1). “The Red States Experimenting With Authoritarianism”, April 18, 2023, Brian Klaas, The Atlantic.
2). “The Uniquely American Future of US Authoritarianism: The GOP-fueled far right differs from similar movements around the globe, thanks to the country’s politics, electoral system, and changing demographics”, Mar 26, 2023, Thor Benson, Wired, at < https://www.wired.com/story/us-authoritarian-movement-future/ >
3). “The MAGIC KINGDOM of RON DeSANTIS”, May 2023, Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, Vol. 331, Issue 4, p40-50. 11p
4). “The Republican Agenda Is One Bad Idea After Another”, April 25, 2023, Molly Jong-Fast, Politics, Vanity Fair, at <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/republican-agenda-bad-idea-abortion-book-ban-child-labor-guns>.
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: There is absolutely no doubt that the ruling class, of the U.S., is toying with imposing an authoritarian regime; to rule their homeland during the last years of their Declining Empire’s Hegemonic; or perhaps more accurately expressed as, during their recently begun Post-Hegemonic period. One of the two duopoly Capitalist political parties has gone Whole Hog in that direction, that party being the Republicans of course. The Democrats preside over a weak and ineffectual response and, in effect, have already ceded over half the land area of the U.S., and perhaps 35% of the population of the country -- to increasingly hard-line authoritarian rule. The parallels to Weimar Germany are hard to ignore.
There has been a considerable amount of writing about these developments. Paul Street, for one, writes excellent true leftist articles about the topic that are frequently posted here. The liberal media have also published some good work and four of them are posted here. Item 1)., “The Red States Experimenting With Authoritarianism”, reviews several developments in the Republican Controlled States and notes how these Republican-led initiatives have undermined and greatly lessened actual democracy in those places. Klaas notes that:
“The composition of Republican rising stars is worrying, too. In Oregon, members of the violent, far-right Proud Boys have secured leadership positions in local GOP bodies, making national-level extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene look moderate by comparison. (Emphasis added)
“Democracy isn't all or nothing; it can be measured on a spectrum. But if voters face ‘time taxes’ to vote in uncompetitive, gerrymandered elections that entrench minority rule, and then have their elected officials removed from office or usurped by a new body created by Republicans well, that's not democracy.” (Emphasis Added)
Item 2)., “The Uniquely American Future of US Authoritarianism: ….”, also looks at the country overall and discusses these issues. Item 3)., “The MAGIC KINGDOM of RON DeSANTIS”, focuses on the pivotal, now firmly authoritarian and proto-fascist, state of Florida; the home of the two strongest possible Republican contenders for the 2024 Presidential Election, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. The author, a woman from the U.K. has an interesting take on Florida and the far-right’s brand of political action there. She looks very closely at DeSantis, and less closely at Trump who is, of course, far better known and much more written about. Finally Item 4)., “The Republican Agenda Is One Bad Idea After Another”, looks at four issues, the right-wing attacks on trans children, reproductive health care access, the horrific issues around gun-violence, and the move by Republicans to bring back legalized child labor. The author of that piece notes that 5 states with Republican controlled legislatures and Republican governors are working on legislation to bring back child labor; namely Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Missouri, and Georgia. She also points out that 24 states have already made abortion illegal or are in the process of doing so. These extremist machinations have caused a variety of reactions among the U.S. populace: among them one effect is that: “Abortion rights have shot up in popularity: 62% in 2022 vs. 47% in 2009, ….” and that: “Overturning Roe was so unpopular, the disapproval rating of the Supreme Court has since shot up to a historic high of 58%, according to Gallup.”
Seeing as their overall agenda is so disliked, by various majorities of the U.S. population; the obvious solution for the Ultra-Rich right-wingers, and their most loyal servants in the Republican Party, is to do a variety of end-runs around what actual democracy is present in the U.S. socioeconomic and political system. These include the upcoming Supreme Court hearing of the attempt to establish the dubious doctrine of the “independent state legislature theory” that will be ruled on in the Moore v. Harper case, scheduled for December 7, 2023. This is a case that is widely misunderstood, as Fred Wertheimer wrote: “.... the “independent state legislature theory” is adopted by the Supreme Court in the case of Moore v. Harper, state legislatures will be empowered to override the choice of voters on Election Day in a presidential election.
“That’s not correct.
“Make no mistake, the Court’s decision in Moore v. Harper could dramatically and dangerously rewrite American democracy.” (See, “Democracy on the ballot—the
‘independent state legislature theory’ will not empower state legislatures to override presidential election results”, Nov. 4, 2022, Fred Wertheimer, Brookings Institution, at <https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/11/04/the-independent-state-legislature-theory-will-not-empower-state-legislatures-to-override-presidential-election-results/ >)
Also the state level constitutional initiative system, in which overall state populations vote on issues like abortion access and “right-to-work” laws, and gun control, is under attack by Republican controlled legislatures in a number of states. The state constitutional initiative system is one of the very few actual democratic means by which the American People can express themselves and effect some reforms. Such unlikely places as Mississippi (that turned down a personhood amendment 12 years ago), and Kansas (that turned down new restrictions of abortion last year) have seen expressions of the popular will. In both cases the margin was around 58% to 41%. Not coincidentally Republican Legislatures are trying to implement changes to require 60% or even more to achieve similar victories in the future, a nearly impossible task.
The relative success of authoritarian rule, in the various Red States, should not make those of us on the Left despair of winning this struggle. The apparent strength of the Republican / Amerikkkaner, far-right masks the fact that their political coalition represents a shrinking minority of the U.S. population; and their social agenda is hated by a majority of the American people. A series of maps goes a long way toward illuminating this situation.
For the purposes of this discussion I will assume that areas with political control by the Democratic party are less susceptible to Authoritarian Regimes; than are areas controlled by the Republican Party. I certainly am not proposing that we trust the Democratic Party to defend or even expand what democracy actually exists in the U.S.; but clearly the acute dangers are less in the Blue States than in the Red States. Map 1 shows the current situation as to; the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, composition of congressional delegations, and most importantly the control of state governments. This sort of map is the standard graphical representation shown in most Corporate Controlled Media. It is misleading in that there is no indication of the existence of Democratic enclaves in Republican controlled states or of Republican enclaves in Democratic controlled states. It also graphically exaggerates the power of the right-wing, who control huge expanses of territory where prairie dogs outnumber people.
Map 1, with faithful geographic spatial accuracy, represents the parts of the U.S. that are either already under authoritarian / soft fascist control; or that are well on their way to that sort of regime. The Red States, composed of the Old Confederacy with some additions from the Midwest and the Mountain States, make up 67.66% of the land area of the U.S. though they only comprise 48.25% of the overall population. Those figures assume that the active major acute political struggles taking place for control in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina will result in victories for the far-right, while the active major acute political struggle taking place for control in Wisconsin will result in a victory for Liberal Democrats. There are struggles taking place elsewhere, Republicans maintain control in Ohio in a milieu in which African American and liberal college towns see lines where people must wait several hours to vote, frequently in harsh inclement weather standing outside, while reactionary districts have virtually no waiting. .
..
Map 2, again spatially accurate in a geographic as opposed to a demographic sense, shows which of the duopoly parties holds the higher proportion of all elective offices in each state, as of August 2022. This situation for party advantage shifted somewhat with an advantage towards the Democratic Party with the mid-term elections in November of 2022; though in places like Iowa the shift was towards the Republican Party. Michigan restored a majority of Democrats in both state legislative houses, for the first time in 40 years, passed a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing reproductive health care rights, and re-elected all three women Democrats to the senior state elective offices; the Governorship, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. In Wisconsin the liberal Democratic Party aligned candidate for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court won a resounding victory over the right-wing candidate (it was a nominally a “non-partisan” election), but the state Legislature remains under Republican Control. In Arizona the far-right Trumpista candidates lost their races for Governor and other state-wide offices, but the state Legislature remains under Republican Control. But in Florida the march of the DeSantis reactionary agenda continues, most notably with a 6-week “fetal heartbeat” abortion restriction act. North Carolina, ostensibly the most progressive of the Southern States, recently had a Democrat in the legislature defect to the Republican side of the aisle. This gives the Republicans a veto-proof majority to override vetoes by the Democratic Governor. Iowa has now moved farther to the right with all Republican Statewide office holders and new reactionary/authoritarian legislative initiatives. The list of authoritarian moves is very long and involves almost all the Authoritarian Heartland States as delineated in Map 1.
