Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat, but he never let it get him down.

Indeed, back in 1980, just days before he was elected our nation’s 40th president, the Gipper was at a working class bar in Bayonne, New Jersey, when he shared his conversion story: “I know what it’s like to pull the Republican lever for the first time because I used to be a Democrat myself,” he said. “And I can tell you it only hurts for a minute, and then it feels just great.”

Of course, it had been years since Reagan was a Democrat — since 1962, in fact. And as he trenchantly put it, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party. The Democratic Party left me.”

These days, we can imagine Robert F. Kennedy Jr. feeling much the same way Reagan did — like a man without a party. And we can imagine it was with a heavy heart last week that he penned an open letter to the Democratic National Committee.

“Families tell one another the truth,” Kennedy began, “as best we are able with grace and love and, above all, with candor. When we take wrong turns, or fail to live up to our best selves, it is our family’s responsibility to hold up a mirror and recall us back to our true purpose and highest self-expression. And so I feel compelled to write to you now, because in my view, limited though it may be, the Democratic Party has gone off track.”

The Dems have gone off track? Say it ain’t so.

Kennedy then got to the point of his piece: freedom — and how the Democrat Party that once fought for this principle has since forsaken it. The party that once fought for civil rights and free speech has since “succumbed to the siren of control,” as he puts it. Kennedy seems to have forgotten some of the less noble things that the Democrat Party has historically fought for — things like slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and poll taxes and literacy tests — but these things would greatly complicate his argument. He continues, calling out the party’s leaders: “They have compromised the defining democratic principle of one person, one vote through repeated interference in the primary elections. They have hijacked the party machinery and, in recent years, directed the power of censorship onto their political opponents, raising political victory onto the altar in place of honest democracy.”

So much for the “progressive” party. But that’s the thing about progressivism: The job is never done, the state never satisfactory, the mission never accomplished for the party that believes as Rousseau did that man is born free and yet is everywhere in chains.

Here, we should also acknowledge that while we love a good family feud, and while we believe that RFK Jr. is a breath of fresh air, and while we hope he makes an independent run for president in order to pull votes away from Joe Biden or whichever Democrat runs in his place, we can’t ignore some of the candidate’s more, er, eccentric policy positions.

“Some conservatives,” writes Power Line’s John Hinderaker, “have an unreasonably positive view of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., based on the fact that he sounds sensible on two or three issues. But in fact, he is nuts, as manifested most grotesquely in his conviction that Sirhan Sirhan did not murder his father. Beyond that, he is, on the large majority of issues, an unreconstructed far left-winger.”

For example, he wants to ban fracking, he believes vaccines can cause autism, he believes 5G is used to collect our information and control our behavior, and he thinks the CIA killed his uncle but Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill has dad.

In any case, as for his status as a Democrat candidate for president in a cycle featuring a greatly debilitated Democrat incumbent, RFK Jr. writes:

Equally disheartening is the DNC’s refusal to hold debates. The matter of precedent is spurious, as there has been no serious primary challenge to an incumbent in more than 40 years. (Although Al Gore, a sitting vice-president, did debate challengers in 2000.) Voters deserve — and democracy requires — a competitive process by which to determine nominees. It should be a party’s voters who choose a candidate, not party insiders who anoint one.

The DNC and the Joe Biden campaign have essentially merged into one unit, financially and strategically, despite the promise of neutrality in its charter and bylaws. The DNC is not supposed to favor one candidate over another. It is supposed to oversee a fair, democratic selection process, and then support the candidate that its voters choose.

Kennedy closes his open letter with a call to his fellow Democrats to conduct “the most transparent, equal, accessible, and accountable election that has ever been seen in this country.” He then offers some parting words from none other than the Indispensable Man: “Parties,” warned George Washington, “become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

It’s hard to argue with Washington’s wisdom.

Postscript: In his column yesterday, National Review’s Jim Geraghty made an interesting appeal to Joe Biden: Provide RFK Jr. with Secret Service protection. Now. While it’s true that such protection is usually only afforded to “major presidential and vice-presidential candidates and, within 120 days of the general presidential election, the spouses of such candidates,” this particular candidate warrants special consideration. He is, after all, a Kennedy. And our country is, after all, more than just a bit nuts.