Elon's conduct only strengthens my belief that we need a whole new income tax structure to deal with billionaires. No more tinkering around the edges; we need a complete rethink on how income is taxed in America.
And it will probably never happen, thanks to the twin pillars of the last forty years of Republican policies: regressive tax cuts at all costs, and anything else is “communism/socialism” and evil.
I don't see how a disciplined, ruthless, prevaricating, amoral DeSantis would not be, if anything, worse than an undisciplined, slave to impulse, cruel, lying, unreasoning narcissist Trump.
Both in office will have at the top of their agenda:
0. Build and leverage existing databases of the US population and assign people and organizations loyalty and enemy scores. Both parties already have lists of all eligible voters and of course contributors. This is being combined with all the other information now available through private and public sources -- they already know where you live, what car you drive, what your Facebook posts look like, how your neighbors vote, where you eat, what you eat, how much you spend, where you go, what music you stream, what TV you watch, and how all your relatives and friends and coworkers score on all these and other attributes.
If you buy craft beer, this will factor in. Whether you drive a pickup truck or a Prius, this will be counted. If your neighbors voted for Dems in the last election, your address will testify against you.
As the rot spreads, indifference and neutrality will no longer be sufficient; inoffensiveness itself will become evidence of opposition. Literally there will be no way to hide your loyalty or antipathy to the regime, even by trying to stay out of sight and hearing and never speak a political word.
1. Purge the whole US Justice department of honest men and women and replace as many as possible as soon as possible with truckling lickspittles whose only concern as to duty will be do whatever is asked of them, and do it to whomever they are directed. This will be a bit difficult at first since it will be so highly visible, given the services required will entail letting fellow criminals off the hook, and persecuting enemies in courts of law on the public record. It won't take long however for everyone to sense where the breeze blows. Those who object will be squeezed out. Those who can't stomach it will leave. Those who can't or won't risk leaving will acquiesce. And the ambitious will pause, triangulate, and enthusiastically cooperate.
2. Ensure that promotion and retention in the military is filtered through a sieve of loyalty to the regime or at least MAGA cultural fit. Officers and noncoms who intend careers will be required to give ongoing evidence of fealty. This will be very easy to do since it can be done sub rosa by informal blacklist and "MAGA boy" networks. An unofficial system of political officers can be even more effective than an official one. What does not exist de jure cannot readily be opposed de jure.
3. Tie federal contracts and research spending to loyalty scores.
4. Teachers, police, public employees will find they need to have the right recommendations to be hired and promoted.
Gradually this will diffuse into private industry. As firms find they cannot compete without being on the right lists, they will have to cooperate to survive.
5. The IRS is ripe for conversion into a corrupt tool of oppression. One reason the right was so sure the "scandalous" attempt to enforce tax exempt status rules was a targeted attack was that they can't imagine having that power themselves and not using it.
6. They will sooner or later need a real political police apparatus. Most authoritarian regimes have more than one; the competition between them helps ensure the leader(s) are not themselves supplanted. I have always looked at ICE is the most obvious candidate to be the new regime's pre-eminent Stasi.
7. Obviously, top of the list, will be the federal and state judiciaries. If things play out as badly as I expect, as soon as a sufficient majority in the Senate is available, we can expect the regime to start cleaning out holdovers through forced retirements (pressure and even physical intimidation) and impeachments. A couple of impeachments will work wonders to concentrate the minds of jurists who know they are going to be on target lists.
They will have the power to do all this and more, because they will have no one to stop them. To expect that having this power they will refrain from exerting it, is to suppose what never in history was the case for long can be different in future. Only the character and preference of the powerful in any given regime really stand in the way. We have the measure of Trump. The full measure of the DeSantises and Cottens and Cruzes has yet to be confirmed, but the early results do not look good.
Yes. I see all of this as possible. The excellent documentary "The Rise of the Nazis" (https://www.pbs.org/show/rise-nazis/) examines the four years between 1930 and 1934. In 1930, Germany was a liberal democracy, with elections, parliament and the rule of law. By 1933, the Justice Ministry (the German counterpart to our DOJ) is taken over. They stop a prosecutor who investigated the SS practice of summary execution and fake suicide at Dachau. By 1934, democracy is dead. As I watch the program, this take over seems to be the critical turning point that assures Nazi control of Germany.
I thought after he was lightly tapped on the back and screamed he'd been assaulted that we'd all come to settle on the "assailant's" preferred term for him: Scumbag.
