DeSANTIS'S ANTI-DEMOCRATIC INSTINCTS HAVE BUSH-ERA ROOTS

Jonathan Chait has written a pretty good feature story on our possible Ron DeSantis future. I appreciate the warning that the entire Republican Party has settled on DeSantis as the alternative to Donald Trump if Trump doesn't run in 2024:

People who do not ingest large amounts of conservative media may have difficulty comprehending the extent of the adulation both the Trumpist and the Trump-skeptical wings of the party have lavished on DeSantis. On a daily basis, the right-wing press churns out stories with headlines like “The Promise of Ron DeSantis,” “Could Gov. Ron DeSantis Be the Favorite GOP Frontrunner for 2024?,” “A Ron DeSantis Master Class in Rope-a-Dope,” “Media Keep Trying — and Failing — to Take Down Florida’s Ron DeSantis,” “Karol Markowicz on What Gov. Ron DeSantis Is Really Like: ‘So Real and Down to Earth,’” and on and on.

And it's good to be reminded that DeSantis rejects Never Trumpers altogether, but is very willing to embrace racists and other extremists.

[DeSantis's] proto-candidacy reflects a handful of working assumptions. First, that any former Republican voter who opposed Trump on moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone and not worth trying to bring back. Second, that the right-wing groups Trump brought into the Republican fold or whose creation he inspired are either political assets or simply too important to be culled. And third, that Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term was a failure of tactics, not a disqualifying ambition that merited rebuke and ostracism.

Chait puts this more succinctly on Twitter:

2. DeSantis is consolidating all the changes to the party's base that occurred under Trump, including overtly wooing extremist factions and actors that were outside the party tent pre-Trump https://t.co/VwjFTC9fgR

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) March 29, 2022

Chait sees this as a professionalization of Trumpism, which is correct. DeSantis strokes right-wing voters' rage centers the way Trump does, and obsesses over Fox News grievances in a Trumpian manner, but, Chait writes, "without [Trump's] childlike inability to focus on what his advisers tell him. One DeSantis ally, confiding to the New York Times, summed up his appeal as 'competent Trumpism.'"

But even Chait doesn't quite understand how DeSantis got here. Chait went back and read DeSantis's 2011 book, Dreams from Our Founding Fathers, written when DeSantis was a congressman and member of the Freedom Caucus, which he helped found. After reading the book, Chait concludes that DeSantis isn't merely pandering to Trump -- he "developed reactionary suspicions of democracy before Trump ever came along, which positioned him perfectly to straddle the elite-base divide within his party." -- but Chait also thinks DeSantis "has adjusted nimbly from tea-partyer to Trumpista." But how is that an adjustment at all? They're essentially the same thing.

I give Chait credit for recognizing that Trump didn't invent the anti-democratic impulse in the GOP, but he seems to think it was there in its current form long before we were born. Chait says of DeSantis's book,

Its author ... has clearly given a great deal of thought to the book’s thesis: that Obama’s agenda of raising taxes on the rich and spending more money on the non-rich is an attack on the Constitution....

The Constitution, he argues, was designed to “prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process.” ... The Constitution’s role, as DeSantis sees it, is to prevent popular majorities from enacting the economic policies they want.

DeSantis does not believe the Constitution merely establishes a set of ground rules for how policy should be written. He thinks the Constitution requires that conservative Republican policy prevail forever. This is not an original belief. It was the dominant right-wing position from the late-19th century through the middle of the New Deal...

DeSantis’s core conviction is that an outcome in which Democrats win majorities through free and fair elections and vote to expand social spending by taxing the rich is fundamentally illegitimate. He is far from the only Republican to hold this view. The American right has never fully accepted the legitimacy of democratically elected majorities setting economic policy.

Yes, but it hasn't always been the majority opinion on the American right that all elections won by Democrats are fundamentally illegitimate. That idea took off in the George W. Bush era, with its "voter fraud" obsession. DeSantis was born in 1978, which means he probably can't remember any kind of Republican politics other than the Democrats-always-cheat kind.

This and his obvious opportunism makes it unsurprising that he seized on Trump's stolen-election talk right away. DeSantis knows what sells to GOP voters. His instincts told him that this message would have mass appeal on the right, and he was correct -- it's not going away. The only question is why this doesn't marginalize him in the broader political culture.