JFK’s assassination was a tragedy for the Right: discuss

I’ve been carefully avoiding British television’s wall-to-wall coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I gave up believing in the conspiracy theories 20 years ago, I’m sick of the saintly sex-maniac being used as a symbol of successful soft socialism, I’m tired of the same old stock footage of blacks being mistreated in Alabama (we know, we know), but mainly I’m bored with the standard narrative that Kennedy’s untimely death robbed America of a vibrant young crusading civil rights leader who, had he only been allowed another five years in power, would have brought peace to the world while transforming the US into a cuddly, compassionate, Swedish-style, high-spending, social democratic nirvana. As this video essay by Tim Stanley suggests, a Kennedy second term would have been a distinctly sticky affair (and not just as a result of sexual activity):

The real tragedy of Kennedy’s death (apart from Jackie ending up married to that sleazy thug Aristotle Onassis) was that it ushered in Lyndon Johnson, a far more effective politician, who, as Tim Stanley points out, was able to bulldoze through his disastrous Great Society legislation because of the outpouring of grief and guilt which followed Kennedy’s death (Stanley glosses over the fact that the worst of America’s 1960s race riots took place after LBJ had spent billions of dollars “helping” American blacks – as Ronald Reagan once said, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”).

If Kennedy himself had been responsible for unleashing even a fraction of the economically and socially ruinous raft of policies which his demise made possible – and had thus personally borne the blame for their failure - it’s possible that Americans wouldn’t have subsequently saddled themselves with young, plausible, gum-flapping, left-wing Kennedy-lite “healing” figures such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as national leaders. I also suspect that the Democratic Party wouldn’t have turned itself into the divisive, urban, anti-white, anti-South, anti-business, left-wing, identity-politics party which it became in the late 1960s (and which it essentially remains to this day). That, in turn, might have meant that the Republicans – unburdened by the Kennedy myth - wouldn’t have tacked as far to the left as they did under Nixon. By the time Ronald Reagan became President, the Left had tightened its grip on government and the media to such an extent that, while Ronnie was able to get the economy moving again by deploying his breezy, confident personality, he actually did relatively little to curb the power or size of government – The Gipper never got public spending under control, which did for his immediate Republican successor.

The result of the Kennedy myth was to shift American politics decisively to the Left. Because JFK died so early in his reign, Democrats have been able to present him as far more left-wing than he actually was (he really wasn’t – people get confused by the leftiness of the LBJ administration and by the success red-bating, gangster-busting Robert Kennedy made of reinventing himself as a feelgood hippy peacenik) and by pretending that 1963-1968 would have been a Golden Age if only JFK had survived. The American Right has had to operate in the shadow of that myth for 50 years – and because the myth-creating left control the media and academia, there’s no sign of it abating any time soon.

If JFK had lived, there might very well have been no need for a Tea Party - and America might not currently have a Big State President who seems actively to despise his own country and most of its people.