RFK Junior Is Going To Die Someday
Folk Lamarckism and the pro-disease movement
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
RFK Jr. and many of his ordinary, everyday “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) sympathizers– you know people like this, even if you don’t think you do– tell themselves death is something that happens to sick people. Health is a trait you can cultivate by eating right and living right. To quote Kennedy himself speaking in West Virginia earlier this spring: “according to CDC, the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases. . . healthy kids were not dying. Healthy Americans were not dying of COVID.”
Which is why he’s decided we don’t need vaccines. Earlier this week, Kennedy announced that the federal government will no longer recommend vaccination for “healthy” children and pregnant people. This means insurance won’t pay for them. This will kill children, because healthy kids have died, and will continue to die, of COVID. This will kill parents too. And it will kill Americans in general, because vaccines work best when we use them to achieve immune resistance in the population broadly.
Robert F. Kennedy Junior cannot believe vaccines work. Today we’ll talk about why: he thinks the world is a game to be won, he refuses to accept that he will die, and the structure of his denial has a deep intellectual heritage in economics as well as eugenics.
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Arguably the original “social Darwinist,” Herbert Spencer believed in– as longtime readers will know!— Lamarckian rather than Darwinian evolution. I didn’t linger on that in my earlier Spencer series, but it’s worth going into now. Lamarck believed that characteristics acquired during life could be inherited biologically. If I become good at swimming, then have children, my children will be better adapted to swimming because of this.
This is wrong, but it isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. Any children I have are likely to be better than average at skiing. But this is because I would teach it to them. If I had children and then they were immediately kidnapped, they wouldn’t be any better at winter sports just because I learned them. Other cases are less clear. Michael Phelps is good at swimming in part because of the structure of his body– something that would be influenced by his genes.
There’s only one way out of this: a mechanistic explanation of heredity itself. Prior to modern biology, Lamarckism wasn’t altogether unreasonable. Now that we understand what DNA is and how it works, we know there’s no mechanism by which “lots of time in the pool” can alter your genome in favor of swimming.
But folk Lamarckism never went away. That’s because Lamarckian inheritance has political utility. In the Soviet Union, Trofim Lysenko set back science in the USSR for years by insisting that Lamarckism was true, on the basis that it was more compatible with Marxism. Darwinian inheritance seemed to doom organisms from their origins to particular fates– Lamarck offered a way for them to change. While this is probably the most famous case of Lamarckian delusion, it’s not the most significant– in my view, that would be Spencer. Socialists are a weak political force today, and anyway we have thankfully repudiated this ridiculous pseudoscience. But the Lamarckism Spencer promoted remains an influence on the vastly more powerful global right.
Folk Lamarckism works by not having a mechanistic account of biology. It does not explain how skills or virtues or behaviors influence genes. It conflates genetic inheritance with cultural and economic influences. This is invaluable for anyone who wants to reduce complex social problems to “nature” and blame them on individuals. For Herbert Spencer, Lamarckism was a license for apathy. Helping the sick or weak was helping sickness and weakness and even poverty itself: these traits all could be developed and inherited. Spencer believed in evolution as a cultural and political force, not just a genetic one: people had to be subjected to the full force of “free” markets, or else they could not learn and improve and adapt themselves. This was a kind of economic eugenics meant to complement the biological version.
You can draw a line directly from Spencer to the modern right on economics, and in my book Control Science (to keep sending the signal: you can buy it in less than a year, on May 26, from Verso!) I do that. Quinn Slobodian has written an excellent book on this, which I reviewed in Jacobin recently. It’s easy to trace Kennedy’s own ideas back as well: he himself has approvingly cited 19th-century pre-germ theory conceptions of biology.
But we don’t need a genealogical argument here: RFK Junior and his followers don’t believe what they do because of any long chain of ideological inheritance. What they have done instead, I suspect (a historian of medicine might actually have more concrete links) is independently invent an old idea for the same reasons it arose before. Late 19th-century eugenics and laissez-faire arose in a moment of profound inequality and social upheaval. They became popular because they offered a supposed solution to social ills without threatening existing hierarchy. And applied to individual health today, they provide something even more tantalizing.
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What we might imprecisely call a belief in competitive evolution soothed the deepest anxiety of all: the fear of death itself. Kennedy’s name got him into Harvard— literally, as according to classmates’ stories reported by biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s entire application essay was “Robert F. Kennedy Junior”— but it won’t get him past the Grim Reaper. So it is for all of us. COVID was a painful reminder of our mortality. You are going to die someday. I’m sorry.
It won’t be your fault. You can delay it, but not reliably. The healthiest athlete can get hit by a car. You might drive yourself mad eating healthy only to die earlier of stress because of it. Or your genes might arbitrarily betray you; a transcription gone wrong and before you know it, your body is being flooded with cells that refuse to do anything but reproduce themselves, endlessly. If cancer doesn’t do it, a virus or bacteria might. “Healthy Americans were not dying of COVID.”
Kennedy’s recent swim in the toxic Rock Creek is a perfect illustration of his denial. DC has banned swimming for decades due to pollution. But RFK Junior knows he’s a healthy man, a good man, the kind of person whom illness simply does not happen to. So he took his grandkids on a swim through sewage and bacteria.
