The American Spectator founder R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., has a new book coming out next month. It’s called How Do We Get Out of Here?: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator—From Bobby Kennedy to Donald J. Trump, and you can pre-order it now.

Tyrrell joined The American Spectator publisher Melissa Mackenzie and me as a guest on The Spectacle podcast last week for the first segment, and it was a rollicking good time. One of the stories he related is on point with the topic at hand, as it turns out that the Kennedy family is responsible for the title of his book.

The story goes that in 1968, when Tyrrell was a conservative college student at Indiana University working a campaign event on campus, he watched as then-Sen. (and, at the time, Democrat presidential frontrunner) Robert F. Kennedy gave a rousing campaign speech. Upon its completion, Kennedy asked him, “How do we get out of here?”

Tyrrell — the only other person onstage — not only escorted the candidate to his car but also cheekily pressed a “Reagan for President” button into RFK’s hand.

And that prank, emblematic of Bob’s style, was but a prequel to the publication you’re now reading. How Do We Get Out of Here is his memoirs of all the years that followed, and it’s going to be a must-read.

The thing about that episode back in 1968 is that even during that horrifically tumultuous year — Bobby Kennedy himself didn’t see half of it before he was assassinated under circumstances that still defy explanation — America still had some ability to bridge partisan gaps. Yes, politics was certainly deadlier then than it is now, but that’s because the radicals have more high-tech means than they had then. Shedding blood is far too crude a means of imposing one’s political will by today’s standards, but the effect of today’s politics is far more corrosive on public morale and consensus.

In 1968, the true radicals were outside of the mainstream political system. Back then, American politics was defined largely by the ongoing debate and sometimes agreement between William F. Buckley Jr. conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals, with Ronald Reagan ultimately rising to be the political manifestation of conservative thought and the Kennedys the emblems of liberalism.

Of course, the Kennedy clan was very ill-fated in its efforts to fulfill its version of liberalism. John F. Kennedy didn’t last three years as president before his own assassination; Bobby Kennedy was killed before he could secure the nomination of his party in 1968; and the next year, 1969, the third Kennedy brother, Ted, was involved in a disgraceful and deadly incident in Chappaquiddick involving a female staffer and a car driven off a bridge. His negligent conduct insured that, though he would run for president in 1980, he would never rise above the Senate.

The Kennedy wing of the Democrat Party ran out of gas a long time ago. The jig was largely up when it was represented by low-energy Massachusetts pols like Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, in between the rise of Bill Clinton, and it lost its mojo long before it lost candidates capable of carrying its brand. And the other Kennedys who followed Ted into politics were more of the flash-in-the-pan variety; none rose above House seats in Congress.

But interestingly, it wasn’t just the Kennedy brand that vanished into the ether. The optimistic, pro-America liberalism it championed went with it.

Those radicals from 1968, the ones who rioted at the Democrat convention in Chicago that year, took over the party. It took a while, certainly, and the 1960s radicals themselves never actually became the frontmen. Kerry was really a pretend radical. He’s a pretend everything.

But the second generation of those radical lefties certainly did. They took over that party when Barack Obama came along.

And they’ve consolidated power to such totality — not just in politics but in society as a whole — that the modern-day use of “liberalism” to describe the philosophy of today’s Left is a misnomer.

You really shouldn’t use the word anymore because it has utterly lost its meaning.

There is no liberty in modern leftism, not really. There is a bit of libertinism, at least where it comes to deviant sex, baby-killing, and anatomical mutilation. But real liberty, the sort of thing contemplated by America’s Founding Fathers? None of that can be found in the doctrine of the left.

And perhaps the best exposition of this fact is the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has, through an upstart primary challenge to Joe Biden, breathed just a little bit of life into the old Kennedy brand and old-fashioned liberalism.

RFK Jr. seems to have garnered a lot more appreciation on the right than within his own party, though it looks as though most of that appreciation comes from Trump voters, who aren’t going to cross party lines in a general election. But polling indicates that he does hold on to some 15–20 percent of the Democrat vote, which represents what’s left of the Kennedy liberal faction.

It isn’t his share of the vote as reflected in those polls being so paltry that speaks volumes about where Kennedy liberalism stands inside the Democrat party. It’s how he’s treated.

Disgracefully, Kennedy was denied Secret Service protection, something virtually all major political candidates get as a matter of course within three weeks or so of asking for it. In his case, RFK Jr. was made to wait almost three months before the utterly impeachable Alejandro Mayorkas told him to sod off, something of a colossal insult to him given the history of his uncle and father falling at the hands of assassins. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Long-Awaited Impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas)

And that came after he was inexplicably (not really) accused of anti-Semitism for the mere reference to a study indicating that Ashkenazi Jews (as well as ethnic Chinese) fared better during the COVID pandemic than most, noting that if genetic markers could inform survivability of certain viruses, it might be indicative of present or future biological warfare. That was a serious, and rather alarming, observation that led to his being tarred and feathered by such nincompoops as Stacey Plaskett and Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a congressional hearing on — I’m not kidding — censorship. According to his fellow Democrats, Kennedy should have been canceled and deplatformed as a Jew-hater despite never uttering a word to that effect. (RELATED: Democrats Smear RFK Jr. as Anti-Semitic)

And, of course, he’s been almost completely blackballed from broadcast television as well as CNN and MSNBC.

Kennedy is being treated as a right-wing plant inside the Democrat Party, which is hilarious. Those Trump voters who appreciate his willingness to stand against the tyrannical impulses of the radical left inside his party agree with him on virtually nothing save his stance on COVID vaccine mandates and federal attempts to stifle social media discussions. He’s way out there on environmental policy, he’s anti-corporate in ways even the most populist Republicans wouldn’t endorse, and his economics and tax policies look reasonable only in comparison to what Team Biden has inflicted.

He’s no conservative. But to the radical Left, an old-school liberal is, nonetheless, an enemy. A return of old-school liberalism threatens the hard Left’s control over the woke institutions it’s corrupted, including the DNC, and it won’t have it.

Tyrrell said during our Spectacle interview that he sees RFK Jr. as a real threat to Team Biden. He’s not unreasonable for thinking so; if and when Biden implodes, if there is no backup plan (a Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom poised to pick up the standard), Kennedy might just be there to hold open his trick-or-treat bag and let primary victories pour into it.

But I’m of a less-sanguine view. I think Kennedy is relegated to two options: Either he’ll have to accept the status of a modern-day Bernie Sanders, who got a nice pat on the head for his fruitless efforts at wresting the nomination away from the Obama machine’s chosen candidate, or else he’ll have to do something a lot more disruptive if he wants to be relevant.

Namely, run as a third-party candidate, and, in doing so, quite possibly set the contemporary Democrat Party ablaze.

Which, given the speech he gave at the Iowa State Fair over the weekend, isn’t completely out of the question.

Kennedy is, to put it mildly, unusual as a politician. But this is a man with whom an honest debate can be had. He’s a man whose values are recognizable to those outside of the Dems.

And he’s being made a pariah by the liars and miscreants in his party.

Tyrrell’s memoirs will be a must-read. They will provide a road map for how we got to where we are now from that humorous moment in 1968.

But how we get out of here, this currently non-humorous moment of an American kakistocracy that, as RFK Jr. notes, is strip-mining our culture, economy, and politics, is something nobody quite has an answer for.