Ron DeSantis Backs Down From a Fight
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Irregular musings from the center left.
&c. by Jonathan Chait
Ron DeSantis Has a Glaring Vulnerability
As a rule, State of the Union addresses are what Daniel Boorstin has called pseudo-events: scripted affairs whose only news value
is the commentary surrounding them. But President Biden’s speech gave some important signals about the upcoming election. Biden is
probably going to run — his performance was lively enough to at least slightly alleviate doubts about his age — and his campaign
is likely to focus on a defense of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
This dynamic clicked into place for me when I saw two pieces of reporting about Ron DeSantis, the conservative Establishment’s
selection to replace Donald Trump as the presidential nominee. First, Josh Barro noted that, as a member of the House in 2013 and
2014, DeSantis not only voted for Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into vouchers but also supported an even more radical plan
that “would have raised the retirement ages for both Social Security and Medicare to 70, cut the growth rate of Social Security
benefits, and changed Medicare from a program that guarantees access to health insurance into one that would have provided a
stipend payment that would not, over time, have necessarily kept pace with the actual cost to buy health insurance.”
The next day, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck reported for CNN that DeSantis had endorsed privatizing both Medicare and Social
Security. “I would embrace proposals like [Rep.] Paul Ryan offered, and other people have offered, that are going to provide some
market forces in there, more consumer choice, and make it so that it’s not just basically a system that’s just going to be
bankrupt when you have new people coming into it,” DeSantis said in a video CNN dug up. “Social Security, I would do the same
thing.”
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
What is perhaps even more telling is the response from DeSantis: nothing.
DeSantis has built an identity as a fearless pugilist. One of his ads literally boasts that DeSantis will “never, ever back down
from a fight.” And yet, even after the media reported these damaging stories, and even after Biden traveled to Florida to give a
speech attacking him for denying health coverage to a million Floridians by boycotting Medicaid expansion, DeSantis did not reply.
DeSantis’s peripatetic spokespeople — both official (Christina Pushaw, Jeremy Redfern) and unofficial (Chris Rufo, Karol
Markowicz, David Reaboi, to name a handful among a cast of thousands) — normally swarm over any reporter who paints the boss in an
unflattering light. As of Monday morning, they have tweeted absolutely nothing about this.
The absolute silence from DeSantis World on this issue reveals that he understands perfectly well that his history of endorsing
right-wing views on the welfare state poses a serious vulnerability. It will be fascinating to see how DeSantis handles this
vulnerability going forward. Maybe he will renounce his old views. Or maybe he thinks he can continue to focus exclusively on his
own preferred issues and win enough voters solely through a bubble curated by media loyal to him.
You’ve probably read plenty about illiberal excesses in progressive spaces. It’s difficult to find one that more effectively
exposes the absurdity of these contemporary norms than the story of how a Macalester College art exhibit was briefly closed owing
to student complaints, then reopened with curtains and frosted glass to hide the offensive content from innocent eyes.
Here is the funny part. The exhibit was deemed offensive not despite but because it expressed feminist protest against religious
puritanism.
Now why, you may ask, would progressive students object to an art exhibit critiquing misogyny? Well, the exhibit was critiquing
Islamist misogyny:
A woman in a niqab shows her leg and crotch and gives the viewer the finger; a woman in a hijab pulls up her dress to show the
sexy lingerie underneath. Several sculptures depict women in niqabs fully covered except for cartoonishly large protruding
breasts.
If the protesters had deemed the exhibit blasphemous, or arousing, or said it celebrated women as whores, the exhibit would have
stood firm against reactionary philistinism. Instead, they cleverly couched their complaint in social-justice lingo. “The decision
to display and continue to display this exhibition despite the harm it perpetuates is a deeply problematic issue. It is targeting
and harming an already small community that exists on this campus,” complains the petition.
The complaining students believed that if they presented supporters of strict Islamic fundamentalism as an oppressed minority, the
museum would ignore the content of their objection. And they were right! What this shows, of course, is how easy it is to hack
into and manipulate norms that assume any person deemed to be from an oppressed class can decide any idea they don’t like is
“harmful.”
Jill Filipovic, through whom I found this story, has an excellent commentary on it. “If you can’t handle seeing breasts —
including breasts on a woman who wears a hijab or niqab — I would recommend not going to any art museum or exhibit,” she writes,
“I might stay off of the internet, too, and perhaps reconsider leaving the house.”
