great presidents of the centuries past.

“History repeats itself twice — the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” This well-known quote, attributed alternatively either to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Karl Marx, unwittingly surfaces in the memory when you hear about the recent decision of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run for the U.S. presidency in 2024 as an independent candidate. Fifty-five years ago, in the far-off year 1968, his father participated in the presidential election, and this participation proved to be fatal for Robert F. Kennedy. On the night of June 5, he was shot in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel by Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who has been serving a life sentence in a California prison for more than half a century.

Robert F. Kennedy was undoubtedly a prominent politician and statesman. In many respects he even surpassed his older brother, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, whose life was also cut short by an assassin’s bullet on Nov. 22, 1963. Nature didn’t spare the descendants of the famous clan: Robert Kennedy Jr., over the course of his long life, didn’t show himself in any particularly prominent way, except for his long struggle for clean water in the Hudson River and his stubborn resistance to vaccination programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. He, like many other offspring of influential American families, had problems with drugs; his relationship with his close relatives was not always smooth.

It’s unlikely that Robert Kennedy Jr. has even a minimal chance of winning the election in November next year; the probability of his martyrdom at the hand of a religious or political fanatic is also close to zero. Kennedy’s participation in the election is perceived by Americans — those who have even paid any attention to his emergence on the national political horizon — more as yet another political curiosity rather than the promise of a new, exciting drama. However, the peculiar irony of history, which continues the old family tragedy of the Kennedy clan in the form of a farce, makes you wonder how long a path the U.S. political system has carved out over the course of the last half century.

First of all, it’s apparent that all the U.S. presidential candidates in the 1968 election were, by modern standards, relatively young people. The eldest among them was Democratic Sen. Hubert Humphrey, who was 57 at the time. Republican Richard Nixon, who defeated him, was two years younger than his main opponent; at the time of the murder, Robert Kennedy was only 42. Given that, Joseph Biden, who will celebrate his 81st birthday next month, or Donald Trump, who will turn 78 by the time of the election, doesn’t look overly presentable, to put it mildly. The “dark horse” in the form of Robert Kennedy Jr. also can’t be listed as a young politician — next January he will celebrate his 70th birthday.

In the end, age is not the main point. More importantly, the 1968 presidential election became a clash of true political heavyweights — people with strong characters, unwavering will and hard-fought views of what the America of the future should become. Even far-right independent candidate George Wallace, who advocated the return of segregation in the American South, was a massive and, in a way, tragic figure (he, by the way, also fell victim to a murder attempt during yet another of his election campaigns in 1972, and spent the rest of his days in a wheelchair as a result). Humphrey is rightfully regarded as one of the most prominent American liberal politicians of the 20th century. Nixon, with all of his complexity, made history as a man who, in one way or another, managed to turn the tide of American history and put an end to the entire era of the Democratic Party’s political hegemony.

Could the American politicians of today —Biden, Kamala Harris, Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Bob Menendez or the same Kennedy Jr. — be compared to these titans of the past? The question is, as they say, rhetorical.

Yes, 1960s America faced, without exaggeration, fateful challenges: the Soviet Sputnik, the Vietnam War, the baby boomer uprising, the civil rights movement. The 1968 election defined the priorities for the country’s development for many decades ahead, and the thundering drums of fate called vivid and charismatic leaders to the political arena, who were convinced of the righteousness of their ways. But does America of today face fewer problems than back in 1968? Is the Chinese challenge today less fundamental than the Soviet challenge of half a century ago? Are the questions of migration or climate change of our day less substantial than the questions of racial integration and civil rights in the 1960s?

The point, perhaps, is not that American society, as a result of some mysterious genetic catastrophe, is no longer capable of producing brilliant, confident, strategic-minded politicians. It’s just that over the last five decades, party machines and the political system of this country as a whole have learned to cast such politicians aside at the very early stages of their careers, favoring instead featureless, systemic mediocrities. Calculated cynics take the place of irrepressible romantics; strategists and visionaries time and again cede to tacticians and time-servers. Personal beliefs are valued much less at the American political Olympus than the ability to promptly follow the smallest oscillations of incredibly volatile public opinions.

Trump managed to deceive the political system in some measure in 2016, but it’s hard to call him a truly great president. If Robert Kennedy in his 1968 election campaign strove to unite the country, appealing to the rich and the poor, to liberals and conservatives, to Blacks and whites, to recent immigrants and generational Americans, Trump built his campaign on skillfully pitting some groups of American society against the others. Biden used the same approach, albeit in reverse, four years later.

Robert Kennedy Jr., trying to bypass party bureaucracy and run as an independent candidate, in any case will be held hostage to the established rules of the game and, of course, won’t be able to repeat Wallace’s 1968 success, when the independent candidate managed to rake in almost 10 million popular votes and 46 electoral votes. And while the U.S. political system puts group interests over national interests, it’s unlikely that the White House will finally see a leader comparable to the great presidents of past centuries.

The position of the editorial board may not coincide with the opinion of the author.