Matt Levine, please do not confuse crony capitalism with capitalism. The ability to manipulate the strike price for nickel futures because you’re too big to fail is by definition not true capitalism.
I read Linkers newsletter when it came out earlier this week.
A few points he missed:
DeSantis set up his own election police force that ONLY reports to him. Directly.
Yeah...What could go wrong with that? Let's see....
Gov. DeSantis claims that there are election "irregularities" in Miami-Dade and Orlando (or Tampa, Jacksonville, Tallahassee - any two (or three) will do) the day of the 2024 presidential election, for which he is the GOP nominee.
Proof? We've learned that we don't need that. He just has to claim it. Then send his "police" into to impound - for safe keeping, ya know - the ballots in Miami-Dade/Orlando. And that his police force will need to conduct an "investigation" and "audit" the ballots.
Well, wouldn't you know it...it's going to take a few weeks. Like 4 months. Well past the certification dates. Just have to use the counted votes, I guess.
Looky there!! DeSantis is going to carry FL.
Now, repeat in GA, PA, AZ, WI.
The idea that DeSantis wouldn't pulled that is belied by every action he has taken in the last 2 years with respect to the election laws in FL.
You have the plan -- they have it too. They have plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D -- they have whole alphabet of plans. And they have the money and time to set up all the pieces. Last time was a planned conspiracy set up before the election with a full set of measures to try, one after another, from legislatures to courts to what was supposed to be a Q-type storming of the Bastille to shut down the count, all of which had been focused on an ultimate goal of forcing the election into the House. Fortunately for us (for a brief interval of a handful of years-- enjoy it as a last brief "Indian Summer" before the long blast of permanent winter) t hey were an inept bunch, and the entourage of servile lickspittles turned out to have enough people in it who were not ready (this time) to go along. Next time will be different. If it's DeSantis, it will be under mature emotional control, and will not be botched.
I completely agree with Linker and his rankings. DeSantis WILL be better than Trump. I suspect that Trump tried to usurp power not only because he did not believe he lost (lots of people around him told that yes he lost) but also because he did not want to let go of his followers. Like O'Brien from "1984" said, "power is not ruling over things; power is ruling over people". Trump's greatest power is over his followers. We simply do not know at this time whether DeSantis is similarly addicted to power, but all of his background (Harvard/Yale education, military service, even his first actions in the beginning of COVID) argue against this. When I look at his culture war fights, I can't help but think that he is forced to fight them - how else is he going to displace Trump? This is so like Reagan in 1970s ("welfare queens", "Panama canal - we built it, we paid for it, it's ours", etc...)
Not being snarky here but do YOU live in Florida? I do and I have a completely different perspective on DeSantis who built most of his campaign in 2018 on building a wall in... Texas!
His "evolution" on handling COVID is a perfect illustration. Early on he basically just did the normal "governor thing" not knowing any more about COVID than anyone else and just following Trump's lead which was to let the CDC and NIH do their thing. AND then came the reality of how devastating COVID was for Florida economically. Then he tried to control the statistics. Then he tried to silence anyone who did not agree with him. Then he took decision making away from school boards and local governments for pandemic management. Then he wanted to prevent private businesses from choosing their own COVID strategies. Then he started suing academics and medical professionals and prevent them from serving as experts in courts saying that to disagree with the governor was a conflict of interest. He publicly mocked people who wore masks. Instead of preventing sickness by promoting vaccinations he promoted therapies for people AFTER they got sick. Essentially his COVID policy post-Trump was to simply do the opposite of whatever the Biden administration suggested. His handling of COVID was to turn it into a culture war issue.
His addiction to power is absolute.
If you participate in Florida centered social media platforms you will see the same blind PERSONAL devotion to DeSantis that Trump once enjoyed. He will not even try to displace Trump. He is rationally preparing for the circumstances where Trump will be unwilling or unable to run. It is a good bet because he will already have his campaign well underway before the other "wannabes" even get started. He already has FOXNews in his corner. The ONLY way he does not run is IF Trump does run. Trump would eat DeSantis for supper on any debate stage just as he did with all the Republican also-rans in 2016. And to seriously challenge Trump would be alienating to a huge swath of Republican voters. To challenge Trump is to be disloyal and disrespectful.
Finally the advantage DeSantis has is his sterling MAGA/culture wars record as Governor. Most of his competitors will be sitting Senators who haven't actually put any policies into action. His nearest experienced competitor on that level is Abbot of Texas.
So yes, DeSantis would be better than Trump--- if a Banana Republican dictator is what you want.
