The DeSantis presidential pitch usually was in regards to the governor as this singular pressure stopping societal decline. His imaginative and prescient encompassed colleges, companies, the markets and authorities paperwork. This, at occasions, uneasily subverted conventional conservative concepts about federalism and the person — utilizing authorities to create house for a selected conception of the person and interfering with enterprise and native authorities, if vital, to do it. The pitch wasn’t particularly about preserving the Everglades or elevating trainer pay or getting bridges rebuilt after hurricanes, which he has labored to do and are literally the form of issues folks have now.
Mr. DeSantis marries depth and motion, which is perhaps the supply of a few of the weirdness that adopted him and his marketing campaign, from the Twitter Areas launch to the X.com videos with the edgelord aesthetics. He talks about bodily rebuilding bridges, however on this approach the place solely he can marshal the powers of the state to get a bridge rebuilt on time in a disaster, relatively than as efficient and collaborative administration unfazed by occasions.
In November, Mr. DeSantis hosted a New Hampshire occasion devoted to medical freedom, the place he campaigned with Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the mRNA vaccine skeptic he made surgeon common. In distinction, the following day at a collection of Nikki Haley occasions, the pandemic solely got here up in glancing mentions, about Covid aid fraud and psychological well being crises.
Dr. Ladapo talked about Mr. DeSantis and the pandemic in Ayn Rand-esque phrases of historic sweep. “You could see that he recognized that this wasn’t some battle over policy, like ‘I think this is the way we should do it.’ ‘No, I think this is the way we should do it.’ No, that’s not what this was. That’s not what this is,” he informed attendees. “This was a battle over the existence of human beings, the autonomy of human beings, the ability, the right or the position of human beings over institutions.”
Mr. DeSantis’s ascension right into a believable Trump challenger coincided with some of the disruptive durations in American life. It’s clear that some folks have had their lives reorganized by the pandemic in a frontal, tangible approach that wrecked their well being or intensified their political opinions, and different folks by no means wish to hear in regards to the pandemic once more, regardless of how a lot these years might have modified any side of their lives. For Republicans who wish to neglect 2020 and 2021, the valor discovered again then in Mr. DeSantis may not have been all that a lot about crushing the woke left and a corroded society, and extra nearly permission to maneuver on from the pandemic sooner than most states.