The Republicans have used a wide variety of legal maneuvers and other actions to take legal political control over elections and the governments of all the states where they have been able to do so. Map 3 shows just one stratagem. Republicans generally stripped elected Democratic Secretaries of State of their jurisdiction over state and local elections and moved that power to Republican controlled state legislatures. Other moves include passing laws that allow state legislatures or governors to exercise political power over county district attorneys, giving Republican power centers the legal right to replace DAs they do not like. These are clear moves to take as much power as possible in quasi-legal and legal operations to put themselves in as powerful a position as possible, with the likely motivation to take over the Society and impose national authoritarian and/or fascist rule.
Map 4 clearly demonstrates the fact that there are red-leaning counties in Blue States and blue-leaning counties in Red States. The simplistic explanation frequently proffered is that the urban areas are more progressive and less fascistic than are the rural areas. While basically true; this does not explain the entire complex division of the U.S. populace into right-leaning and left-leaning components. That explanation, along with other flawed analyses of “Populism”, does not dig far enough into the data to really explain what is going on. To start with, in modern parlance, the term Populism is mostly used to describe right-wing political movements with some sort of mass base among disaffected, generally white, populations (in The West anyways). Webster Tarpley has, usefully, described two types of Populism. “Cultural Populism” is the precursor of Fascism, it is based on hatred, fear, and resentment and its practitioners, leaders and spokespeople are experts at whipping up frenzies about cultural issues while defending the basic economic privileges and power of their rich masters. Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are classic Cultural Populist figures (not to mention Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Greg Abbot among many others).
I do not know much about political and socioeconomic models for American Urban areas; therefore I produced a geographic diagram of my own to use in this discussion; it is presented here as Figure 1). It is certainly not exhaustive, but demonstrates some of the complexity of the political situation in most American Urban areas. The Red vs Blue hues of the various components represent the proclivity to support reactionary (red) vs liberal (blue) policies. Regardless of the accuracy of Figure 1 we must keep in mind that most mapping and analysis of political trends only goes down to the county level; and therefore misses some of the complexity of the American political milieu.
Map 5 below still is geographically accurate, in the two-dimensional spatial sense, but adds a three-dimensional aspect showing how many ballots were cast in each county. The hue indicates the proportion cast for Barrack Obama (blue) and Mitt Romney (red), in 2012. Clearly apparent is the tendency of urban areas everywhere in the country, not just on the “coasts”, to support more progressive policies. I pointed out, on Map 5, that the hue, in the vertical element that represents the vote in Maricopa County, shows that the Phoenix Metropolitan area was perhaps the most Republican of any Urban Area in the country. That partisan balance changed somewhat in the years leading up to 2020, when Arizona narrowly voted for Biden; and the biggest population area in Arizona representing over half the votes is Maricopa County. Who can forget the reactionary “election observers”, armed with AR-15s who camped out across the street from ballot drop boxes in Phoenix. The population of the U.S. is 83% urban and suburban. The kind of reactionary social policies that are supported by large majorities of rural and small town populations are much less popular in the urban and suburban populations of the country.
Map 6 is a Cartogram. Cartograms are not true to the spatial geographical situation but rather portray other attributes and modify the simple spatial parameters to fit that other data. In this case the map is modified to reflect the number of electoral votes cast by the various states in the 2020 Presidential election of Joe Biden, Map 5 presents a very different view of the size and importance of the Central and Southern States that cast their electoral votes for Donald Trump. The Six North Central States Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska occupy 553,584 sq miles, or 17.74% of the physical territory of the Contiguous 48 States and yet only yielded 21 Electoral Votes or 3.9% of the 538 total Electoral Votes. Add in Alaska, the huge far Northwest / Pacific State, and along with the six North Central states those 7 “Red States” occupy 1,218,968 sq miles, or 32.1% of the physical territory of the 50 States and yet only yielded 24 Electoral Votes or 4.46% of the 538 total Electoral Votes. And even those paltry figures are really artificially high, due to the fact that the number of senators has never been adjusted to reflect the immense differences in population that have developed in the U.S. since the time when the constitution was written and ratified.
This Situation makes it all the more important for the Reactionary forces to maintain control of the key Southern and Midwestern states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arizona, along with the various other Southern, Midwestern, and Mountain Red States. Accomplishing this now requires ever harsher voter suppression and election fraud measures as, after years of rapid population growth and immigration from the North and from Foreign countries, the demographic balance is moving against the Republicans, and their harsh reactionary agenda. We should never forget that old-fashioned political organizing by grass-roots groups led to the narrow electoral successes in Georgia and Arizona. This refers to both the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump in the Presidential election in those states; and the election of 4 Democratic Senators from those 2 states, even if one from Arizona was the extremely dubious figure Kristin Sinema.
Map 7 shows the results of the changes in the distribution of Electoral Votes as a result of the 2020 Census. The now over a century long shift of population in the U.S., from the Midwest and Northeast to the South and the West, continues though internal U.S. migration has slowed down. Even the implementation of the 2020 Census itself became more politicized than in almost any other census in U.S. history. The only possible exceptions being the 1920 Census after which right-wing Federal Legislators became angry at the results; that showed that the U.S. was rapidly urbanizing with people moving from farms mostly to Northern Industrial cities, and the immigrants who had flooded into the U.S. from the 1880s until the early 1920s had also changed the composition of the U.S. population.in ways that were unfavorable to the right-wing’s agenda. The results were very distressing to right wing agricultural and political interests, and conservative rural based reactionaries understood they were bound to lose power. As a result there was no reapportionment carried out after the 1920 Censusn, and the first actual reapportionment took place after the 1930 Census. The total number of House Seats was set, by statute, at 435 in time for apportionment resulting from the 1910 Census; but the legislature merely added seats to some states that were growing in population. In 1912 Arizona and New Mexico became states and each was assigned 1 member for the House of Representatives, plus of course 2 senators. That was also done as a function of the 1910 Census figures, and without taking away any house members from existing states.
The 2020 Census moved, net, 7 electoral votes from the Democratic Side to the Republican side. So if the same states voted for Democratic and Republican Presidential Candidates as voted for them in 2020 the Electoral Vote Count would be 299 for the Democrat and 239 for the Republican candidate. If the Republican State Legislatures in both the Georgia and Arizona State Legislatures, further assisted in great measure by the Republican Governor and Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, manage to move the electoral votes of those two state to the Republican column; the Electoral Vote Count would see the Democratic Party eke out a narrow win for the Democratic Candidate, with a tally of 272 Democratic Electors to 266 Republican Electors. This only accentuates the importance of political struggles going on now in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. All four are states where the balance of power between the two parties is narrow and political operatives are very busy.
One final Map, Map 8 uses a spatial cartogram approach but takes the data down to the county level. This map demonstrates very clearly that the balance between the two duopoly parties is nationwide. Republicans are clearly stronger in the South, parts of the Midwest, and parts of the Mountain States but Democrats are always present and often in large numbers, therefore requiring constant and ever-vigilant voter suppression, voter registration suppression, and vote counting fraud to keep them from winning important offices. As I stated above the presence of Democrats, in national and important state-wide and legislative offices, is not a guarantee of salvation for the left. But it serves as a reliable indicator of resistance to authoritarian rule by the right.
The rabid anti-abortion “forced birth” movement is an excellent indicator of this phenomenon. On this weeks episode of EWTN’s “Right to Life Report”, the narrator read a statement claiming that the reason that people are moving from places like California, New York, and Illinois to places like Texas. Georgia and Florida; is because they want to live in a Forced-Birth and harshly limited Reproductive HealthCare social environment. This is a profound misunderstanding of what is actually going on. Single minded “forced birth” operatives continue to push for harsher and more pervasive controls over women’s reproductive health care services. But more practical political operatives on the right are starting to realize that the Forced Birth movement is costing them critical political support. What the more gung-ho Force Birth operatives are still trying to do is exactly what the Right-wing wants to implement as national policy, but it is betraying their long-term political agenda and is causing significant political mobilization on the left. The endless slaughters with semi-automatic assault rifles (there have been several including in Texas, Mississippi, and South Carolina just over the last couple of days), are also starting to cost the right-wing significant amounts of support.
Articles Begin Here:
1). “The Red States Experimenting With Authoritarianism”, April 18, 2023, Brian Klaas, The Atlantic.
In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis applauded the role of experimentation within the states, calling them "laboratories of democracy" that could inspire reforms at the national level. Today, that dynamic is inverted, as some red states have become laboratories of authoritarianism, experimenting with the autocratic playbook in ways that could filter up to the federal government. American states are now splintering, not just on partisan lines, but on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy.
