“Goodbye, Ron”
(to quote Bret Stephens in The New York Times the morning after the first Republican debate of 2023)
A turd can only be polished so many times before it turns to dust—and as the DeSantis sideshow founders outside the small tent of Florida grievance politics, it is worth asking, what is the studied credulousness on the part of mainstream media outlets that allowed him to be treated as a normal candidate—even post-Trump, and how did a relative political neophyte with little to no charisma even briefly capture the attention of the GOP donor class and the aforementioned media pundits, when his actual agenda, crafted to appeal to the grossest instincts of Trump-emboldened fascist-leaning social conservatives, was never anywhere near in step with our purported American values of democracy, plurality, and self determination?
Yes his midterm performance was markedly better than most Republicans in 2022, but his self-presentation, seemingly pulled whole cloth from Central European strongmen, lacks the well-treaded showmanship of Trump or the hopeful ethos of early Obama, and while it must have cast an early positive impression on the troll farms of Russia, given that his putative agenda is a Putinist Russian import—from “Don’t Say Gay,” to his rehearsed acolytes flanking him at press conferences, just why did the Republican donor class, purportedly over Trump-like expedient bombast, and the media, who could and should have highlighted just how essentially un-American his political project was, treat him like a candidate operating in good faith who was worth extensive coverage?
As someone whose existence the DeSantis political project would seek to drive from public life, who believes Americans need to be vastly more aware of our painfully checkered moral arc as a country, rather than less, I take personal exception to the man, and find it additionally insulting that he has been conveniently backpedaling on his war on “woke,” as he finds it less politically expedient.
Of course the man will never be president, and Casey DeSantis, who was until rather recently presenting paid content on Florida morning television, can dress up as Jackie O. all she wants, but she will never be First Lady.
What concerns me, is that after January 6th, a candidate with such a radical agenda was treated with kid gloves by the media, and seriously considered by more sober-minded Republicans as a candidate anyone who still has some belief in the sustainability of American Democracy could support instead of Trump.
I fully understand the far right argument that he would be a more disciplined disrupter of their loathed liberal order than Trump was, but that hardly explains why an anti-Trump Republican would see him as a better bill of goods, given that he, like Ramaswamy, cannot bring himself to offer even a mild rebuke of Trump. If you want Trump, he’s unfortunately fully available, and leading GOP polls by double digits.
Sure, DeSantis has the bonafides of Ivy and Navy, and that was impressive to the early Yale alumni donors he solicited for his first campaign to become a member of the House, but the crux of his oleaginous political rise in reality was the “everything is permissible” ethos of the Trump era, and the media’s temerity when it comes to speaking plainly.
The man is a five alarm phony who has a well-documented history of bullying and biting the hand that feeds him, and yet he actually made it this far before starting to founder.
And although the far right seems to be actively imploding, at least in the House, his agenda has already opened the Overton window to make conceivable a similarly morally craven, Democracy-allergic candidate with just a little bit more polish winning a GOP primary.
Of course, if Trump wins again, elections won’t be of concern at all.
One might make the argument that his strategic lurch back to somewhat relative center, at least by post-Trump GOP standards, or his acknowledgment that anti-“wokeness” isn’t the useful scapegoat it once was, could be seen as an inevitable “correction” in the “market” of ideas, given the exigencies of winning a general election, but I would counter that those ideas weren’t treated as as radical departure from “American ideals” when DeSantis first offered them up for consumption, and if “wokeness” was never an actual “kitchen table” issue for most Americans, why didn’t his book banning, attacks on the teaching of actual American history and the LGBTQ community disqualify him from being seen as participating in any kind of rational, good faith political discourse from the very beginning of his ascent in the polls?
Perhaps this is partly because in so many ways he looks like a traditional candidate on paper, with that aforementioned Ivy League education, military background and three children whose names wouldn’t be out of place on the roll call of a selective NYC preschool.
The relatively more nuanced but still hopelessly frustrating answer is the inflated value of polling itself—popularity shouldn’t equal legitimacy as a candidate, but legacy media is forever concerned about appearing not to look down on those they most certainly look down on behind closed doors, which means they flog a both sides narrative. The newest cover of the New Yorker depicting two aging Republicans and two aging Democrats is illustrative of this—the intractability of entrenched elderly party elites is an issue (I bet they’re glad they didn’t include Feinstein on that cover), but the elephant in the room is not age, but rather, what the man on the far left would do if returned to power.
A disciplined candidate, with a far less off-putting personal presentation, could capture the Republican nomination and the centrist, market-focused, political and media apparatus would give them all the oxygen they need to set fire to American pluralistic Democracy in plain sight.