No, you are on the ground there and certainly should have a better perspective than I do. I don't live in Florida -- I live in Michigan, which used to be a reasonably well-governed middle-of-the-road state that alternated between moderate Republican and moderate Democrat, and whose median voter was not clinically insane. This has completely changed.
I have however some experience of Florida. Although there is much natural remaining beauty there well worth experiencing (which it seems progress is tirelessly in the process of eliminating), I confess to a hearty (and idiosyncratic) antipathy to Florida, or at least to the dominant culture there. My parents retired to St Augustine back in '84, and until they passed away we went there at least once per year to visit. I do have good memories there -- visits to the Castillo, the alligator farm, many lovely parks, and of course holidays with my parents. Once we even saw the blast and heard it crackling in the heavens as a space shuttle ascended from the cape 120 miles down the coast. So not all bad.
But the society my parents found there was wholly unlike, and vastly more intellectually and morally impoverished, than the academic culture they retired from in Michigan -- retired medical professionals and military, mostly, interested in money, in real estate, and in fear and loathing of immigrants and minorities. Particularly annoying were the shiftless, lazy black people, but the browns also received due attention. I recall an afternoon of cocktails in my father's sister's house where she and her husband (a retired surgeon and an immigrant no less) shared their strong feelings about how indolent the local blacks and immigrants were. This was mid July, and even as she spoke, a crew of those very same idle layabouts were outside in her yard working their asses off in the 90 heat and 80% humidity attending to her lawn and shrubbery. This was during the HW Bush years, and all those people I'm sure have joined my parents in the great beyond, so maybe things have changed. Maybe.
My sister lives in Lutz, in a neighborhood where there are actual statues of Donald Trump on people's lawns, in a background landscape of adulatory and belligerent MAGA ornamentation. Her subdivision looks like a pro-facist colony of right-wing bower birds. I Went to Orlando to for a conference there a few years back -- not for pleasure by any means, business; what a horrible city for traffic, and an economy dedicated to extracting $$$$$ from people who, for reasons I cannot fathom, want to mingle with actors on the verge of heat-stroke habilimented as cartoon characters, and form queues over and over again. My mother-in-law was in the Villages until she passed away -- a Phillip K. Dick waking nightmare literally to die in.
I would like to see Key West and the Everglades. My sister seems to like living there, even though she does so literally as a stranger in her own strange chosen land, culturally and politically. Some people seem to like the climate and even more seem to like the society. Those who like the climate don't worry me. It's those who like the society who scare me to pieces.
I can't tell you how perfectly you have described what I see in Florida.
My husband and I spend the summers in northern rural Wisconsin and our winters in the Tampa Bay area. So we experience the MAGA death cult twice a year in two different locales!
We retired to Florida just after DeSantis was sworn in.
We came for the beauty of the beaches and apparently are staying to die in a traffic accident.
Over a quarter of a million people are moving here each year--- many of them are coming for the thrill of living in a MAGA paradise and the privilege of having Ron DeSantis as their governor.
It was perhaps the biggest mistake of our lives and we bought before the real estate market exploded so the thought of selling and getting out occurs to each of us about 20 times a day.
Fortunately our deed restricted community has tight control over yard displays, flags, etc. so at least our neighbors are forced to keep their politics inside and to themselves.
I hope you are correct and I am mistaken. But try as I might I see not one shred of a scintilla of an iota of evidence that DeSantis is "forced" to fight the culture war against his private preference. DeSantis looks to me like the reptilian sociopathy of Trump under the direction of a disciplined, well-trained intellect focused without human empathy on a single goal: power. Possibly better than Trump in one respect only: Trump's narcissism and love of cruelty for its own sake prevent him from raising and sustaining the self-discipline he really needs to become a Napoleon or Caesar or Mao or Stalin. He may well return to office (he will I suspect unless God calls him off the stage) and his next administration will no doubt turn America into the kind of hell on earth that a Caligula or Idi Amin can create, but Trump himself does not have the skill set and temperament of a truly great tyrant.
DeSantis on the other hand has precisely the qualities needed. Where Trump is helpless to control his narcissism, DeSantis is in full command of his selfishness. For Trump, cruelty is an insatiable appetite he cannot control. Instead of a passion for cruelty, DeSantis has shown ruthlessness, and he rules it with an iron will.
In one crucial respect, they are exactly alike. Neither one as far as am aware has ever shown any evidence of having any purpose in life beyond what he can aggrandize to himself. From what we have seen so far, for both men, the world and all the people in it exist to be eaten.
