Robert F. Kennedy Jnr’s endorsement of the Republican presidential ticket involves more than shifting the vote one or two per cent Trumpwards in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. That, of course, is no small thing, and yet it represents only one way in which a Maga/Independent Alliance could be transformative or, at any rate, a function of a political transformation that is already underway in America.

The shock of Kennedy being embraced by the Maga crowd at Glendale, Arizona, on 23 August has still not worn off. Chants of ‘USA! USA!’ were followed by ‘Bobby! Bobby!’. Kennedy did not have it in him to finish his speech with ‘Make America Great Again!’ but ‘Make America Healthy Again!’ was close enough. Here, we might one day say, was the moment right-wing populism began to align itself with left-wing populism.

One of the dispiriting features of contemporary American politics is the prevalence of conspiracy theories, a number of which Bobby Kennedy Jnr endorses – for instance, he claims the CIA played a role in the 1963 assassination of JFK, the agency continues to cover up the circumstances of RFK’s assassination and today it controls all the major mainstream media outlets, from the Washington Post and the New York Times to the National Geographic. I seriously doubt any of this is true, and yet who can deny America’s alphabet agencies operate beyond democratic oversight and collude with their favourite media outlets – the Russian collusion hoax an obvious case in point – when it suits their interests.

At Glendale, with RFK Jnr standing beside him, Trump announced that on winning a second term in office he would create a presidential commission on assassination attempts (including his own) and release all remaining files on JFK. This must have felt like such a personal achievement to Kennedy, and yet his anti-establishment populism goes deeper than that.

Kennedy has increasingly expressed his frustration that every new crisis – be it anthropogenic global warming, (which he believes to be true), foreign wars (he is no neo-conservative) or Covid-19 (a vaccine sceptic) – always results in a sharper stratification of society, greater power afforded to the state and larger profits finding their way to rapacious corporations. We do not have to agree with Robert Kennedy about everything to acknowledge that his anti-totalitarian sensibilities are sound. As he recently remarked, ‘Any power that the government takes from people, it will never return voluntarily.’

From a mainstream Democrat point of view, however, Kennedy’s association with the Maga movement is treachery pure and simple. If Trump is a neo-fascist blowhard and his supporters deplorable white supremacists, the son of RFK and nephew of JFK has betrayed his gilt-edged lineage. Kennedy’s horrified siblings were prompted to issue a public disclaimer, saying: ‘We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.’

Hollywood celebrities were no less condemnatory. One of the stars of The West Wing, Bradley Whitford, perhaps best encapsulated the mood of the glitterati with this posting: ‘What a sad, broken, human being @RobertKennedyJr is.’ Sandra Bernhard echoed the sentiment: ‘A broken deeply disturbed person.’ RFK Jnr, champion of anti-corporate environmentalism in the United States over the past three decades, is now – to borrow from Lenin’s political vocabulary – a ‘former person’.

Such was Bobby Kennedy Jnr’s reputation as heroic, corporate-slaying ecological legal eagle that both John Kerry (in 2004) and Barack Obama (in 2008) marked him out to be head of the Environmental Protection Agency – before changing their minds. To start with, there was the small matter of Kennedy’s heroin addiction in the 1980s. But more than that, there was no way the Senate – dominated, on both occasions, by the GOP – would have confirmed his appointment. Kennedy, in other words, was simultaneously the conscience of establishment Democrats and unconscionable in the eyes of establishment Republicans.

Today, in contrast, Bobby Kennedy Jnr is a devastating critic of the Democratic party and welcomed with ‘Bobby! Bobby!’ at a Maga rally. Is this unexpected turn of events the result of opportunism on Kennedy’s part or does it signify a monumental change in America’s political landscape? It is probably both. Over the past year, for instance, Kennedy’s popularity dropped from 20 per cent to 15 per cent and by the time he ended his quixotic campaign he was down to 5 per cent nationally. Throwing in his lot with Team Trump, as the Glendale appearance indicated, provides him with not only a few months more of political relevance but the possibility of a cabinet position in a Trump administration. Secretary of Health, anyone?

That said, even before he quit the Democrats last year, Kennedy’s attitude to his old party was hostile. In an open letter to the DNC, dated 13 September, 2023, he wrote, ‘Throughout the modern era, the Democratic party fought back against censorship, upheld civil liberties, resisted corporate influence, and sought to enfranchise as many voters as possible.’ However, over the past 40 years party leaders had succumbed to ‘the sirens of control’. The Democratic party, as a consequence, is tilting the United States in the direction of totalitarianism.

Again, it might be countered that Kennedy’s enmity towards the Democrats results from his failure to become the party’s presidential nominee for this year’s election. On the other hand, the party machine’s intervention against Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, its coup against Joe Biden in July 2024 – who, exactly, is running the White House these days? – and the glitzy, policy-free nature of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago goes a long way to corroborating Kennedy’s assertion that the Democratic party is no longer ‘democratic’.

I am not certain Kennedy gets the order of things right. Is the Democratic Party anti-democratic because it is institutionally autocratic or because it has been changed beyond recognition by the despotism of identity politics?

Either way, it’s time to defeat the USA’s version of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. RFK Snr would be proud.