After the remarks I quoted earlier, Kennedy commented approvingly on restricting sugar in soda. That’s probably a good idea! But pay attention to how he actually proposes doing it. Kennedy in these same remarks compliments efforts to make soda unavailable for food stamp recipients. This won’t help anyone access healthier food: it won’t solve food deserts (areas where it is difficult to access healthy food), or high grocery prices.
The FDA’s proposed ban on several food dyes might be a good idea, but we’re making that decision based on the whim of a celebrity cabinet official, not science. Sometimes, when the wheel in Robert Kennedy’s head spins the right way, he might land on a position that has some merit. But because he’s making these decisions without serious scientific inquiry and without proper values (you need both!) we mostly get terrible ideas. The cost of this process is our collective immunity. In addition to restricting access to COVID boosters, Kennedy has made war on Moderna’s life-saving mRNA vaccines, which allow for rapid production of many doses– critical in any fight against a future bird flu pandemic.
Why restrict access to vaccines? Perhaps the most obvious motivation is a belief in the “natural.” The basic argument for banning dyes like red 40 is often simply that they are “artificial,” which is a ridiculous basis for medical decision-making. My inhaler, without which I would be dead, is artificial. Nightshade is natural. Etc. Still, a less committed version of this sentiment is common and popular. Even more importantly, MAHA’s competitive framework suggests vaccines are unnecessary. If you can make yourself healthy by doing enough virtuous and healthy things, why would you need that icky shot?
Neither of these alone explains the assault on vaccination. If we turn back to the economics that this eugenicist ideology co-developed with, we get closer to answers. Right-wing economists from Spencer onward insist that collective, top-down intervention of any kind does not work. The state cannot intervene in the market. The individual will cannot even impose itself over one’s own mind– Spencer believed this was tyranny and doomed to failure. Solutions that work from a high level of complexity, abstraction, and structure downward– a government intervening in a business, or my moral convictions imposing themselves over my basic instincts– are in this view doomed to failure. This wasn’t just a 19th-century idea either; it’s one of the most important ideas of 20th-century neoliberal Friedrich Hayek.
Apply this to medicine and you get a basic account for loosening vaccine mandates. They are a tyrannical intervention by the collective at the level of the always wiser, always freer individual. Parents know best. Big government has no business meddling in your kids’ bloodstream! This is bad enough— but this isn’t the terrain we’re fighting on anymore. Anti-vaxxers are now trying to keep the rest of us from accessing vaccines altogether.
Their eugenic faith in competition is the reason why. Vaccines are cheating. They’re a shortcut. You’re supposed to avoid COVID by going to the gym and never buying Taki’s and treating Diet Coke like it’s uranium and drinking protein shakes and running every morning and pretending, believing, dreaming you will never age or die. Kennedy claims he has had an exercise routine he’s followed for half a century. That’s what’s supposed to save your life, not a magic vial of mRNA some pale nerds made in a lab. Vaccines aren’t fair. Health is supposed to be an individual virtuous struggle. The problem for Kennedy is not that vaccines harm us, or even that they are unnatural. It is that a working vaccine that helps healthy people runs counter to the very cosmology of MAHA.
Understanding anti-vax sentiment and right-wing economics as part of a shared vision of competition explains a lot for us. It’s not otherwise obvious that anti-vaxxers would team up with the rest of the MAGA coalition. Right-wing “free market” thought is directly at odds with some of the regulation RFK Jr supports– banning food dyes, for example. But competitive evolution as a shared belief helps explain this and other alliances on the right. Among Republicans, libertarian free market views are now clashing constantly with the MAGA desire for tariffs. Faith in competition helps explain their uneasy alliance: free marketers believe competition will produce ideal outcomes, while MAGA tariff types and economic nationalists agree the world is a competition, but aim to win it by any means necessary. Likewise, the MAHA-MAGA alliance is a collaboration between coalitional partners who, despite their differences, share a basic view of the world: it’s a competition in which the deserving individual prevails and the undeserving masses die.
That alliance will doom nearly anything good RFK Junior wants, too. Food dye is low-hanging fruit: there are obvious alternatives to red 40, and if every corporation that uses it is forced to swap it for something else, none of them will have a competitive advantage in costs or food attractiveness to any other. But if Kennedy goes after sugar, he’ll face the full force of the corn lobby, or Florida’s powerful sugar firms. If he tries to make groceries cheaper, he’ll run right into the mainstream economic prohibition on price controls. If he tries to improve access to food in food deserts, the right-wing prohibition on actually spending money and building infrastructure for the common good. There’s a reason MAHA has meant making it harder for welfare recipients to buy Diet Coke instead of helping them— you cannot protect American society by building a coalition with people who believe there is no such thing as society.
He likely won’t try any of these things anyway. RFK Junior’s project is a monument to his own vanity and ego, built on a seemingly unshakeable faith that he is the protagonist of history. This is not how either good policy or the political coalitions necessary to make it possible come to be. You do not have to hand it to Robert F. Kennedy Junior, even when or if by sheer chance his hateful worldview happens to lead him to a position or two that is potentially correct. Children dead because they couldn’t get a vaccine won’t be alive to care what was in Kennedy’s heart when he cut them off. This is eugenics with a smile– a eugenics of false hope and erasure more than fury and annihilation, but eugenics all the same.