JVL pushes Anne Helen Peterson from time to time. She has a really good blog that focuses a lot on work culture and and just American culture in general.
Is it Musk (or the nickel guy) who is ignoring the rules, or is it the rest of us, if we can reasonably expect those things you described to happen for anyone with enough capital?
I’m going with Trump-like candidate who wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote. And BTW, what’s the deal with all these non-cowboys wearing cowboy boots - DeSantis in photo. Drugstore cowboy as we used to say. He must be shorter than average.
I used to wear cowboy boots because they felt good on my feet and with warm socks and properly taken care of, they kept my feet warm and dry. That’s probably at least 50% of why cowboys wear them . That and something to do with stirrups. Maybe it’s only virtue signalling if your a politician.
You can spend serious money on cowboy boots. Maybe it’s also a way to signal casual wealth like rock stars and some popular hellfire preachers who wear expensive, very cool sneakers. Maybe it just makes them happy.
There are tons of righteous Pro-EC people out there (GOP, obvs) with ridiculous arguments (more power to small states!) that are transparently wrong. But when I say, 'The EC will be over 5 minutes after the first Republican candidate loses the EC but wins the popular vote' they mostly go quiet.
I don't doubt there are GOP operatives out there already with a 'break glass in case of EC loss/Popular Vote win'
I had hoped, after Romney, that they might start deciding to capture voters' attentions. But it looks more like 'game the system'.
Plotting those scenarios is useful, but recent history has taught us that something totally unexpected is just as likely as any of those things.
I’ve startled to dabble in learning more French history, motivated by the thin consolation that if they’re on their 5th republic, maybe we can fix ours if we break it?
Sadly, I’m not sure the second American Republic (third, if we count the Articles, but we never do) is still even a possible improbable if it all comes apart. We’re a pluralistic, multicultural, excessively armed society, driven mad, enraged, and divided by money-making algorithms and greedy, lying infotainment purveyors. It’s hard to knit that back together if it breaks.
Your last sentence is a great encapsulation of everything in JVL's piece today!
But rather than French history, perhaps that of the two World Wars, esp II. It was won by luck, not by competence, not by being on the side of the angels. Luck. Reading about wars through the ages, that seems to me to be the salient feature of pretty much all of them.
Not sure how that bodes for Ukraine.
But sure wish Biden would COMMIT and stop being so wishy washy (I think too much of Obama has rubbed off on him and not the best parts).
Now you've piqued MY interest in French history. I have a general sense of it, but not the specifics of the string of republics. A quick Wikipedia read and I see each had a new Constitution. How did those come about? It looks like the government in their parliamentary system collapsed. That's not us. We have a federal system with each state having some sovereignty. Further, they are small and compact where we are big and dispersed. So, I don't see it.
Ours broke in 1861 and was never really repaired. As long as Blacks were kept under, there was some national unity. But once their civil rights were established, we started slowly to come apart. Somewhere I read the most salient thing about Trump voters was racial resentment. France doesn't have that history.
France does have a history of racial resentment. They call them immigrants and Le Pen stokes it. It runs throughout Europe and probably the whole world. It's just that most countries are not melting pots like ours is so it may come across differently. (And slavery has been around at least since Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt!) Interestingly, I think the UK is probably the most diverse population, in part because of the sweep of their Empire. And we see where it has led them now. France is running to catch up but holding it off so far.
But I have come to believe that we were never a real union, just a confederation. A big one.
We have never had a democratic presidential election (though provision was made for the states to have some democratic process) and there is no democracy in capitalism. So just another failed state in the making apparently.
With Johnson in limbo, the Israeli government heading for yet another election, Ukraine continuing to burn. and Biden suffering from terrible approval ratings heading into the must-win American midterm elections, this could end up being a tempting window of opportunity for malignant actors to make sudden geopolitical moves. Nations with a target on their back like Taiwan suffer the most during these transitional periods.
If I'm China, I'm in wait and see mode. The fait acompli model for Ukraine worked out spectacularly bad, and NATO is currently strong and united (yeah, I know it isn't a NATO thing in the Pacific). Trump could be back, a DeSantis could be in to be tested, or even a lame duck Biden could be tested. Right now, despite some turmoil, the west is actually riding higher than it has in a while. China is stuck with their own Mussolini bumbling around and generally being a drag on the alliance.
