About Ron DeSantis’ political ambitions

CONTEXT

Recently, I’ve posted several items about what the radical right dictator wannabe Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida. It is the centerpiece of his campaign for president in 2024. From what I can tell, he is emulating the tactics that Viktor Orban used to kill democracy in Hungary. This post is a copy of the superb analysis that PD laid out on Snowflake’s Forum about the cruel, authoritarian things that DeSantis wants to do to American democracy. For context, this 5:28 interview is about how Orban killed democracy in Hungary. He did that within just two years after his election in 2010. That track record of anti-democracy accomplishment is why radical right Republican authoritarian elites love Orban and want to replicate here what he did there.

DeSantis analyzed

  PD wrote: 

DeSantis is the only candidate (once he actually announces) with a chance of defeating Trump, who is still the #1 Republican candidate in the polls I’ve seen. But DeSantis knows that he’ll never beat Trump on Trump’s own terms-- basically cult of personality with that famous charisma I just don’t feel, but which seems to catalyze voters even after all his blunders. So what can DeSantis do? Trump savages him verbally, and-- true to Trump’s nickname for him, DeSanctimonious-- he can do no more than say, “I don’t insult other Republicans, I criticize Biden and not others in my party.” Actually he does both, but dreads a battle of personalities, since his own is dull as dishwater. 

Here’s what I think is going on in Fla. with the constant ratcheting up of authoritarianism: he’s putting together a resume for the radical Trump-loving base which will not require him (he hopes) to square off with Trump and thus lose. Instead, his sales pitch is going to be, I think, “Look at what I did to Florida in a few short years. Give me your vote, and the US will look just like Fla.” Okay, so what does that look like according to DeSantis? As he puts it in this 50 second clip, after bragging about his authoritarian policies, “The political character of Florida has changed. We’ve been really able to rewrite the map here, and the Democratic Party in this state is basically a dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.”

He is betting that if he can do what Trumpists want Trump to do more quickly and effectively (or at least make the claim on the basis of Florida as “exhibit A”) then most of Trump’s followers will vote for this audacious “Trump sans baggage.” While Trump continues to relitigate the 2020 election at his rallies, DeSantis is working hard to model Florida’s colleges on Hillsdale College ( where Scalia and Clarence Thomas have given commencement speeches, and where "anti-woke" curriculum and Christian nationalism-laced American History courses are designed and exported to Red States). DeSantis placed Christopher Ruffo on the board of New College in order to make of this famous liberal arts college that once had Arnold Toynbee in its history dept., a Christian Nationalist (CN), anti-woke, book banning dystopia to show just how much he can fuck with US institutions and get away with it. 

Ruffo is the GOP’s premier culture warrior, the guy who almost single-handedly made the letters CRT a household word in this country and manufactured a virtual panic over them. He and other CNs from Hillsdale and Claremont (the most regressive institutions going) are taking over the administration of this college which will also (DeSantis hopes) serve as “exhibit A” on the education/ religious indoctrination front. See, it’s not just K-12 anymore. As the bumper stickers say nowadays, “Florida is where woke goes to die.” That has to include not just K-12, but state colleges, corporations (like Disney) and anything else in the way of the DeSantis juggernaut. Here’s Ruffo bragging about how swift and thorough the wreckage will be. Notice the line that says, “We’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”

But I'm more optimistic than this. The takeover of New College has already changed the dynamics in higher education. We have a strong new president who has a mandate to change the administrative and academic trajectory of the institution. You'll see changes in the next 120 days.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 28, 2023

So, there should be no surprise that if he can get away with it, DeSantis will censor blogs just like he has done with libraries, just as he is doing with Advance Placement courses in HS and now higher education too. Who knows what he really believes. As Katherine Stewart (author of The Power Worshippers) wrote in a recent New Republic piece, DeSantis knows that the road to the White House must include A) frequent public acts of cruelty (y’know like when Trump attacked an American Judge as "having a conflict of interest because he’s Mexican" or when he taunted a Goldstar Family whose Muslim son had died fighting in Afghanistan while Bone Spurs used insulting ethnic stereotypes to savage the parents). That’s why DeSantis pulled that stunt with the asylum seekers he sent to Martha’s Vineyard late last year. Performative cruelty. 

The second requirement to win is to get the support of a significant portion of the Republican super-donors, which DeSantis has done. BUT, often overlooked by MSM is the fact that, as DeSantis has learned from Trump, the road to the White House now requires that “you get an endorsement from God” according to the influential CN’s and white evangelicals. That’s why Hillsdale College (a CN bastion) serves as the template for the educational makeovers he’s trying to orchestrate. I recommend Katherine Stewart’s article in The New Republic.

All of these things are timed to coincide with his new book, The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, obviously his extended argument for running against Trump. This Newsweek article includes a 30 minute podcast interview with DeSantis in case anyone wants to hear what he sounds like as he makes the case for being a--perhaps less charismatic but more “effective”-- proponent of just about all of the things “the base” wants from Trump.  

I still say Trump is likely to be the candidate mainly because when I try to picture DeSantis forced to respond to Trump in real-time on TV I think he’ll come across as lame and stiff as Trump repeatedly insults and humiliates him as he did effectively with more likeable-- to Repubs that is-- candidates in 2016. But as Stewart and others point out, DeSantis is a man with a plan, and though he’s in the news, unlike Trump, he is not explicitly called out as a dangerous would-be dictator. And yet that is exactly what he wants to prove he is by making sure that by the time the debates start he can say with even greater credibility that in Florida, he has left the Democratic Party like “a dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.” 

It’s scandalous that our cowardly media outlets give him a pass as if he were just another candidate-- albeit with anti-woke tendencies. Anti-woke is only the tip of the iceberg, the bait to attract a broad swath of Republicans and Right Leaning Independents. Come for the anti-woke--stay for the thought control regime.

Qs: Is this analysis wrong, hyperbole or otherwise not persuasive? If so, why, e.g., are evil democrats indoctrinating children with socialism, and evil awareness of inconvenient truth and gender fluidity? Does the alleged evil the Democrats do justify doing to American democracy what Orban did to democracy in Hungary? Is DeSantis just another candidate or does the MSM deserve a grade of F for failing to treat DeSantis as the dictator wannabe I firmly believe he is?