Democracy requires more than just holding elections. But at a bare minimum, two qualities are non-negotiable. True democracies must allow voters to determine who governs through elections, and must respect the outcome of those elections. Many Republicans at the state level are undercutting those principles.
Democratic deterioration is not a new problem in red states. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor at the University of Washington and the author of Laboratories Against Democracy, measured the democratic quality of American states from 2000 to 2018. He used 51 indicators, including gerrymandering, whether politicians were responsive to public opinion, long wait times to vote, and the availability of postelection audits to verify that the count was accurate. States that had been dominated by Republicans over the previous two decades, Grumbach found, became substantially less democratic. States dominated by Democrats and those with a divided government saw no such drop-off.
Since Grumbach published his findings, Republican attacks on the mechanisms of democracy have accelerated. When Democrats win at the ballot box, Republicans may attempt to neutralize their power. In Arizona, an elected Republican proposed allowing the state legislature the power to overturn the results of presidential elections. In Mississippi, white Republicans in the state House of Representatives established a parallel court system to cater to white neighborhoods in Jackson, usurping the elected judges put in office by the broader population, which is 80 percent Black.
[ Read: A troubling sign for 2024]
Recently, the Tennessee House expelled two Black Democratic representatives who led anti-gun protests in the statehouse. The protests they led were disruptive, but the expulsions were wildly disproportionate and likely motivated by race: Republicans voted to expel the two young Black men, but not the older white woman who'd also participated. The attempt backfired, as both were swiftly reinstated, but that doesn't change the fact that Republicans tried to undo the will of the voters over a minor transgression.
The botched effort in Tennessee is just one example of Republicans trying to invalidate elections by getting rid of Democrats who end up in power. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers recently passed a bill that would give them the power to remove elected prosecutors. And in Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis boasted about firing a Democratic prosecutor using a flimsy pretext. A judge who reviewed the firing concluded that DeSantis's goal had been "to amass information that could help bring down [the prosecutor], not to find out how [he] actually runs the office."
These tactics are layered on top of long-standing antidemocratic practices. Gerrymandering is a form of legalized election rigging done at the state level in which electoral districts are drawn to ensure that politicians choose their voters rather than having voters choose their politicians. Democrats are certainly guilty of drawing district lines in their favor in some states (Illinois, for example), but Republicans are substantially more guilty. According to the nonpartisan electoral forecaster Dave Wasserman, 152 congressional districts were drawn to help Republicans in the 2022 midterms, compared with 49 districts drawn to help Democrats.
When gerrymandering is extreme, most elections become foregone conclusions, extinguishing the foundational principle of democracy: competition. Five years ago, in Wisconsin, Republicans won just 44.7 percent of the vote in races for control of the state legislature. Yet Republicans won 64.6 percent of the seats. In North Carolina, state Republicans drew such skewed districts in the 2018 congressional elections that the GOP won 10 out of the state's 13 districts, even though the party's candidates earned just 50.3 percent of the statewide vote. In Georgia, a state that voted for Joe Biden and has two Democratic U.S. senators, the newly drawn district lines mean that 57 percent of State Senate and 52 percent of state House seats can be considered "safe Republican" seats. Barring a major political shift, Republicans will continue to easily control the legislature in a competitive state trending toward Democrats.
When such blatant electoral manipulation takes place in other countries, the U.S. State Department denounces it. Here, it's just a legalized part of the American system.
[ Aristides N. Hatzis: My country used to look up to America's democracy]
Even where elections are competitive, Republican legislators are trying to make voting more difficult. Disparities in ballot access are long-standing and present in both red and blue states. Researchers who analyzed anonymous cellphone-location data have found that, on average, residents of Black neighborhoods wait "29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place." These "time taxes" have a knock-on effect, because voters who face long lines become less likely to vote in subsequent elections. But overall wait times are worse in states controlled by Republicans; the worst performers in the 2020 election were South Carolina and Georgia.
Now Republicans are parroting Trump's lies about voter fraud as a pretext to make voting even harder, in ways that disproportionately disenfranchise poor and nonwhite voters. Study after study has found voter fraud to be an infinitesimal problem. Republicans have nonetheless introduced 51 state-level bills that would put up obstacles to ballot access.
Beyond attacking elections, or trying to interfere with their results, Republicans are testing out different ways to wield power against democracy. In Florida, DeSantis is using his power to punish a private company that dared to criticize him. In Idaho, Republican lawmakers have made it illegal to help minors cross state lines to obtain an abortion, using government power to restrict freedom of movement. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has said he "looks forward" to pardoning a man convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester; the murderer had previously texted a friend to complain about the protests and said that he "might have to kill a few people on my way to work." The composition of Republican rising stars is worrying, too. In Oregon, members of the violent, far-right Proud Boys have secured leadership positions in local GOP bodies, making national-level extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene look moderate by comparison.
Democracy isn't all or nothing; it can be measured on a spectrum. But if voters face "time taxes" to vote in uncompetitive, gerrymandered elections that entrench minority rule, and then have their elected officials removed from office or usurped by a new body created by Republicans well, that's not democracy. If states combine these tactics, they won't be worthy of the democratic label.
On the political right, many have suggested that concerns about American democracy are alarmist. Previous attempts to capture the erosion of American democracy at the state level have been criticized for hyperbole. One effort to measure the quality of state-level elections resulted in several U.S. states scoring below Rwanda, an autocracy in which the dictator, Paul Kagame, was reelected in 2017 with 98.8 percent of the vote. That's absurd.
North Carolina is certainly not North Korea. But millions living in red states have become guinea pigs, the subjects of Republicans experimenting with autocracy.
Copyright (c) 2023 The Atlantic Monthly Company
2). “The Uniquely American Future of US Authoritarianism: The GOP-fueled far right differs from similar movements around the globe, thanks to the country’s politics, electoral system, and changing demographics”, Mar 26, 2023, Thor Benson, Wired, at < https://www.wired.com/story/us-authoritarian-movement-future/ >
7–9 minutes
The US Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future. Despite performing poorly in the 2022 midterms after running many candidates the public saw as too extreme, the GOP has decided to elevate and empower far-right lawmakers like representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
In Florida, books have been removed from school shelves as governor Ron DeSantis tries to reshape the public education system in his own image. Republican lawmakers around the US have passed abortion bans that put pregnant women’s lives in danger. The rights of transgender people are under attack throughout the country.
Nearly half of Republicans say they would prefer “strong, unelected leaders” over “weak elected ones,” according to a September Axios-Ipsos poll, and around 55 percent of Republicans say defending the “traditional” way of life by force may soon become necessary. About 61 percent of Republicans don’t believe the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Finding examples of extremism, a lust for authoritarian leaders, and general antidemocratic beliefs in America is not difficult these days—just spend a few minutes online. The question is how far down the rabbit hole the United States has gone and where it may end up in the not-too-distant future.
“To call a party democratic—committed to democracy—they’ve got to do three basic things: They have to unambiguously accept election results, they have to unambiguously renounce violence, and they have to consistently and unambiguously break with extremists or antidemocratic forces,” says Steve Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “I think the Republican Party now fails these three basic tests.”
Levitsky says far too many Republican leaders have flirted with using violence to achieve their political goals and spread lies about the most recent presidential election. He says politicians like DeSantis appear to be experimenting with an authoritarian way of governing in their own states that could be applied at the national level should they successfully run for president.
It’s difficult to find an apt comparison between the Republican Party and authoritarian movements that have risen elsewhere for a variety of reasons. One, Levitsky says, is that Donald Trump took over a party that has existed for nearly 170 years and made it more authoritarian. Historically, authoritarians tend to start their own parties. Another is that a relatively small percentage of the populace was able to wield such great power under Trump.
“There’s a minority of the population that’s pretty reactionary and, by a bunch of measures, fairly authoritarian in really all Western democracies,” Levitsky says. “The question is, how are they channeled into politics? What’s exceptional about the United States is that 25 percent or so was actually able to wield national power. Is MAGA comparable to far-right parties in Europe? Yeah. With the exception of maybe Golden Dawn in Greece, though, probably more openly authoritarian.”
Authoritarian movements of the past share characteristics with what we’re seeing in the US today—from Turkey and Hungary more recently to the rise of fascism in the 1920s—but the US governmental system and political parties present particular hurdles and windows of opportunity.