Her broader point strikes me as clearly true: “Leaning into the language of ‘harm’ creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and
while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s
long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.”
It is very easy for liberals to see this when the idea of “harm” is derived from religious fundamentalism. We understand perfectly
well that creating taboos around images, thoughts, and words are ways of controlling ideas and this control is merely justified by
appeals to preventing harm to onlookers. The challenge is to extend this easy clarity to social taboos derived from belief systems
closer to home.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Kyrsten Sinema is a fascinating subject to me because she did something rare in the Democratic Party: She threw away her political
career over a matter of principle, specifically bad principles. Sinema went to the mat to protect the super-wealthy from taxation
and to severely limit the federal government’s ability to negotiate prescription-drug prices.
These policies have no meaningful electoral constituency. She forced herself into a position where, having little chance to win a
Democratic primary, she fled the party and is running as an independent (assuming she makes it all the way to the election, which
does not strike me as a certainty).
Tara Palmieri reports Sinema was recently being “fêted at a fundraiser in Palm Beach by Steve Schwarzman.”
Who is Steve Schwarzman? He’s a Republican hedge-funder and probably the heart of Sinema’s base. Schwarzman has backed various
Republicans, but he does not care about social policy or racism. He is in it for the tax cuts.
In 2010, he compared President Obama’s plan to tax private-equity firms to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. This statement clarified
that Schwarzman sees both progressive taxation and Nazism as evil. Which one he saw as more evil was an abstract question until we
got a president who liked Nazis and hated taxing the rich, at which point Schwarzman became a major donor.
In the wake of the insurrection, when the business class was suddenly and briefly abandoning Trump, the Guardian reported on his
prior support for Trump, and a Schwarzman spokesperson hilariously explained it was “purely about matters related to economic
policy and trade, not politics.” It’s not that he’s immoral; he’s just amoral.
Arizona Democrats have been attacking Sinema as ignoring her constituents to cater instead to her superrich pals. This alliance is
hardly going to dispel that line of attack.
Columbia sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi argues in a new column that the wave of illiberal norms sweeping through progressive
institutions has already begun to recede. I made a similar argument a year ago. Al-Gharbi’s version has a handful of differences.
He dates the origination of the trend to 2011, a few years before I do, and defines the locus as “knowledge economy” hubs. His
column also brings to bear more data to measure the peaking of the trend:
Across a range of datasets, we see apparent declines in “grassroots” attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus (even as
there are growing attempts to suppress political scholarship from external stakeholders) …
Companies are slackening their enforcement of post-2010 norms and expectations on identity issues. For instance, they are growing
less likely to rapidly terminate or suspend employees accused of sexual misconduct based purely on the word of accusers. At the
same time, they are walking back their aggressive symbolic commitments to social justice and quietly defunding the financial
pledges they made to various activist groups and causes. Many are also making aggressive cuts to the DEI-related positions that
ballooned in recent years.
I find his case persuasive. I would like to highlight one factor that I have cited and that he omits. Al-Gharbi, like me, sees
political outcomes as an important driver. Democrats recognized after the 2020 election that their left-wing activists were
associating their party with unpopular policies and rhetoric and recognized the need for a course correction.
The factor he does not cite is Donald Trump receding from public attention. It is true that even before Trump ran for president,
left-wingers had advanced reductive views about race and gender within progressive spaces. But Trump’s rise was gasoline on the
fire.
As silly as it may sound, Trump’s overt sexism and racism has remained deeply underappreciated. On occasion, I’ve brought up
Trump’s overtly racist rhetoric to conservatives, and they respond with blank stares. During the presidential campaign, Paul Ryan
conceded that Trump’s claim that a “Mexican judge” was inherently biased was a “textbook definition of a racist statement.”
Trump never stopped making statements like this. As last week’s Twitter hearings revealed, he violated the site’s terms of service
by telling people from immigrant communities to go back to “their” country. (Twitter responded by making an exception for him.
When you’re a star, they let you do it.)
An ideology that claimed racism and sexism were endemic, and required totalistic and sometimes even cultlike behavior to
eradicate, became much more persuasive when the president of the United States was running around calling women ugly and telling
brown-skinned people they had no right to participate in public affairs. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wave of
post-liberal progressivism has receded as Trump has exited the national stage.
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