Neither Cranks Nor Hacks Should Head HHS
RFK Jr. has had a crazy week. It will not be his last, alas.
On Wednesday, during a signing ceremony for some Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiatives in Texas, a visiting Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said, "I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like. I'm looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection. And I know that that's not how our children are supposed to look."
The corresponding C-SPAN clip went viral, triggering a fresh round of Wait, THIS guy is in charge of the federal government's public health apparatus? "He literally makes zero sense," opined radiologist, pandemic-policy critic, and National Review contributor Pradheep Shanker. "Wacky, flat-earth, voodoo stuff," added Biden-administration Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha. The Bulwark's culture editor went with "dumbass fucking witch doctor charlatan."
Such exasperated vitriol is common among RFK Jr.'s critics, and has so far produced about the same real-world political results as 10 years' worth of sputtering in the general direction of President Donald Trump. Kennedy remains the second Trump administration's most popular Cabinet member, and the president definitively has his secretary's back in the face of high-level Centers for Disease Control (CDC) firings, COVID vaccine restrictions, mass-shooting hypotheticals, medical-school MAHA retrofits, plus 750 HHS employees jointly accusing their boss of "repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information."
Kennedy was the member of the Cabinet whom Trump first called on during his three-plus-hour meeting Tuesday, encouraging the decades-long vaccine skeptic and autism theorist to hurry up with his federal investigation into the causes of increased autism diagnoses. "The autism is such a tremendous horror show," the president said. "When you see the kind of numbers that you have today versus 20 years ago…there has to be something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something."
Rebuttals to critiques of RFK Jr.'s voluminous, multidisciplinary record of illiberal crankery tend to come in three varieties: 1) political scoreboard-watching ("It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly reelected on November 5," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday, in defense of Trump firing CDC Director Susan Monarez one month into her job. "This woman has never received a vote in her life, and the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission"); 2) benefit-of-the-doubt-giving on discrete pieces of MAHA ("There's certain things [he] oversees that seem to be supported in a bipartisan way — like getting terrible toxic stuff out of our kids' food," cousin-in-law Chris Pratt recently told Bill Maher. "I think that's a great thing"); and 3) furious denunciation of the culture/regime Kennedy seeks to supplant.
"Anyone who had any power or leadership role at the CDC during Covid deserves to be fired," conservative media personality Buck Sexton tweeted this week. "The failure was that universal and cowardice that widespread."
It's that last category of complaint whose potency seems undimmed a decade into Trumpism. Trump (like his counterpart on the populist left, Bernie Sanders), arose at a time of profound citizen revulsion at bipartisan elite failure: failing to prevent and then overreacting to the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent nation-building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and bailouts, plus all the issues (especially immigration) that the two main political parties seemed to prefer campaigning on rather than solving. The great derangements of Covid, the summer of 2020, and the Jan. 6, 2021, ransacking of the Capitol seemed to vindicate that bitter alienation from the ruling class, albeit in ideologically polarized ways.
Each main political team in the United States likes to tell itself a soothing fairytale. For Democrats, it's that they are the party of "science" and adult-like dedication to norms of impartiality. For Republicans, it's that they are the party of "truth" and the courage to tell it. When cross-examined at any length about dubious fidelity to these values, each side will beat a hasty retreat to what the other guys made them do. Or worse yet, they won't even know about their own side's glaring flaws.
RFK Jr. is to truth what a fish is to basketball. But Buck Sexton is absolutely right about the CDC serially botching its job during the pandemic. Has there been anything like a reckoning among the Democratic and managerial left since then? Or are they content to point at RFK and snicker?
If contrarian kookery and nihilism are bad policy responses on the right, so, too, is autopilot managerial liberalism on the left. Kennedy's predecessor, Xavier Becerra, appointed and confirmed in the teeth of the pandemic, was an absolute political hack with no relevant health-policy experience, touted at the time for being a Latino. He was, predictably, terrible on vaccine mandates and government censoriousness. And probably received 1/1000th the negative press that RFK Jr. has.
American governance will continue to spiral downward until voters start demanding something more than Well, the other guy is worse. Neither Kennedy nor his predecessor were fit for this job; may we one day have a politics where that easy truth isn't so rare to acknowledge.