Assuming democracy remains intact in the years to come, Levitsky thinks the GOP will have to eventually moderate its stance in response to changing demographics. The current extremism will not be sustainable if the party hopes to win enough elections to wield power in the future. However, Levitsky thinks any adjustments could take longer than one would hope.
“The problem is our incentives—the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the fact that sparsely populated territories are dramatically overrepresented in our electoral system—allows the Republicans to wield a lot of power without winning national majorities,” Levitsky says. “If the Republican Party actually had to win over 50 percent of the national vote to control the Senate, to control the presidency, to control the Supreme Court, you would not see them behaving the way they’re behaving. They would never win.”
It remains to be seen whether Trump will be the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, but there’s clear evidence that the effects of his actions wouldn’t simply disappear if he wasn’t controlling the party. A lot of Americans have been radicalized since he first took office, and it’s not easy to roll that back.
“I think the consensus is that democracy is not in the clear, and that’s because the rhetoric and actions of the GOP have emboldened their supporters to sort of accept certain behaviors that we wouldn’t have thought were in line with democracy,” says Erica Frantz, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. “Suddenly it’s OK to question if our elections are free and fair. Suddenly it’s OK to be provocative and suggest you might use violence if the election doesn’t go your way.”
Frantz says large sectors of the US population accept the authoritarian messaging Trump spearheaded, and that is likely going to have lasting effects. She says the fact that Trump was successfully removed from office despite his attempts to overturn the election in 2020 is a big deal, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to protect American democracy.
“I don’t think we’re going to backslide to dictatorship. The probability is higher than before Trump, but it’s still low compared to many other countries,” Frantz says. “It is very possible that we’ll muddle along for quite some time in this situation where undemocratic norms are being spouted and perpetuated by one of our main parties.”
In terms of what supporters of democracy can do in the face of an authoritarian movement, there’s no silver bullet—but there are ways to push back. Levitsky says it’s important to form large coalitions to “isolate and defeat” authoritarians, which means uniting democracy supporters on the left and the right.
A. James McAdams, a professor of international affairs at the University of Notre Dame, says those who oppose authoritarianism need a strong message that will appeal to people who might be pulled in by authoritarian leaders.
“If you look back historically, one of the big problems in democracies has always been that the forces of reason can’t figure out what they stand for,” McAdams says. “We’re at a point in history today in the United States and Europe where moderate parties aren’t sure what to say.”
You also need to support and strengthen democratic institutions like the courts, McAdams says. He says this is particularly important because weak courts are often part of the reason authoritarians are able to take power and chip away at democracy, such as in Latin America in the 1970s.
“If you do have stable democratic institutions—particularly viable courts—then there’s a lot of bullshit that you can overcome,” McAdams says. “Perhaps the greatest victory for American institutions in the Trump age was that the courts weren’t overpowered.”
3). “The MAGIC KINGDOM of RON DeSANTIS”, May 2023, Helen Lewis, Atlantic. Vol. 331, Issue 4, p40-50. 11p
Abstract:
Some are born Florida Men, some achieve Florida Manhood, and some have Florida Manhood thrust upon them by the demands of right-wing politics. Buoyed by Trump's blessing and the support of right-wing media, DeSantis won Florida's Republican primary for governor in August 2018 by 20 points. Features In the course of a single month this year, the following news reports emanated from Florida: A gun enthusiast in Tampa built a 55-foot backyard pool shaped like a revolver, with a hot tub in the hammer. But it didn't land, somehow, and Trump's more recent efforts - Meatball Ron, Shutdown Ron, Tiny D - have not been as devastating as Low-Energy Jeb or Little Marco. [Extracted from the article]
Article:
My very British romp through America's weirdest state
In the course of a single month this year, the following news reports emanated from Florida: A gun enthusiast in Tampa built a 55-foot backyard pool shaped like a revolver, with a hot tub in the hammer. A 32-year-old from Cutler Bay was arrested for biting off the head of his girlfriend's pet python during a domestic dispute. A 40-year-old man cracked open a beer during a police traffic stop in Cape Coral. A father from East Orlando punched a bobcat in the face for attacking his daughter's dog.
In headlines, all of these exploits were attributed to a single character, one first popularized in 2013 by a Twitter account of the same name: "Florida Man," also known as "the world's worst superhero," a creature of eccentric rule-breaking, rugged defiance, and unhinged minor atrocities. "Florida Man Known as 'Sedition Panda' Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol," a recent news story declared, because why merely rebel against the government when you could dress up in a bear suit while doing it?
Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as "the America of America," but to a Brit like me, it's more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. Florida's place in the national mythology is as America's pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness; the public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there. "Whatever you're doing dishonestly up north, you can do it in a much warmer climate with less regulation down here," said the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote about the weirder side of Florida for the Miami Herald from 1976 until his retirement in 2021.
But under the memes and jokes, the state is also making an argument to the rest of the world about what freedom looks like, how life should be organized, and how politics should be done. This is clear even from Britain, a place characterized by drizzle and self-deprecation, the anti-Florida.
What was once the narrowest swing state has come to embody an emotional new strain of conservatism. "The general Republican mindset now is about grievances against condescending elites," Michael Grunwald, the Miami-based author of The Swamp, told me, "and it fits with the sense that 'we're Florida Man; everyone makes fun of us.'" But criticism doesn't faze Florida men; it emboldens them.
It is no coincidence that the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination both have their base in Florida. In one corner, you have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his "Winter White House" at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the formerly supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline "Florida Man Makes Announcement" before relegating the news story to page 26.)
In the other corner stands the state's current governor, Ron DeSantis, raised in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, a man desperately trying to conceal his attendance at the elite institutions of Harvard and Yale under lashings of bronzer and highly choreographed outrages. In his speeches, the governor likes to boast that "Florida is where 'woke' goes to die." In his 2022 campaign videos, he styled himself as a Top Gun pilot and possibly even Jesus himself. You couldn't get away with that in Massachusetts.
"The thing about being the 'punchline state' is that it's all true," the writer Craig Pittman told me over Zoom, his tropical-print shirt gleaming in the sun. "Do you remember the story about the woman who got in trouble in New Jersey for trying to board a plane with her emotional-support peacock?"
Yes, I do.
"The peacock was from Florida."
WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED in Orlando, in late October, I rented what to me was a comically large Ford SUV and drove to McDonald's for hash browns and a cup of breakfast tea (zombie-gray, error). Then I went to a gun range, where I began by firing two pistols. The very serious man behind the desk had clocked my teeth (British), accent (Hermione Granger), and sex (female), and expressed skepticism that I would want to fire an AR-15 assault rifle too. But I did. In the past decade, semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 have become the weapon of choice for young killers, and I needed to see what America was willing to put into the hands of teenagers in the name of freedom.
With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR-15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn.
Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis's Florida. When the Tampa Bay Rays tweeted in support of gun control after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre last year, the governor vetoed state funding for a new training facility, saying that it was "inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation." You might think: How petty. Or maybe: How effective.
Hold on to those thoughts. DeSantis is a politician who preaches freedom while suspending elected officials who offend him, banning classroom discussions he doesn't like, carrying out hostile takeovers of state universities, and obstructing the release of public records whenever he can. And somehow Florida, a state that bills itself as the home of the ornery and the resistant, the obstinate and the can't-be-trodden-on, the libertarian and the government-skeptic, has fallen for the most keenly authoritarian governor in the United States.
THIS IS THE POINT in the story when a foreign reporter would traditionally go to Walt Disney World and have a Big Thought about how the true religion of America is capitalism. She might include a variation on the French theorist Jean Bau-drillard's observation that "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real."
Me? I went to Disney World; bought a storm-trooper hat, a 32-ounce Coke, and a hot dog that looked like a postapocalyptic ration; then I had my photo taken high-fiving Baloo. What a great day out. The Magic Kingdom drew nearly 21 million tourists in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, and is central to Florida's mythology. I had to go. For me, the visceral thrill came from the park's extraordinary bureaucracy: all the attention to detail of a North Korean military parade, purely for your enjoyment.
Disney flatters its customers the way Florida flatters the rich, by hiding the machinery needed to support decadence. You absolutely never see Cinderella smoking a joint behind her castle, or Mickey Mouse losing it with a group of irritating 9-year-olds. In Florida, no one wants to hear about the costs or the consequences. Why else would people keep rebuilding fragile beachfront homes in a hurricane zone—and expect the government to offer them insurance? Of course everyone wants the Man to butt out of their life, but at the same time, the state-backed insurer of last resort hit 1 million policies in August.
