The Make-Believe Country

Joe Biden’s America vs. Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s

By David Talbot, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

There is President Joe Biden’s America, a country whose economy is booming, whose aggressive foreign policy makes us “the essential nation,” and whose  continued prosperity is based in part on the weapons industry and its record profits (thanks to the bloodshed in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere).

Then there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s America, a country ruled by the super-wealthy and their politicians and bureaucrats. A country where the rich get richer and the rest of us struggle to pay the rent or mortgage, feed the family, and fix the car. A country that has been drained by the military-industrial complex and its constant wars, whose empire dominates foreign countries and whose surveillance and censorship has turned the home front into a “shadow of a democracy.”

(We won’t get into Donald Trump’s dystopian view of the country. Suffice  to say that his blowhard belligerence and corrupt cronyism only made the national mood and Washington swamp much worse.)

You can embrace Biden’s rose-colored vision of the country. Hey, it’s cozy in here! Liberal pundits like The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman do. Last week, Krugman championed “Pax Americana” — a euphemism for U.S. empire that Vietnam War protesters (like me) once denounced, but Democratic Party leaders now advocate. While lauding Biden’s global aggressiveness, Krugman attacked the Republicans in Congress who want to “betray” Ukraine, calling them “the enemy within” — a loaded phrase once used by Kennedy’s father to describe the malicious national influence of organized crime.

Biden doubled down on his wartime-president stance in his televised White House speech last week. Linking the slaughter in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, the president told the nation, “We’re facing an inflection point in history.” Biden argued that “American leadership holds the world together.” And he made it clear that a big part of that “leadership” is supplying weapons and ammunition to the world’s hotspots, ensuring more fighting and dying. Not only does this (literally) weaponized foreign policy somehow make us safer, Biden claimed, it also makes us richer!

Screenshot: 60 Minutes on X

“And let me be clear about something,” Biden said. “We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores — our own stockpiles with new equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.”

In other words, the business of America is not just business – it’s war.

In response to Biden’s bellicosity, Kennedy posted on X: “Is the middle class buying this? Is making weapons and blowing things up really going to make us prosperous?”

Well, what’s left of the middle class might not be buying this, but the war machine cheered Biden’s speech.

The wave of wars around the globe has been a bonanza for the U.S. military-industrial complex, which exports nearly half of the world’s weapons. The additional $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine and $10 billion for Israel that President Biden requested from Congress last week is only the latest monetary infusion for the U.S. weapons industry. U.S. allies in Europe and Asia are also increasing their military budgets in response to the escalation of fear about Russia and China stoked by the Biden administration.

“Lots of good news out there,” crowed Gregory J. Hayes, Chairman and CEO of the conglomerate that owns the big weapons contractor Raytheon, during a Wall Street briefing in April. “And for us, it’s just a question of getting it out the door at this point.”

I remember a vivid passage from Rosa Brooks’s powerful 2016 book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Brooks, a  Georgetown University law professor and former advisor in President Obama’s Defense Department, is the daughter of the late, left-wing author Barbara Ehrenreich. She is also married to a U.S. Army Special Forces officer, now retired. In the book, Brooks recalls life on a U.S. military base. Inside the Army perimeter, everything was gleaming: streets, houses, clothes and food stores. But as soon as you drove off the base, Brooks wrote, America was a wreck.

I live in San Francisco, a once-beautiful city now known for its devastated urban landscape: ragged and crazy people on the streets, boarded-up stores and restaurants, a downtown that is ghostly in its desolation. RFK Jr. says in campaign speeches that he loved this city as a kid, that he continued coming here on recent court cases and speaking tours. It’s a sign of national decline, he says, that San Francisco has been allowed to fall into ruin. (More on San Francisco in a future column.)

It’s true: some do live in Joe Biden’s America. Shiny, happy people. The fortunate ones. But most of us live outside of this fantasy land.

We want something better — for ourselves and our kids.