John Quincy Adams Redux—RFK’s Route To Rescuing American Democracy

Exactly 200 years ago was the last time that an insufficient majority in the electoral college forced the presidential vote into the U.S. House of Representatives. The resulting winner of the 1824 election, John Quincy Adams, was notable not only for being the son of the second president and a Founding Father, but also because he had famously promulgated a few years earlier a doctrine which became the foundation of America’s long and prosperous run as a peaceful Republic during the next 93 years.

But it was not only the phrase “she goes NOT abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” that rings out across the subsequent two centuries. The entire framework in which Adams correctly depicted America’s proper role in the world is profoundly pertinent in 2024. That’s because the latter was destroyed by Woodrow Wilson’s foolish entry into WWI and the subsequent metastasis of John Quincy Adam’s peaceful Republic into a destructive global Empire that threatens to now bankrupt the nation and eviscerate American democracy.

That is to say, the time has long-passed to terminate the interminable Washington search for monsters to destroy abroad and to bring the Empire home. Yet the Uniparty in Washington is so beholden to the vast machinery of war and intervention that neither Trump nor Biden offers even the remotest prospect of embracing that urgent imperative.

By contrast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deeply understands that the very future of capitalist prosperity and democratic governance in America depends first and foremost on draining the Swamp on the Pentagon side of the Potomac. And that as a practical matter, the only route to that end is a hung jury in the Electoral College, thereby paving the way for an epochal deal in the U.S House of Representatives. That is, a grand bargain that would enable him as president or as a second-in-command-extraordinaire to dismantle the Empire and return America’s cratering fiscal affairs to some semblance of sustainable order.