Baudrillard had it precisely wrong: Disney's success only underlines how the state is one giant theme park. "This is not a place that makes anything, and it's not really a place that does anything, other than bring in more people," Grunwald had told me. Having brought in those people, what Florida never tells them is no, nor does the state ask them to play nicely with the other children: "We're not going to make you wear a mask or take a vaccine or pay your taxes or care about the schools," Grunwald said.
A STATE THAT BILLS ITSELF AS THE HOME OF THE ORNERY AND THE RESISTANT HAS FALLEN FOR THE MOST KEENLY AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNOR.
I did have one Big Thought in Orlando: It's odd that Ron DeSantis cast Disney as an avatar of the "woke mind virus" after its then-CEO, Bob Chapek, spoke out against the Parental Rights in Education bill—known to critics as the "Don't Say 'Gay'" law—which restricts the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools. Disney's cartoons now feature LGBTQ characters, and its older films carry warnings about their outdated attitudes, but the corporation itself is deeply conservative in the discipline it demands from its staff, its deep nostalgia for the 1950s, and its celebration of American exceptionalism.
At Epcot's World Showcase, I observed national pavilions built on the kind of gleeful cultural supremacy last seen in 19th-century anthropologists marveling at the handicrafts of the natives. Britain was represented by a fish-and-chips shop, a pub, and a store where you could buy a "masonic sword" for $350. It could have been worse: Brazil, the fifth-largest country on Earth, had been reduced to a caipirinha stand.
OUTSIDE TALLAHASSEE, I fell in love. Having driven four hours north to the Panhandle one bright day, wearing denim shorts that would be unnecessary in Britain for nine more months, I ended up in Wakulla Springs State Park.
This was primordial Florida, the swamp I had been promised, and it was heaven: a swimming spot overseen, on the opposite bank, by a 13-foot alligator named Joe Jr., something the tour guide presented as perfectly normal and not at all alarming. Unwieldy manatees glided through the water as if someone had given my SUV nostrils and flippers. Turkey vultures massed in the trees. I had bubble-gum ice cream and a root-beer float—how American is that?—and felt pure happiness flooding me like sunshine.
Here was the magic that brings so many people to Florida, a glow that returned as I traveled around the state on my two trips there: turning off an unremarkable road and finding myself in the public park outside Vero Beach, where for $3 you could walk through warm white sand on a weekday afternoon; having a beer and watching the pink-orange sunset over the marina in the small town of Stuart; the Day-Glo-graffiti walls of Wynwood, south of Miami's Little Haiti; the revelation that there's an entire spare Miami just over the bridge from the original. Bumped off my return flight for three days by Hurricane Nicole, I drove to the Kennedy Space Center—just in time to watch a SpaceX rocket blast off into the clear blue sky. At one point, I took a wrong turn outside of Miami onto Alligator Alley and drove 15 miles into the Everglades before I could turn around at a visitors' center. I've never been somewhere so wild that also had M&M's in vending machines.
Braided through these experiences was the sensation of Florida as a refuge from reality, something that has encapsulated both its promise and its peril since before it was part of America. In the early 1800s, enslaved people escaped from southern plantations and sheltered in Seminole lands, prompting Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, to launch the first in a series of devastating wars. Florida was soon offloaded by the Spanish, and loosely attached to the U.S. for two decades before becoming a state in 1845. It was roundly ignored for a long time after that. In 1940, it was the least populated southern state.
The reasons for its transformation after World War II are well known: air-conditioning and bug spray; generations of northeastern and midwestern seniors tempted by year-round sunshine; the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who fled Fidel Castro in the 1960s. Then came the rodent infestation: Disney, with all its money and lobbyists and special tax arrangements, and eventually its own town, called Celebration. Now the state draws crypto hustlers, digital nomads, and people who just plain hate paying state income tax. All of these migrants fueled decades of explosive growth and a landscape of construction, condos, and golf courses. In 2014, Florida's population overtook New York's, and in 2022, it was the nation's fastest-growing state.
But those bare facts conceal a more fundamental change. As Florida has become America, America has become more like Florida: older, more racially diverse but not necessarily more liberal, and more at risk from climate change. "The state that looks most like what we'd expect the United States to look like in 2060?" Philip Bump writes in his new book, The Aftermath. "Florida."
For so many who choose to live here, arriving in Florida feels like a relief: a liberation from cold winters, from COVID mandates, from the paralyzing fear of political correctness, from the warnings of climatologists and guilt trips by Greta Thunberg. "This is an irresponsible place," Grunwald told me—a counterweight to Plymouth Rock and the puritanism of the Northeast. When I drove across the border into Georgia, a battery of signs greeted me, warning against speeding and littering, as if to say: Look, we're relaxed here, but not Florida relaxed. In freedom-loving Florida, you presume, every warning and restriction has been reluctantly imposed in response to a highly specific problem.
(Exhibit A, the hotel swimming-pool sign: NO SWIMMING WITH DIARRHEA.)
Before arriving in the state, I had called the political strategist Anthony Pedicini, who has worked for multiple Republican state representatives and members of Congress in Florida since moving there two decades ago from New York. He expressed a general frustration with the fussiness and rule-making of Democratic-controlled areas: "You've dealt with these blue-state politics that have raised your taxes, defunded your police, rewarded homeless-ness, made the schools a mockery—you're fed up with it." And so you go to Florida.
Then Pedicini said something unexpected. "You ever read The Iliad and The Odyssey?" I know them reasonably well, I responded, with the caution of someone who is anticipating a quiz.
"So there was one of the chapters where the ship is going by the Sirens, calling the sailors off," he continued. "Odysseus strapped himself to the mast so he wouldn't go, but he made all his sailors plug their ears with wax and cotton. I think Ron DeSantis is like a siren call to all of these suburban Republicans living in these blue states."
Right, but weren't the sirens luring people … to their death?
Pedicini was unperturbed. "I'll tell you this, to give you background on me. I lost my mother during the pandemic to COVID. My mother chose not to get a shot, the only one in our family. Do I blame it on the governor? Absolutely not. Do I blame my mother? No, she made a choice for her that she thought was best for her. It resulted in a disastrous consequence. But the government didn't have the right to make that choice."
EVERYONE I MET in Florida agreed that DeSantis was ambitious, hardworking, and smart—but, you know, so were Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Where were the fizz and the fire and the electric crackle of change that he claimed to be offering?
During a rally held at the American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, on the Space Coast, I got to see DeSantis in person, floodlit like a Pink Floyd concert and flanked by sweet vintage rides. Flags fluttered in the parking lot, declaring BLUE LIVES MATTER AND LET'S GO BRANDON, but the experience was underwhelming. DeSantis's speech was a rote recital of approved villains, lacking the chaos and danger that Donald Trump brings to his rallies.
Any serious consideration of DeSantis inevitably runs headlong into his lack of charisma. Can you win the presidency without being able to make small talk? The Republican donor class is very keen to lubricate his path to power, but they worry he can't schmooze and flatter as well as he bullies and schemes. He has courted partisan YouTubers and talk-radio hosts, but throughout his reelection campaign last year, he did not grant a sit-down interview to any mainstream publication, and declined to cooperate with profiles in The New Yorker, the Financial Times, and The New York Times. His press team specializes in insults that read as though ChatGPT has been trained on Trump speeches—gratuitous, yet somehow bloodless. (Asked to respond to fact-checking queries for this article, DeSantis's press secretary, Bryan Griffin, replied by email: "You aren't interested in the truth; this is just yet another worthless Atlantic editorial.")
The governor's closest adviser is generally agreed to be his wife, Casey—ironically, a former television reporter—who survived breast cancer in 2022, and made a campaign ad extolling the support DeSantis gave her. In general, he reveals little about his inner life. Until recently, he had not spoken publicly about the unexpected death of his sister, Christine, at age 30 in 2015. In February, when the New York Post followed him to Dunedin, to see the governor in his home environment, the most the reporter got out of him was that he'd parlayed his success as a Little League pitcher—his teammates called him "D"—into a job at an electrical store in town. His mother was a nurse and his father installed Nielsen boxes; his middle name is Dion; vacations were spent visiting his grandparents in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He was smart and worked hard enough to get into Yale.
