Jonah Goldberg: Voters wishing for an alternative to Trump and Biden got one. Unfortunately, it’s RFK Jr.
American politics is so intensely stupid and nasty that it sometimes seems as if somebody made a series of wishes with a monkey’s paw. The dark moral of “The Monkey’s Paw,” a 1902 short story by the English writer W.W. Jacobs that became a pop culture trope, is that you should be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
In 2008, the widespread wish for an African American president who would usher in a new” politics yielded to an era of heightened obsession with and tensions over race. In 2016, the ancient dream of a capitalist outsider who would run government like a business delivered a man who ran the government like it was in the business of promoting and enriching him. In 2020, the notion that a non-military threat could unite a divided country around a common challenge gave way to sharp polarization over the management, treatment and origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
