Writes The Atlantic's Helen Lewis:
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....
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....
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.
And yet Lewis's article, at bottom, has little to do with DeSantis or Trump. "Nothing is more damning of the modern Republican Party," she continues, "than the fact that DeSantis needs to flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and casual cruelty to court its base."
The damned — as well as those whom they would drag with them — are the roughly 74 million Americans who comprise the Republican Party and, in part, the state of Florida. As Lewis points out, DeSantis must flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism and cruelty because the 74 million demand that he do so.
For all the abuse we non-74 heap on DeSantis and Trump, it's not really they who are attempting to bring America so low. It is us, too broadly speaking. If it were not, DeSantis would, at best, be a minor state rep in Florida, and Trump would be nothing more by now that a third-rate real-estate huckster in prison.