Ah, the Ivy League. This is where DeSantis's story really takes off: the smalltown Florida boy thrust into a world of inherited privilege, elite tastes, and left-wing opinions. "I showed up my first day in jean shorts and a T-shirt because that's what we wore on the west coast of Florida," he told Tucker Carlson in April 2021. "That was not something that was received very warmly. And I never quite fit in there, and it was a total culture shock to me." For the first time, he told Carlson, he heard someone criticize America—and God, and Christianity. "They hated God," he said. "They hated the country." For the first time, in other words, the young Ron met people with different political opinions—and he didn't like it one bit.
After college, DeSantis spent a year teaching at the private Darlington School, in Georgia, where, according to the Times, one student recalled him as a "total jock" who "was definitely proud that he graduated Ivy and thought he was very special." DeSantis once dared a student who had been boasting about how much milk he could drink to prove it. The student threw up in front of his classmates.
Unlike Trump, DeSantis could have succeeded by the elite's rules. Like George H. W. Bush, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the captain of the baseball team. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale. His performance got him into Harvard Law School, after which he joined the legal arm of the U.S. Navy.
He spent Christmas 2006 at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay—not as an inmate, he would later joke on the campaign trail. One former Guantanamo prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, has accused DeSantis of laughing as he was force-fed; Adayfi says he threw up in the young lawyer's face. "I was screaming," Adayfi told Eyes Left, which describes itself as a socialist anti-war podcast hosted by veterans. "I looked at him, and he was actually smiling. Like someone who was enjoying it." Adayfi was released in 2016 after being detained without charge for 14 years, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights later classified this forcefeeding as torture. (In his 2023 book, The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis offers few details about his stint at Guantanamo, saying that although detainees would often "claim 'abuse'" in U.S. facilities, "in Iraqi custody they really would get abused and treated inhumanely.")
In 2007, DeSantis deployed to Iraq with SEAL Team 1, not as a stone-cold killer himself, but as the stone-cold killers' lawyer. The year before, he had met his future wife on a golf course (very Florida), and in 2009 he married her at Disney World (even more Florida). In honor of the couple's Italian heritage, the reception was at Italy Isola in Epcot, a private terrace next to a small faux- Venetian canal. They now have three children: Mamie, Mason, and Madison.
Casey DeSantis's job as a local TV host meant she couldn't move out of the state, so her husband decided to leave the military and began contemplating his future while serving as a special assistant U.S. attorney in central Florida. He wanted to run for Congress in Florida's Sixth District, north of Orlando, but he knew he had a problem. "I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as the GOP primary went," he later wrote. He needed a mythology. He needed to embrace his destiny as a Florida Man, a crusader for people who want to open-carry in Publix against the blue-state pencil-necks who worship Rachel Maddow and scoff at birtherism. "If I could withstand seven years of indoctrination in the Ivy League," he took to telling audiences, "then I will be able to survive D.C. without going native!"
DRIVING BACK FROM Melbourne to Orlando took me past the Reedy Creek Improvement District—a forgettable euphemism for Disney's private fiefdom, 25,000 acres of land around Lake Buena Vista, where for more than half a century the company was able to control building codes, utilities, and waste collection. Until it crossed Ron DeSantis.
The treatment of Disney—which has more than 70,000 employees in the state—has become the cornerstone of DeSantis's pitch to voters; he calls it "the Florida equivalent of the shot heard 'round the world." It reveals both his governing philosophy and the evolution of the Republican attitude toward corporations. In February, on the eve of his book's publication, DeSantis signed a bill ending Disney's control of the district and replacing its board of supervisors with his own handpicked choices. These included Bridget Ziegler, an education activist whose husband had been elected earlier that month as chair of the Florida Republican Party. For a guy who had never run anything before becoming governor, DeSantis has shown an incredible aptitude for patronage.
The campaign against one of Florida's largest private employers is DeSantisism distilled into its purest form, a kind of Mafia bargain reminiscent of Viktor Orban's Hungary: Don't come for me and I wont come for you. Corporations can be supportive of ruling politicians, or studiously neutral. What they must not do is cause trouble.
What else does DeSantis believe? We know from the media tour for The Courage to Be Free that he is far from a foreign- policy hawk. He has said that it is not in America's interests to become "further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia." His first book, 2011's Dreams From Our Founding Fathers—published by a Florida vanity press called High-Pitched Hum, and clearly riffing on the title of Barack Obama's first memoir—paints him as an originalist; he claims that the Founding Fathers considered the Constitution a "fundamental law with a stable meaning" rather than a "living document." He confidently asserts that the country's first Black president betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who "did not dream of a transformation of America in which the foundational principles of the nation were tossed aside."
Dreams From Our Founding Fathers was DeSantis's calling card for his successful 2012 congressional run. He quickly became a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus. Aware of the Tea Party energy coursing through the party, DeSantis was careful not to appear co-opted by the establishment. He slept in his office instead of renting an apartment in Washington, declined the congressional pension plan, and flew back to Florida—and his growing family—as soon as votes ended each week.
During his third term, DeSantis made his bid for promotion to governor—and that is when he received the blessing of this story's other Florida Man, Donald Trump. The facts are disputed: Trump recently claimed that DeSantis begged him with "tears coming down from his eyes" for an endorsement; other sources have the president moved by watching the potential candidate praise him on Fox News. Either way, in late 2017 Trump posted a tweet describing DeSantis as "a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida."
That endorsement allowed DeSantis to become a staple of Fox News, with more than 100 appearances in 2018. "The once little-known congressman spent so much time broadcasting Fox News TV hits from Washington this year that he learned to apply his own powder so he could look as polished as he sounded," Politico reported.
Buoyed by Trump's blessing and the support of right-wing media, DeSantis won Florida's Republican primary for governor in August 2018 by 20 points. Two months later, he went on to win the general election by just 32,463 votes. In The Courage to Be Free, he recalls asking his transition team to draw up an "exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor. I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities." If DeSantis ever sits behind the Resolute Desk, you can bet he'll do more than order Diet Cokes and compulsively check Twitter.
IN JANUARY, after DeSantis had been reelected as governor by 1.5 million votes, I returned to Florida, landing in Miami. This time, the car-rental agency offered me an upgrade to a Cadillac Escalade. I got all the way to climbing up the little step to the driver's seat, where I looked backwards at two more rows of seats and a trunk, before I decided to set out instead in a positively demure GMC Terrain.
I had been told that there were three Floridas: the Panhandle, best viewed as an extension of the Deep South; the state's central belt, where maps should read "Here Be Seniors"; and the south, where condo towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back beaches of the Keys. Visiting Miami, I could barely comprehend how the city—with its bitcoin brunches and graffiti district and cops who look like male strippers—could be in the same country as Tallahassee, never mind the same state.
Maria-Elena Lopez, the vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democrats, volunteered to tell me why the traditionally blue and "rabidly Latin" county had voted for DeSantis by 11 points in November (he lost there by 21 points in 2018). Her answer was simple: Its more recent arrivals were middle-class conservatives in their countries of origin, and "they didn't come here to fight the fight of the other people." Also, she said, "Latin Americans love strongmen."
Lopez, who came to the United States from Cuba at age 4, also underlined the complicated relationship between recent migrants and the idea of government help, explaining that her fellow Cubans were particularly triggered by anything that smacked of socialism. She pointed to Hialeah, "which is probably our most Latin city in Miami-Dade County … and there is the highest enrollment of what is casually called Obamacare. Okay. Yet they're like, 'Obama was Communist.' Oh, but you like his insurance policies? The messaging does not go with what the actual reality is."
In the November election, DeSantis's success was not an outlier in Florida; Senator Marco Rubio notched an equally large win, and the party gained four House seats. Yet DeSantis deserves some credit for this: He had pushed an exquisitely gerrymandered redistricting proposal through the state legislature. "His plan wiped away half of the state's Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America's largest swing state," ProPublica reported last year. As one example, the DeSantis map shattered the seat held by the Black Democrat Al Lawson, which stretched along the border with Georgia, dividing it into four pieces, each of which was inserted into a majority-white district. (DeSantis has rejected the criticisms, calling the old district itself "a 200-mile gerrymander that divvies up people based on the color of their skin.")
DeSantis also established an Office of Election Crimes and Security, whose officers carried out widely publicized arrests for alleged voter fraud. Fentrice Driskell, the state House minority leader, points to the chilling effect of police officers "parading around 20 individuals who thought that they had registered to vote lawfully" in front of the cameras. (Three defendants have so far had their charges dismissed.) "They were just bogus cases," Driskell told me, "being used to gin up a big lie that there's election fraud in Florida."
