"Rendezvous with a Different Reality": Ted Kennedy and the Death of America

Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy (1932-2009) was, depending upon whom you might ask, either “The Lion of the Senate”, champion of the common man and an inspirational symbol of perseverance in the face of familial tragedy, or one of the most reviled politicians in the history of the United States. For run-of-the-mill conservatives, Kennedy was just an inveterate big-government liberal and a drunkard whose principal claims to noteworthiness were his last name and the fact that he had fled the scene of the drunk driving accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick in 1969. “But the Kennedy that the right both demonized for being a liberal icon and praised [after his death] for his willingness to ‘reach across the aisle’ was one and the same,” writes Lance Selfa. “And the media punditocracy’s assessment of him – a doctrinaire liberal turned bipartisan dealmaker – says a lot about what they consider the most important part of his legacy.” For Selfa, Kennedy’s career “is a chronicle of the decline of American liberalism, which once promised to end poverty in America, but now debates whether including even a mild ‘public option’ in a health care reform bill might be a bridge too far.”¹

For nationalists, Kennedy will forever be associated with the passage of the disastrous Hart-Celler Act of 1965, summarized here by Kevin MacDonald:

The Senate hearings on the bill were so perfunctory that the statements of opponents were given in Kennedy’s office; these were mainly old line patriotic organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution which by that time got absolutely no respect from elites. The bill was written by Norbert Schlei who was Jewish, and its official name is the Hart-Celler bill; Emmanuel Celler spent his entire career in Congress as a leader in opposition to immigration restriction, beginning with his hostility to the 1924 law which enshrined quotas favoring Northwestern Europeans. One should also mention the role of Jacob Javits in the Senate. As soon as the bill was passed, Jewish organizations focused their efforts on increasing the numbers of immigrants. Ted Kennedy may not have [consciously] lied when said the bill would not change America. But in conjunction with the later efforts of Jewish activists, demographic change was inevitable.²

Hart-Celler “goes to the very central ideals of our country,” Kennedy shilled for the measure in his characteristic platitudes. “Our streets may not be paved with gold, but they are paved with the promise that men and women who live here – even strangers and new newcomers – can rise as fast, as far as their skills will allow, no matter what their color is, no matter what the place of their birth.”³

  

Notwithstanding his reputation among conservatives as a freedom-hating big-government booster, however, Kennedy’s advocacy of Hart-Celler and the civil rights movement more generally comprises but one component of what was actually a broader barrier-dissolving and deregulatory tendency to his political activity – activity that amounted to a systematic assault on American cultural and economic cohesion. Ridiculously – but meaningfully – Kennedy himself linked deregulation with civil rights when he appeared at festivities held in honor of Martin Luther King in Atlanta in 1979:

Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the late Martin Luther King Jr. and his father both preached, was again the scene of hand-clapping and shouts of “preach, preach” as Sen. Edward Kennedy called for full rights for the poor and the oppressed.

Kennedy spoke Friday during the second day of a six-day celebration marking King’s 50^th birthday.

“Black and white, north and south, on this 50^th anniversary occasion, let us answer the call of Dr. King,” the senator told the applauding crowd. […]

The Massachusetts Democrat also called for a reduction in the power of interest groups in the nation and for the worldwide promotion of the struggle against racism. […]

“Now is the time to reduce the monopoly power of massive selfish interest groups over our economy. We can end the excessive burden of government regulation that stifles competition.” […]

The Senator ended his speech with a quotation from Pilgrim’s Progress, saying, “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

As the crowd yelled, pounded the floor and applauded, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., turned to each other on the podium and held hands.⁴

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau almost seemed to get misty-eyed when he recalled how, “for a brief, shining moment, in the mid to late 1970s, Kennedy viewed smaller government as the most compassionate answer in one area of economic life: transportation.” Berlau continues:

Kennedy was the prime mover in Congress behind the airline and trucking deregulation bills that were signed by President Jimmy Carter. He saw the impact of regulation in these industries as protecting entrenched companies from competition, and decided that the liberal, compassionate thing to do was to deregulate to give consumers lower prices and more choices. […]

But the aviation industry fought against repealing these controls that had long protected it from real competition […]   

But deregulation advocates found an ally of their own in Kennedy, who, with the help of young policy aides like now-Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, began to see the egalitarian case for deregulation. Beginning in 1975, Kennedy held hearings on airline and trucking deregulation as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure and later the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. Kennedy’s opening statement for one of these hearings sounds positively CEI-esque on the detriments of regulation and the benefits of the free market. The senator said, “Regulators all too often encourage or approve unreasonably high prices, inadequate service, and anti-competitive behavior.  The cost of this regulation is always passed on to the consumer. And that cost is astronomical.”⁵

“But there is a guiding star in the American firmament.” Young Teddy Kennedy gets chummy with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1971 as wife Joan stands by, grinning rather too intensely. Had Kennedy, who consistently voted Zionist in the Senate, learned a lesson from the deaths of his brothers John and Robert?

Transport deregulation, contrarily, constituted “one of the greatest assaults on working class living standards of the modern neoliberal era,” argues Left Business Observer’s Doug Henwood:

Once upon a time, working for an airline or driving a truck was a pretty good way to make a living without an advanced degree: union jobs with high pay and decent benefits. A major reason for that is that both industries were federally regulated, with competition kept to a minimum. Starting in the early 1970s, an odd coalition of right-wingers, mainstream economists, liberals, and consumer advocates (including Ralph Nader) began agitating for the deregulation of these industries. All agreed that competition would bring down prices and improve service.

