Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has made himself the leading rival to Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He won a sweeping re-election victory as governor in 2022, even as Republicans generally were underperforming. Now, he’s used that position to pick purposeful fights on polarizing social issues, clearly seeking to cater to the fury of the MAGA Republican base. By assailing what he calls “wokeness,” including everything from vaccinations, Dr. Fauci, critical race theory, LGBTQ students, and how American history is taught, he apparently hopes to offer Republicans a new generation culture warrior who can rouse Trump’s base and have a broader appeal to suburban voters.
DeSantis is relentless, if nothing else. He picked a fight with the Disney Corporation, scolding it for being too woke. He championed the “Don’t Say Gay” law to ban teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity in early grades and limit it in later years. He’s banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, trampled law and decency shipping Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, and is moving to eliminate any diversity and equity programs and critical race theory teaching across Florida public schools and universities. His Department of Education blocked high schools from teaching the advanced placement curricula on African American studies.
DeSantis says he wants the core curriculum to be “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization,” but he’s opposed to teaching actual American history, for that would violate his dictate that nothing be taught that might make any student feel uncomfortable or guilty.
DeSantis’ focus on how American history is taught isn’t new to the South. After the Civil War, the plantation class in the South invented the theory of the “lost cause,” suggesting that secession was about states’ rights, not slavery and that the slave system wa–in fact, beneficial to the backward Black race. That utterly distorted history helped provide legitimacy to legal segregation – American apartheid – that treated Blacks as second-class citizens for another 100 years after the Civil War. DeSantis stands in that ignorable tradition. He opposes “wokeness,” which he defines (according to his spokesman) as the belief that there is “systemic racism in institutions in our country and that something must be done about it.” That means it is impossible to teach the “actual history” of voting, housing, employment, education, and the economy.
Can DeSantis be elected president as a cultural warrior? Many people think that Trump’s victory in 2016 was driven by his race-baiting politics, his assaults on immigrants, Black protests, and feminists. Trump, however, combined racial division with a big right-wing populist argument. American politics, he famously argued, was corrupted by big money; elites were cleaning up as working people struggled; America’s trade policy was shipping jobs abroad; its endless wars were weakening the nation.
DeSantis, in contrast, offers the race-baiting cultural wars without populist economics. As a congressman, he was a stalwart conservative Republican, one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus. He pushed to shut down the government over funding for the Affordable Care Act in 2013 and voted to cut more than $250 billion from Social Security and Medicare over a decade. While voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he lined up with Republicans in 2017 to support Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and the corporations.
Florida remains one of 11 states that has refused to expand Medicaid to its low-wage workers. DeSantis is explicitly opposed to redistribution – raising taxes on billionaires to pay for child tax credits for families, for example. And, of course, DeSantis is a politician backed by big money, with all of the corruption that comes with the checks in the mail.
The cultural and race wars that DeSantis is championing are powerful and divisive. They also have the potential to backfire – as Republicans discovered after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to control her body.
In addition, Americans – across the political spectrum – are tired of corrupt politicians, corporations, and billionaires that pay lower taxes than nurses do, of ruinous trade policies, and conservative drug policies that have us paying the highest price for prescription drugs in the world.
Republicans like Trump and DeSantis can rouse ugly fears – about immigrants, about the myth of critical race theory, about the LGBTQ community, about vaccinations, and “grooming.” But unlike Trump, who promised his base a new course, DeSantis still champions the old, failed, right-wing economics and politics. At some point, he isn’t going to be able to hide that behind the heated rhetoric of his cultural attacks. What has played well for him as a politician in Florida may be too thin a gruel for the presidential election in 2024. Running on hate and division isn’t as powerful as running on hope and change. And that is likely to be the choice in 2024.
You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.
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