SUNDAY MORNING IN RON DESANTIS'S VISION OF HELL, AND I WAS DRINKING BOTTOMLESS MIMOSAS.
SUNDAY MORNING in Ron DeSantis's vision of hell, and I was drinking bottomless mimosas. This was R House, a drag bar in Wynwood, an area of Miami that has made the journey from sketchy to bougie in just two decades. Last July, a viral video filmed at R House showed a drag performer, her implausible breasts barely covered with pasties, dollar bills stuffed into her thong, showing a small child how to strut along a catwalk. "Children belong at drag shows!!!!" read the caption. "Children deserve to see fun & expression & freedom." DeSantis responded by ordering a government investigation of the restaurant.
When I visited R House, I didn't see any minors, although the menu did offer a $30 kids' brunch. If anything, the drag show revealed how thoroughly gay culture has been absorbed into the mainstream; judging by all the sashes and tiaras, most of the customers were part of bachelorette parties. At the table next to me, a woman daintily fed a glass of water to a chihuahua in a jeweled collar. Fans were snapped, dollar bills were waved, and a few performers did some light twerking, but the only serious danger to children here would have been from a flying wig.
WHEN DESANTIS OWNS THE LIBS, HIS DONORS AND LOYALISTS TEND TO BENEFIT.
I left perplexed. In all honesty, I had found the viral video disturbing; as the DeSantis administration's complaint argued, the performance had a "sexualized nature" that was clearly inappropriate for kids to watch. But it was no more disturbing to me than giving an 8-year-old a "purity ring," or letting them fire a pistol, or forcing 10-year-olds to bear their rapists' babies. Why can't America just be normal? And why wouldn't DeSantis, extoller of "parental rights in education," let moms and dads decide what to show their own children? The paradox of freedom, Florida style, is that it's really an assertion of control. People like us should be free to do what we want, and free to stop other people from doing what they want when we don't approve. That's why it would be deeply unfair to call Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he is a tyrant, he is an expansive one.
Ask Andrew Warren. After the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the twice-elected Democratic state attorney in Hillsborough County signed a pledge that he would not prosecute women who sought abortions, or doctors providing gender surgery or hormones to minors. The DeSantis administration responded by suspending him while he was in the middle of an unrelated grand-jury case. "Five minutes after receiving the email about the suspension, I was escorted out of my office by an armed deputy," he told me. There wasn't even enough time to collect his house keys from his desk. In January, a judge ruled that DeSantis had violated Warren's First Amendment rights and the Florida Constitution, but said he had no authority to reinstate him.
Warren believes his suspension was designed to be a warning to others: "This is what authoritarians do, right? They say that we need to quell dissent, because dissent is so inherently dangerous."
Similarly stuntlike was DeSantis's decision to fly 49 migrants to Martha's Vineyard last year, which became a reliable applause line in the governor's stump speech. Everything about that story stinks, including the fact that the aviation company involved, Vertol—which had close ties to DeSantis aides—made a handsome profit. That's part of a pattern. When DeSantis owns the libs, his donors and loyalists tend to benefit. At the start of the year, under the guise of his "war on woke," he appointed six right-wing activists as trustees of the New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college in Sarasota. The board promptly forced the president out and replaced her with Richard Corcoran, a former Republican speaker of Florida's House of Representatives, on a salary of $699,000 (more than double the previous president's). One of the new board members was Christopher Rufo, who has achieved fame among the Very Online for turning critical race theory into a household term. So what if Rufo lives in Washington State? He is big on Twitter and a beloved brand among Tucker Carlson viewers.
At 44, DeSantis represents a new generation of Republicans who have learned to speak Rumble—the unmoderated alternative to YouTube—as well as fluent Fox. He knows which of his actions to shout about, and which ones are better smothered in boredom. At a flashy press conference on April 19, 2021, for example, DeSantis surrounded himself with cops to sign the Combating Public Disorder Act, which was presented as taming the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement but—according to Jason Garcia, a former Orlando Sentinel investigative reporter who now runs a Substack called Seeking Rents—gave police extra power to quell dissent and civil disobedience more generally. That was a moment worth staging for applause by the Blue Lives Matter contingent. By contrast, the governor waited until just before midnight the same day to approve Senate Bill 50, a blandly worded law that collects sales tax from online shoppers while giving tax breaks to Florida businesses. The difference between the splashy staging of the anti-riot bill and the quiet enactment of S.B. 50 "illustrates DeSantis to me so perfectly," Garcia said. "He's a governor that is masterful at driving these angry social-war fights that divide people, then turning around and governing like a pro-corporate Republican."
FROM THE OUTSIDE, Mar-a-Lago looks less like a millionaires' playground and more like an all-inclusive Mediterranean resort. But Trump's Palm Beach estate does have a watchtower outside, and a guard who was not keen to let me in, even to speak to the manager.
No matter. Instead I headed around the corner to the house owned by the real- estate billionaire Jeff Greene, hoping that he had insight into the one man who could crush DeSantis's ambitions. Someone, somewhere, buzzed me into the gate, but Greene was playing tennis when I arrived, so I wandered around the estate for five minutes, worried about being shot by an overzealous security guard. When Greene finally brought me inside, his house was everything I had hoped for: toilets with self-warming seats, a terrace backing onto the beach, photos of him embracing world leaders, the works. "That's a Picasso," he said, leading me down a corridor to his terrace. This was the Palm Beach lifestyle I had heard so much about.
Greene was once a member of Mara-Lago, but he let his membership lapse after he ran as a Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 (he came in fourth in the primary). His campaign promoted him as someone willing to stand up to Donald Trump, using a grainy video of him and Trump gesticulating at each other in the dining room at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in December 2016 as proof. Despite this history, Greene had sympathy for Trump's complaint that DeSantis would be nothing without him.
Trump seems to feel DeSantis's betrayal keenly. Shortly before the November election, he debuted a new nickname for his rival: Ron DeSanctimonious. But it didn't land, somehow, and Trump's more recent efforts—Meatball Ron, Shutdown Ron, Tiny D—have not been as devastating as Low-Energy Jeb or Little Marco. Locked away for two years in Mar-a-Lago like the world's most gregarious shut-in, the former president has been consumed by his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, long past when it stopped being a useful, base-enraging lie.
The demands of Palm Beach socializing meant that Greene was certain to encounter Trump again—in fact, Greene was due at Mar-a-Lago the following weekend for a benefit in aid of the Palm Beach Police and Fire Foundation. That might be awkward, because a few months earlier he had told the Financial Times that Trump had "no friends." Then came the former president's dinner with Ye—Kanye West—who was going around saying things like "I like Hitler," and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
"I realized that I probably should call the Financial Times to say I owe President Trump an apology," Greene told me, looking the least apologetic a man has ever looked, an attitude the tennis whites amplified, "because he really does have two friends."
Was he not worried about going to Mar-a-Lago under the circumstances? Not at all, it turned out, because Greene would be accompanied by his friend Mehmet Oz, Trump's anointed (and failed) candidate for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, as well as by his best man, with whom he had just spent two weeks in St. Barts.
And who would that be? Mike Tyson.
I blinked a few times, before my brain supplied the necessary explanation: Florida.
ON JANUARY 3, DeSantis was sworn in as governor for a second time, on the steps of the capitol in Tallahassee. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but at 10:20, the public seating area was full, and stragglers had to watch on a giant television screen on South Monroe Street, which had been renamed "Ron DeSantis Way" for the occasion. (Other elected officials were assigned smaller side streets in their honor.) Again, I felt inescapably British: We wouldn't let our politicians get carried away like this.
In the press pen, an enthusiastic livestreamer broadcast his hope that Pfizer, Moderna, and the media would be held accountable for their crimes, then emitted an audible "Ooh" of appreciation when Casey DeSantis stepped out in a mint-green caped dress, with elbow-length white gloves. Her husband took a seat on the dais, splay-legged, his hands disconcertingly locked into a diamond in front of his crotch.
This is what it looks like to become the Chosen One. The former Fox host Glenn Beck had lent DeSantis his rare Bible for the swearing-in. The podcaster Dave Rubin, previously torn between the Florida governor and Trump, tweeted a photograph from the bleachers—not the VIP section, I noted—and later produced a YouTube video praising the "one line in DeSantis' speech that made the crowd go nuts." (I had been led to believe that Floridians going nuts would involve some combination of gasoline, swimming trunks, guns, pythons, golf carts, alcohol, and an unexplained fatality. Here, they just stood and clapped.) The donors and the party hierarchy were ready to move on from Donald Trump; so, it seemed, were the partisan media.
