Jonathan Chait Is Yet Again Wrong about Ron DeSantis

I regret to inform you that Jonathan Chait is at it again. In his latest column, he uses one of my columns as a lever to assert a syllogism in order to claim that Ron DeSantis is quietly courting the support of white nationalists by . . . doing nothing:

There are three fundamental flaws with this reasoning, and when you combine the three, you can see how Chait completely fails to explain DeSantis’s incentives or his strategy. The first: Chait simply assumes that Republican politicians have a constant obligation to denounce white supremacists on every possible occasion, while Democratic politicians never have any obligation to denounce anyone — or, at least, anyone they do not already regard as a partisan adversary. Chait is well aware of the dark, illiberal strains growing on the left — to his credit, he has written against them — but Democratic politicians get a complete pass. When was the last time Joe Biden denounced extremism on his own side in anything resembling specific naming-names terms? Chait doesn’t care. This has been a particularly pronounced pattern regarding attacks on the legitimacy of American elections: As I have detailed at length, while Chait treats DeSantis as guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt on this issue even on the slimmest of pretexts, he resolutely refuses to ever mention the Democrats’ long, dolorous history between 2000 and 2022 of undermining the legitimacy of American elections. The only time Chait ever mentions this is when he is endorsing the view that the 2000 election was stolen.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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I regret to inform you that Jonathan Chait is at it again. In his latest column, he uses one of my columns as a lever to assert a syllogism in order to claim that Ron DeSantis is quietly courting the support of white nationalists by . . . doing nothing:

There are three fundamental flaws with this reasoning, and when you combine the three, you can see how Chait completely fails to explain DeSantis’s incentives or his strategy. The first: Chait simply assumes that Republican politicians have a constant obligation to denounce white supremacists on every possible occasion, while Democratic politicians never have any obligation to denounce anyone — or, at least, anyone they do not already regard as a partisan adversary. Chait is well aware of the dark, illiberal strains growing on the left — to his credit, he has written against them — but Democratic politicians get a complete pass. When was the last time Joe Biden denounced extremism on his own side in anything resembling specific naming-names terms? Chait doesn’t care. This has been a particularly pronounced pattern regarding attacks on the legitimacy of American elections: As I have detailed at length, while Chait treats DeSantis as guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt on this issue even on the slimmest of pretexts, he resolutely refuses to ever mention the Democrats’ long, dolorous history between 2000 and 2022 of undermining the legitimacy of American elections. The only time Chait ever mentions this is when he is endorsing the view that the 2000 election was stolen.