It could be a political exercise of the sort the Founders had in mind — and showcase the superiority of the conservative model of state governance to boot.
It could be a political exercise of the sort the Founders had in mind — and showcase the superiority of the conservative model of state governance to boot.
C alifornia governor Gavin Newsom has been spoiling for a fight on the national stage. “Freedom is under attack in your state,” the governor said in a television spot he cut to be aired exclusively in Florida last year. He urged Floridians to rise up and “join the fight” for the kind of freedom that he alleged was under attack in the Sunshine State — “freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, and the freedom to love.” The ad was clearly intended to make Ron DeSantis into a foil, raising Newsom’s own national profile in the process. DeSantis wouldn’t take the bait, however, and the challenge was soon forgotten.
But during a Fox News Channel interview in June, Newsom threw the gauntlet down again. And on Wednesday, DeSantis accepted the challenge.
Every indication suggests this is real. Newsom’s office has proposed two dates in early November on which the debate might occur, with Fox News host Sean Hannity serving as moderator. He has also proposed some ground rules concerning the format, the timeline, how it will air (live), and whether there will be an audience (there won’t be). The terms are reasonable, and DeSantis seems inclined to accept.
It might have been a publicity stunt when Newsom demanded a debate. DeSantis’ willingness to participate in this contest at this stage of his presidential campaign is almost certainly an extension of his desire for the attention of the Republican-primary electorate. But this is not a waste of the public’s intellectual energies. This spectacle wouldn’t just raise the profiles of both participants; it would also treat America to a substantive political debate with high stakes for the future of the American civic compact.
What prompted Newsom to cast himself as DeSantis’ most potent political foe in the summer of 2022 was the Florida governor’s alleged “bullying” of the Special Olympics, which DeSantis threatened to fine if it imposed a Covid-19 vaccination mandate on its athletes. “He did something that tipped me very directly,” Newsom confessed. “I had an emotional response to that.”
Newsom’s irritation notwithstanding, DeSantis’s threat alone convinced the Special Olympics to scuttle its proposed vaccination mandate, allowing hundreds of special-needs athletes to compete. California’s governor should be made to explain why his ideal vaccination regimen should have robbed these athletes of that opportunity. Moreover, Newsom should say if he still believes that mandate is necessary, since the epidemiological conditions that prevailed in June 2022 still largely pertain today.
Likewise, Newsom deserves to be confronted over why he believes his state’s model provides its citizens with a better way of life than Florida’s. Is it California’s rising violent- and property-crime rates? Is it the fact that a majority of the state’s public-school students cannot meet basic English and math standards? Maybe it’s the rolling blackouts — ahem, “rotating outages” — that are allegedly necessary to meet the state’s energy needs?
Newsom appears to define “freedom” to mean uninhibited access to abortion services at almost all stages of a pregnancy and preserving minors’ uninterrupted access to pornographic illustrations in publicly funded institutions. But does Newsom believe the “freedom from hate” Californians experience and Floridians do not includes freedom from state-sponsored racial discrimination? If he does, he’ll have to explain why California’s legislature attempted to strike from the state constitution language prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. That project, which was designed to legalize anti-racist discriminatory practices, was only narrowly averted by a revolt of the state’s citizens.
Newsom might also have to make sense of why Californians similarly rose up against an effort to artificially boost labor-union rolls by decimating parts of the so-called “sharing economy” like ride-sharing services. If Californians are so satisfied with their circumstances, why do they so often erupt in protest against Sacramento? And when they’re not voting in droves against the state’s latest exercise in social engineering, why are they leaving?
Roughly 400,000 Californians left the state for greener pastures between July 2021 and July 2022. Last year, the state’s population declined to fewer than 39 million people for the first time since 2015. By contrast, Florida’s growth is uninterrupted and shows no signs of abating. Florida gained nearly as many residents as California lost in almost the same time period, and is for the first time since 1957 America’s fastest-growing state. Are all these people making horribly ill-informed or malign decisions for themselves and their families?
When Newsom first began trolling DeSantis in the hopes of engaging directly with the governor, I wrote about why that contest could prove immensely salutary to America’s politics:
This contest, if we should be so fortunate to be privy to it, would be beneficial to America’s civic consciousness. A debate over the theories of social organization being tested at the state level is exactly what the Founders intended for us.
The California model and the Florida model are wildly distinct theories of how to balance economic optimization against the need to maximize human happiness. They are in competition already, and it would be valuable to hash out those distinctions in plain terms on a debate stage. If these two governors can respectfully advocate their respective philosophical approaches to governance, it would greatly clarify the stakes of the coming presidential contest. Indeed, such an engagement would likely prove vastly more informational than one defined by two aged, cantankerous bloviators whose highest aspirations for the country are to ensure that it doesn’t put them or their loved ones in jail.
Of course, a DeSantis–Newsom debate could also devolve into bickering, point-scoring, and competing one-liners. If this debate becomes a contest of personalities, DeSantis’s deficiencies in that area could prove fatal. But if Hannity could keep the participants in this deliberation focused on arguing their competing theories of societal organization, it wouldn’t just be a far healthier political exercise than any to which Americans have been privy for many years; it would also showcase the superiority of the conservative model of state governance. And it might go a long way toward convincing the voting public that Florida’s state-level experiments deserve to go national.