"Bobby's Apparently Disparate Political Stands Become Perfectly Sensible and Coherent"

"In keeping with this ethos, Kennedy was acutely skeptical about the remote, centralized, bureaucratic social programs of the New Deal and the Great Society—on the grounds that they minimized, if they didn't preclude, citizen participation. Kennedy’s intolerance of crime, even when committed by legitimately angry rioters in the streets of American cities, also had a civic-republican basis: Fear of crime, he thought, compromised citizen access to public spaces and so shrunk the sense of community for everyone. He was meanwhile cynical about what he saw as America's overweening faith in economic growth per se and its exaltation of gross national product as the measure of human happiness—noting that the country was afflicted not only by material poverty among the disadvantaged but also by a 'poverty of satisfaction ... that afflicts us all'—and idealistic about what we could call civic growth: 'We know our happiness comes not from the goods we have, but from the good we do together.'"

Win McCormack at The New Republic calls Robert F. Kennedy a "Civic Republican."