A butterfly flaps its wings …
It is distinctly possible that when the history of the 2024 election is written, its outcome, and therefore possibly the fate of the Republic, will have been determined by a tiny worm inside Robert F. Kennedy’s brain.
I believe the worm is, more likely than not, a force for good. My reasoning is as follows:
Kennedy, by his own admission, has endured serious mental trauma on account of a brain worm. As the New York Times reported this week, Kennedy began to confess his mental difficulties in a 2012 deposition pertaining to a divorce, in which he argued that “his earning power had been diminished by his cognitive struggles.” Kennedy blamed the problem on a 2010 episode that he and his doctor attribute to a brain worm, now deceased but possibly still lodged inside his skull, that he believes ate a portion of his brain.
Normally, a victim of a horrible medical condition like this deserves sympathy. But you forfeit that sympathy when you run for president. If it is your belief that a worm has devoured part of your brain, you should not run for the world’s most powerful job. (In Kennedy’s defense, it is possible the portion of his brain responsible for moral reasoning is missing.)
In any case, Kennedy is running an oddball presidential campaign that stands a very low chance of winning but a reasonably high chance of determining the winner. And here the strange logic of spoiler candidacies creates strange incentives.
Third-party candidates affect the race by punishing the candidate closest to them. Kennedy’s profile as a scion of a Democratic Party dynasty who loves the environment makes him more attractive to voters who would otherwise support Joe Biden. But his specific views, especially his more recent ones, have the opposite effect. Kennedy’s fondness for oddball medical theories has made him an anti-vaxxer who can pull votes from Trump on that basis. (Ron DeSantis had clearly identified anti-vaccine sentiment as his best wedge issue against Trump in the Republican primary.)
More recently, Kennedy has begun to flirt intermittently with light pro-insurrectionist sentiment. Kennedy played down the January 6 insurrection, then backed off. But then he hired a spokesperson who claimed, “J6 was no MAGA insurrection. Just more Democrat misdirection.” This week, Kennedy said he would not rule out pardons for criminals convicted in the insurrection.
Liberals may instinctively respond to these comments with anger. But remember, in the upside-down rules of third-party candidacies, crazy is good and sane is bad. The worst possible thing Kennedy could do would be to outline sensible policy reforms for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. What Biden supporters should want is for Kennedy to let his freak flag fly.
Now, it is impossible to know for sure why Kennedy has turned into such a crank. His kookery certainly precedes the brain-worm incident. After the 2004 election, Kennedy was volubly insisting the result had been fixed by an implausible conspiracy to rig voting machines. But both the breadth and the depth of his paranoia appear to have grown in recent decades.
To the extent his descent can be traced to his self-confessed cognitive limitations, they are pushing him in an objectively prosocial direction. And to the extent Kennedy has correctly diagnosed the source of his mental problems — obviously a less than solid assumption but one doctors deem plausible — the worm is playing a potentially decisive role.
It would be the ultimate butterfly-flaps-its-wings dynamic. A tiny worm, perhaps one-third of an inch long, crawled into the brain of the descendant of a famous political family and munched its way into making him a right-wing populist kook who pulled enough votes to prevent the other, more popular right-wing populist kook from winning the presidency. The worm would merit a small statue — or, if that is too grotesque, perhaps an exhibit in the future Biden Presidential Library.