Among the leading agitators was Teddy Kennedy. The right has been noting this in their memorials for “The Lion,” but not the weepy left.

Why was Kennedy such a passionate deregulator? Greg Tarpinian, former director of the Labor Research Association who went on to work for Baby Jimmy Hoffa, once speculated to me that it was because merchant capital always wants to reduce transport costs […]

In any case, Kennedy surrounded himself with aides who worked on drafting the deregulatory legislation. Many of them subsequently went on to work for Frank Lorenzo, the ghoulish executive who busted unions at Continental and Eastern airlines in the early 1980s. (Kennedy’s long-time ad agency also did PR work for Lorenzo.)

And what was the result of all this deregulation? Massive downward mobility for workers. […]

And working conditions have gotten inexpressibly worse – longer hours, fewer benefits, less security. Perhaps there’s a perverse egalitarianism here, the dethronement of a labor aristocracy. Is that the soul of the Democratic party?⁶

“While others talked of free enterprise, it was the Democratic Party that acted and we ended excessive regulation in the airline and trucking industry, and we restored competition to the marketplace,” Kennedy boasted to the Democratic National Convention in 1980: 

And I take some satisfaction that this deregulation legislation that I sponsored […] passed in the Congress of the United States.

As Democrats we recognize that each generation of Americans has a rendezvous with a different reality. The answers of one generation become the questions of the next generation. But there is a guiding star in the American firmament. It is as old as the revolutionary belief that all people are created equal, and as clear as the contemporary condition of Liberty City and the South Bronx. Again and again Democratic leaders have followed that star and they have given new meaning to the old values of liberty and justice for all.⁷

 


 Selfa observes that “once the ‘liberal lion’ Kennedy endorsed a free-market policy like deregulation, it made it easier for other more conservative Democrats to go along with the Republicans as the GOP proceeded to move U.S. politics” in a neoliberal direction. He continues:

Kennedy even voted for the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill imposing mandatory budget cuts in 1985.

As much as right-wing politicians demonized Kennedy, they were happy to have his support when it came their way. “Even Ted Kennedy is for it ...” became a punch-line for conservatives seeking to win support for their retrograde policies. “Teddy was the only Democrat who could move their whole base,” right-wing Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch told the Associated Press. “If he finally agreed, the whole base would come along, even if they didn’t like it.”⁸

“Kill my brother once, shame on – shame on you. Kill me – can’t get killed again.”

Economist Scott Sumner notes that, following his successes in transportation, Kennedy set his sights on the deregulation of banking and other industries, “all with bipartisan support”:

Then in 1986 there was a push for tax reform. The Packwood plan would slash top income tax rates down to 28% (from 70% when Reagan first took office.) A significant number of GOP senators were opposed, but fortunately the highly influential Ted Kennedy stepped up to the plate, and top income rates were slashed.

In the early 1990s both Bush and Clinton fought for NAFTA. But the very popular Ross Perot was opposed, and it was a difficult battle in Congress. Al Gore debated Perot, and swung American public opinion behind the plan. […]

In the Senate vote Ted Kennedy stood with Clinton, and NAFTA became law.

So next time you progressives bemoan the loss of the glorious 1950s and 60s, with our unionized factory workers protected from foreign competition, and our highly regulated industries, and our 70% to 90% top MTRs, remember the man without whose support the neoliberal revolution in America might not have been possible.

Kennedy, in Sumner’s estimation, was the “Godfather of American Neoliberalism”⁹. One of the senator’s favorite songs was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, the ditty that extols those moments when “all the world seems bright and gay”; and, while the global situation might not look particularly bright these days, the senator might take consolation in the overwhelming gayness of the utopian “different reality” that he helped to usher into existence.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of the recently banned books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.

Endnotes

Selfa, Lance. “Myth of the Liberal Lion”. SocialistWorker.org (August 28, 2009): https://socialistworker.org/2009/08/28/myth-of-the-liberal-lion

2.      MacDonald, Kevin. “Ted Kennedy Was Not Responsible for the Immigration Act of 1965”. The Occidental Observer (May 29, 2013): https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/05/29/ted-kennedy-did-not-pass-the-immigration-act-of-1965/

3.      Orchowski, Margaret Sands. The Law That Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, p. 60.

4.      Mooney, Brenda. “Kennedy Cheered At King Birthday Celebration”. The [Hendersonville] Times-News (January 13, 1979), p. 1.

5.      Berlau, John. “Ted Kennedy’s Deregulatory Legacy on Airlines and Trucking”. Competitive Enterprise Institute (August 26, 2009): https://cei.org/blog/ted-kennedys-deregulatory-legacy-airlines-and-trucking

6.      Henwood, Doug. “De Mortuis: Teddy Kennedy and Dereg”. Left Business Observer (August 30, 2009): https://lbo-news.com/2009/08/30/de-mortuis-teddy-kennedy-dereg/

7.      Kennedy, Edward. “1980 Democratic National Concession Address”. American Rhetoric (August 12, 1980): https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/tedkennedy1980dnc.htm

8.      Selfa, Lance. “Myth of the Liberal Lion”. SocialistWorker.org (August 28, 2009): https://socialistworker.org/2009/08/28/myth-of-the-liberal-lion

9.      Sumner, Scott. “Ted Kennedy, Godfather of American Neoliberalism”. The Money Illusion (December 30, 2012): https://www.themoneyillusion.com/ted-kennedy-godfather-of-american-neoliberalism/