Ron DeSantis is a deft politician, which makes him appear more palatable than the man he is challenging for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump. But his demeanour is deceptive.
It is a sign of the times, perhaps, that the world’s greatest economic powerhouse and bastion of liberal democracy, the United States, has produced such poor candidates for leader of the free world in recent decades.
The last truly great liberal president that country has had was Calvin Coolidge, back in the Roaring Twenties. Even Ronald Reagan, who pulled the US out of the economic funk of the 1970s and ended the Cold War, was largely a disappointing figure.
When Joe Biden got elected in 2020, I wrote a piece on what the US really needs: ranked voting.
The paranoid narcissism, crass misogyny, hostile rhetoric, shoot-from-the-hip decisions, trade-warring, protectionism, authoritarian leanings, outright lies and eventual incitement to sedition and criminal indictment of Donald Trump, has made a mess of the Grand Old Party.
Wiser, saner, more centrist heads have been sidelined, and genuine lunatics like QAnon laughing stock Marjorie Taylor Greene and flat-Earther Kandiss Taylor have been let loose wearing Republican lapel buttons.
So it might seem a breath of fresh air to see someone like Ron DeSantis, who at least superficially seems to be an adult in control of his baser instincts, vie for the GOP nomination.
Yet DeSantis, the governor of Florida who last week threw his hat into the ring, is far from the reasonable, rational, small-government classical liberal that one might hope to find challenging the alt-right in the Republican Party.
Big tent
The Republican Party has always been a big tent, with war hawks, the religious right, and fiscal conservatives all squeezed uncomfortably close together. True libertarians have tried to give up on the GOP as a political home, arguing that both they and the Democrats are, in practice, authoritarian big-government parties.
Outside the political duopoly, however, they found themselves out in the cold with frat-house hooligans and drug-addled gunslingers. Turns out there are even worse candidates for president than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The rise of Donald Trump is due to the alt-right, a motley collection of social-media rage-baiters and extremists who pushed the dominant narrative within the party far to the right. Eventually, the movement combined the left’s traditional distrust of capitalism with the fascist, patriarchal ideals of Christian nationalism and white supremacy.
They want a God-fearing, hard-working, conservative, white, heterosexual society; a sort of cartoonish recreation of the 1950s, and they want to exclude, forcibly assimilate or silence everyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow view of what ‘American’ is supposed to be.
DeSantis falls squarely in the middle of that repressive ideology. To imagine what he might be like as a president, one only has to examine his legislative record in his home state, Florida. It is one of the leaders in the rise of fundamentalist Christian-right authoritarianism, as red states, emboldened by a strongly conservative-leaning Supreme Court, embrace theonomy.
Let Them Die Act
DeSantis earlier this month signed into law an outrageous bill that would allow a wide range of healthcare providers to refuse care on grounds of their personal moral, ethical or religious beliefs.
Nursing homes will be entitled to stop catering to gay residents, pharmacies will be entitled to stop providing contraception or HIV medications, emergency room doctors may refuse to treat car accident victims who happen to be trans, hospitals may turn away drunk patients, maternity wards may refuse to admit pregnant teens, labs may refuse to test blood for sexually transmitted diseases, and insurers may refuse to pay for any or all of the above. And nobody is allowed to fire anyone for refusing to provide health services based on their personal hatreds and prejudices.
Legislators call it the Protections of Medical Conscience Act. LGBTQ+ advocates call it the Let Them Die Act. And they’re right. This is pure evil enshrined in law, and the irony is that it is utterly immoral, unethical and unchristian. Yet DeSantis signed it.
Vengeance
DeSantis also backed a bill passed by the Florida legislature that would extend the death penalty to child sex offenders.
Now nobody has any sympathy for child sex offenders, their crimes are truly evil, and any parent’s instinct would be to kill them slowly with a rusty blade. However, there is a very good reason why child molesters do not, and should not, face the death penalty.
Besides the generic arguments against the death penalty – that the state should not have the power of life or death over anyone, that the state too often sends innocent people to die, and that it is actually more expensive to execute someone than to imprison them for life – the argument against the death penalty for lesser crimes than murder is a very simple one.
If a rapist, or an armed robber, or a child molester knows that they would face the death penalty if caught, they now have an excellent incentive to kill the witnesses. Extending the death penalty to such crimes does not protect victims; it puts them at greater risk of being murdered in addition to being assaulted and violated.
Like another DeSantis-backed law, which removes the jury unanimity requirement for imposing death sentences, this law explicitly violates prior Supreme Court rulings, and is blatantly unconstitutional.
These laws are regressive, and play to the vengeful emotions of angry mobs rather than making society safer for its most vulnerable members.
Vendetta
DeSantis also signed into law an abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy, when most women don’t even know they’re pregnant. Unlike some other states, it offers narrow exceptions for abortions up to 15 weeks in cases of incest and rape, or to save the life of the mother.
Still, this is a highly partisan issue, which appeals to the Christian right alone. Only a third of US women identify with the label ‘pro-life’, while almost two thirds consider themselves ‘pro-choice’. Medical opinion is also openly against the wave of anti-abortion laws being passed in the wake of the overturning of Roe-v-Wade. Public health experts point out that abortion bans do not, in fact, reduce the number of abortions being performed. It merely changes who performs them and under what conditions.
DeSantis expanded the so-called Don’t Say Gay law, which prohibits any discussion or portrayal of homosexuality or gender identity in classrooms to all grades. It has already been used to suspend and investigate a teacher who showed a Disney movie that included a gay character.
The Disney company openly opposed this law. DeSantis violated its free speech rights and abused his power by dissolving the legal dispensation under which Disney World governs itself, and placed it under state control. This is a gross violation of the rule of law, in pursuit of a political vendetta.
Disney, predictably, is suing, and has been counter-sued in turn. Disney also suspended all expansion plans and moved them to California, which will substantially harm Florida’s economy.
That DeSantis thinks it is okay to use regulatory powers to punish dissent is abhorrent both to the US Constitution and to the basic principles of liberal democracy.
Self-harm
DeSantis has also signed broad new anti-immigration legislation to ‘combat the dangerous effects of illegal immigration’. That such dangerous effects exist has never been shown.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic organisation in the US, has issued a travel warning for Florida, and has threatened to sue the state. Meanwhile, shortages of construction workers, truck drivers and farm labourers are already emerging, as a classical liberal might have expected.
In his desire to appeal to the right wing, he is perfectly willing to harm his state’s economy. Self-harm should be a red flag in any politician.
These and many other laws illustrate that DeSantis would be an illiberal, sometimes reckless, always populist conservative who panders to the prejudices of the religious right. He routinely violates the classical liberal principles of individual freedom, limited government, free markets, the rule of law, and tolerance.
The only thing that recommends DeSantis over Trump or Biden, who will be 78 and 82 respectively when the next election comes around, is his age.
He’s 44 and can string a coherent English sentence together, but that is cold comfort when evaluating his legislative record in the hope of finding some classical liberal values to support.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/52291147304]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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