The speech drew on the dark Ban-nonite energy of the right-wing online ecosystem, name-checking "entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and corporations wielding public power" and breezing through the obligatory geographic shout-outs, "from the Space Coast to the Sun Coast," to Daytona, Hialeah, and the rest. "Freedom lives here, in our great Sunshine State of Florida!"
The rest of the 16-minute speech was a tour through the greatest hits of his campaign, followed by the predictable raising of his eyes to the horizon of greater ambitions. DeSantis wanted to offer a Florida Blueprint to the rest of America; this was a place that was preserving the "sacred fire of liberty" that had burned in Independence Hall, at Gettysburg, on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, and that had inspired a president to stand in Berlin and declare, "Tear down this wall." Yes, the speech said, I may be currently in charge of highway maintenance and appointments to the board of chiropractic medicine, but I have so much more to give.
ALTHOUGH THE SUNSHINE STATE FORGED DESANTIS, HE'S NOT A TRUE FLORIDA MAN.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION about DeSantis is this: Is he a corporate taxcutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he closer to Mitch McConnell or Marjo- rie Taylor Greene? The great DeSantis innovation has been to realize how much cover calculated outrage provides for rewarding cronies—and that the more you preach "freedom," the more you can get away with authoritarianism.
Although the Sunshine State forged DeSantis, he's not a true Florida Man. Some 400 miles away from Tallahassee, at Mar-a-Lago, you could get the full sugar rush of Trump, a born performer who finds his causes by sniffing the wind, then road-tests potential lines on Truth Social and live audiences, feeling the crackle of a palpable hit. DeSantis offers a synthetic, lab-grown alternative. He's Sweet'N Low.
During the inauguration, the Pledge of Allegiance was read by Felix Rodriguez, a paramilitary CIA officer during the Bay of Pigs incident and a recent winner of the governor's Medal of Freedom. The 81-year-old stumbled over the words, and I realized instantly what a natural politician—Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan—would have done: walk over, take Rodriguez's arm, and create a viral moment of human connection. DeSantis stood rigid and stern. Given a 15-hour run-up and a focus group, he might have gamed out the advantages of a small, public act of kindness. But he couldn't get there on his own.
Nothing is more damning of the modern Republican Party than the fact that DeSantis needs to flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and casual cruelty to court its base. Even then, the routine falls flat. DeSantis lacks the weird- ness, effervescence, and recklessness that makes his home state so compelling. A true Florida Man does not master bureaucracy and use his powers of patronage to reshape institutions in his image. A true Florida Man does not make the trains run on time. A true Florida Man tries to soup up his boat with a nitro exhaust and accidentally burns down the illegal tiki bar he built in his backyard. Some are born Florida Men, some achieve Florida Manhood, and some have Florida Manhood thrust upon them by the demands of right-wing politics.
© 2023 The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC..
4). “The Republican Agenda Is One Bad Idea After Another”, April 25, 2023, Molly Jong-Fast, Politics, Vanity Fair, at <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/republican-agenda-bad-idea-abortion-book-ban-child-labor-guns>.
Republicans succeeded in getting Roe v. Wade overturned, and it cost them electorally. So, naturally, they turned to the also very unpopular ideas of loosening child labor laws, allowing for more guns, and banning books.
7–8 minutes
In the 1990s, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas wrote that the GOP “no longer identified as a party of ideas”; he was among many conservative pundits who lamented the end of the Reagan years. It’s more than 30 years later, and I would argue that Thomas shouldn’t have sold his party short: The GOP has ideas—they’re just bad, and wildly unpopular. Now with three of Donald Trump’s conservative justices on the Supreme Court and red state houses trying to race each other to the right, we’re seeing these “ideas” in action; they’re pushing for more ways to restrict reproductive health, trying to keep trans kids out of sports, banning books, and banning mention of gender identity and sexual orientation with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law—and that’s only part of the agenda. These right-wing fantasies are finally coming to fruition and, it turns out, the American people don’t like it.
The Republican Party long dreamed of overturning Roe, and last June, a conservative-majority Supreme Court was finally able to achieve it. The results were dystopian: women driving for hours and sleeping in their cars, doctors refusing to treat them. Six months after the fall of Roe, 24 states had banned abortion or were planning to. Abortion rights have shot up in popularity: 62% in 2022 vs. 47% in 2009, according to the Pew Research Center. As the Democratic saying goes, “abortion is health care,” and now Republicans have shown voters what it means to strip health care away. Applications for ob-gyn residencies in states with abortion bans are reportedly down 10.5% compared to last year, and horrific stories of people who can’t get treatment for miscarriages appear on the regular.
Overturning Roe was so unpopular, the disapproval rating of the Supreme Court has since shot up to a historic high of 58%, according to Gallup. There seems to be some awareness among Republicans that the antiabortion agenda reeks; House Republicans are reportedly punting on the push for a national abortion ban, legislation they were expected to take up with their newfound majority. “Behind the scenes, Republicans acknowledge that the abortion ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, hurt the GOP in the midterm elections, and they’re worried about a similar backlash in 2024 if they embrace a federal ban now that they’re in power,” CNN reported, in a story citing interviews with dozens of Republicans. Even Trump has avoided chatter of a national ban, despite claiming credit for overturning Roe. And more recently, Republicans have either stayed mum about the Trump-appointed Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling to suspend FDA approval of an abortion medication, or even come out against it (See: Senator Susan Collins and Representative Nancy Mace). The most vocal proponent of the decision, which the Supreme Court put on hold and is currently facing appeal, came from Mississippi senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who tweeted the nonsensical, “We will continue the fight as the case continues to hold the @US_FDA accountable for endangering moms & babies through chemical abortion drugs.”
Still, at the state level, Republicans are pushing forward with one extreme antiabortion measure after another. Because ultimately, the problem for Republicans with the abortion ban is the same as their problem with Trump: The base and, in this case, the evangelical wing of the base, is rapturous about abortion bans. It has gotten a taste of a 50-year fantasy, and it wants more.
We’re seeing this kind of extremism all over the Republican agenda. Florida-based conservative think tank the Foundation for Government Accountability has been pushing laws loosening child labor protections, according to The Washington Post. One law allowing children as young as 14 to work night shifts advanced through the Iowa state legislature last week, and another eliminating work permits for those under the age of 16 was recently signed into law in Arkansas. Similar child labor legislation is advancing in Ohio, Missouri, and Georgia. David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame, told the Post, “When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular. You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.” There’s clearly a corporate interest in loosening child labor laws—this can’t just be a love of Victorian values and a need to go back to one of the darker times in American history. But you don’t exactly see Americans clamoring for 14-year-olds to work night shifts in a factory.
And then there’s the guns. Recent weeks saw the shooting of a couple delivering groceries for Instacart, and nine teenagers at a post-prom party in Texas. Earlier this month, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot for ringing the doorbell to the wrong home, and a six-year-old and her dad were shot when she tried to follow her ball into a neighbor’s yard. Most Americans want stricter gun laws, but Republicans like Ron DeSantis, whose entire governorship seems to be an exercise in trumping Trump in a hypothetical GOP primary (DeSantis hasn’t actually entered the race), keep signing laws like the “constitutional carry” law, permitless concealed carry by a different—less scary sounding—name.
Those aren’t even the GOP’s most unpopular ideas. There’s the push to cut Medicare and Social Security, which is so broadly disliked that most Republicans won’t admit they want to do it. Even Mitch McConnell had to publicly disavow fellow Republican senator Rick Scott’s plan that would have sunsetted all federal legislation every five years, claiming, “That’s not a Republican plan. That was the Rick Scott plan.” But it’s not just Scott (who eventually carved Social Security and Medicare out of his sunsetting idea). Utah senator Mike Lee told a group in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security—to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it”; fast-forward to 2023, and he was furious about the implication he’d want to cut Social Security.
Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. The ideas their base and donors love are not only extremely dangerous policies but they’re also bad politics. The further right Republicans go, the scarier and authoritarian they seem (and likely are). In the 2022 election, democracy and the fear of losing it was a huge voting motivation for voters: “44% of voters said the future of democracy was their primary consideration, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide. That included about 56% of Democrats and 34% of Republicans.” Trump and Trumpism aren’t necessarily the Republican Party’s fundamental problems, they are but a symptom of the Republican Party’s addiction to bad ideas.
No comments:
Post a Comment