He’s been the leader of the opposition to progressive America, and he was that leader even while Donald Trump was still in office.
He’s been the leader of the opposition to progressive America, and he was that leader even while Donald Trump was still in office.
I f I were in Iowa or New Hampshire, I would caucus or vote for Ron DeSantis in the Republican primary.
Why? Very simple. He’s been the leader of the opposition to progressive America, and he was that leader even while Donald Trump was still in office as president of the United States. He is the most effective conservative executive in the country, and it’s not very close. He became this way because he takes care to comprehend his role as a statesman, understanding his powers and their limits. His record of governance in Florida and his last several debate performances show him as a man who does the homework — reads his briefing books with an open and working intellect.
Ron DeSantis changed American life for the better by becoming the political face of opposition to medical mandates and endless closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than deferring to public-health authorities — ones who later admitted to a certain myopia about stopping infection above all other goals — DeSantis took responsibility for reconciling the information and expertise that public-health bodies could offer with the existing life of his state. He saw the stats on how Covid affected the elderly. DeSantis took the opposite course charted by Governor Cuomo in New York, who rushed patients back to nursing homes to free up hospital beds, thus seeding nursing homes with the earlier, deadlier strains of Covid. Instead, DeSantis insisted on full recovery before returning patients to elder-care facilities.
While other governors used their emergency powers to dictate the minutiae of American life — Governor Whitmer closed down the gardening sections of retailers in Michigan — Ron DeSantis used his powers to stop local school districts from closing down on their own. This was in line with the best evidence that schools were not a primary driver of infection and the knowledge that kids thrive when they have the regular scheduled, institutional formation offered only by in-person schooling. Florida experienced less learning loss and teen depression and suicidality than other states. He used the same powers to prevent employers from mandating that their employees take what were vaccines approved only for emergency use. Many residents had good reason to skip it — namely that they already had a more robust immunity from being previously infected with Covid.
DeSantis’s achievement was not just to help Florida’s economy, or help the state win the allegiance of scores of thousands of new families. It wasn’t just the political victory for his party that it inspired, turning his purple state a much deeper shade of red. Ultimately he protected the social fabric from the series of moral panics that come along with a pandemic. No mean feat.
This was a test that Donald Trump ultimately failed. Trump had planned on spending his election year goosing the economy, praising the end of his trade war with China, and talking about how we were getting along so well. He never fully adjusted to the pandemic nor had the attention span or will to reconcile his “let’s reopen for Easter” instincts with the evidence or policies that would make it credible to the American people. He sulked, and dithered, and then whined. He allowed experts who despised him to determine the terms on which Americans would live in 2020 and to make the unsubtle case that only by electing his opponent would we ever truly escape the novel strictures around our lives.
That would be enough for me. But in the everyday life of American politics, DeSantis has been an effective executive. He has used his powers to thwart activist district attorneys. He has worked with the legislature to prevent young children from being exposed in public schools to the psychologically destabilizing ideology that tells them, baselessly, that they may have been born in the wrong body. He has effectively waged counterattacks in the culture war by simply reading the material that progressive educators want in primary school at press conferences, forcing broadcast-news stations to blank out images or words that would earn them serious fines, thereby effectively demonstrating the inappropriate nature of the material for classrooms.
I’m told that DeSantis has failed to catch on with voters in the early states because of his personality. Or because Trump has been indicted too many times. I don’t really understand this. America is hiring a president. A proven executive who spends a little more time than is fun doing his homework and who gets lots of things accomplished seems like a nice change of pace from the playboy billionaire who faces jail time and the elder-abuse victim Joe Biden.