Okay, sorry for filling up JVL's thread with this, but I couldn't find the link to Cathy Young's article questioning the accounts of the 10-year-old girl who had to seek an abortion in Indiana: they just arrested the rapist. She seemed to anxious to debunk the case, so here is the link: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/13/columbus-man-charged-rape-10-year-old-led-abortion-in-indiana/10046625002/
Elon's conduct only strengthens my belief that we need a whole new income tax structure to deal with billionaires. No more tinkering around the edges; we need a complete rethink on how income is taxed in America.
And it will probably never happen, thanks to the twin pillars of the last forty years of Republican policies: regressive tax cuts at all costs, and anything else is “communism/socialism” and evil.
I don't see how a disciplined, ruthless, prevaricating, amoral DeSantis would not be, if anything, worse than an undisciplined, slave to impulse, cruel, lying, unreasoning narcissist Trump.
Both in office will have at the top of their agenda:
0. Build and leverage existing databases of the US population and assign people and organizations loyalty and enemy scores. Both parties already have lists of all eligible voters and of course contributors. This is being combined with all the other information now available through private and public sources -- they already know where you live, what car you drive, what your Facebook posts look like, how your neighbors vote, where you eat, what you eat, how much you spend, where you go, what music you stream, what TV you watch, and how all your relatives and friends and coworkers score on all these and other attributes.
If you buy craft beer, this will factor in. Whether you drive a pickup truck or a Prius, this will be counted. If your neighbors voted for Dems in the last election, your address will testify against you.
As the rot spreads, indifference and neutrality will no longer be sufficient; inoffensiveness itself will become evidence of opposition. Literally there will be no way to hide your loyalty or antipathy to the regime, even by trying to stay out of sight and hearing and never speak a political word.
1. Purge the whole US Justice department of honest men and women and replace as many as possible as soon as possible with truckling lickspittles whose only concern as to duty will be do whatever is asked of them, and do it to whomever they are directed. This will be a bit difficult at first since it will be so highly visible, given the services required will entail letting fellow criminals off the hook, and persecuting enemies in courts of law on the public record. It won't take long however for everyone to sense where the breeze blows. Those who object will be squeezed out. Those who can't stomach it will leave. Those who can't or won't risk leaving will acquiesce. And the ambitious will pause, triangulate, and enthusiastically cooperate.
2. Ensure that promotion and retention in the military is filtered through a sieve of loyalty to the regime or at least MAGA cultural fit. Officers and noncoms who intend careers will be required to give ongoing evidence of fealty. This will be very easy to do since it can be done sub rosa by informal blacklist and "MAGA boy" networks. An unofficial system of political officers can be even more effective than an official one. What does not exist de jure cannot readily be opposed de jure.
3. Tie federal contracts and research spending to loyalty scores.
4. Teachers, police, public employees will find they need to have the right recommendations to be hired and promoted.
Gradually this will diffuse into private industry. As firms find they cannot compete without being on the right lists, they will have to cooperate to survive.
5. The IRS is ripe for conversion into a corrupt tool of oppression. One reason the right was so sure the "scandalous" attempt to enforce tax exempt status rules was a targeted attack was that they can't imagine having that power themselves and not using it.
6. They will sooner or later need a real political police apparatus. Most authoritarian regimes have more than one; the competition between them helps ensure the leader(s) are not themselves supplanted. I have always looked at ICE is the most obvious candidate to be the new regime's pre-eminent Stasi.
7. Obviously, top of the list, will be the federal and state judiciaries. If things play out as badly as I expect, as soon as a sufficient majority in the Senate is available, we can expect the regime to start cleaning out holdovers through forced retirements (pressure and even physical intimidation) and impeachments. A couple of impeachments will work wonders to concentrate the minds of jurists who know they are going to be on target lists.
They will have the power to do all this and more, because they will have no one to stop them. To expect that having this power they will refrain from exerting it, is to suppose what never in history was the case for long can be different in future. Only the character and preference of the powerful in any given regime really stand in the way. We have the measure of Trump. The full measure of the DeSantises and Cottens and Cruzes has yet to be confirmed, but the early results do not look good.
Yes. I see all of this as possible. The excellent documentary "The Rise of the Nazis" (https://www.pbs.org/show/rise-nazis/) examines the four years between 1930 and 1934. In 1930, Germany was a liberal democracy, with elections, parliament and the rule of law. By 1933, the Justice Ministry (the German counterpart to our DOJ) is taken over. They stop a prosecutor who investigated the SS practice of summary execution and fake suicide at Dachau. By 1934, democracy is dead. As I watch the program, this take over seems to be the critical turning point that assures Nazi control of Germany.
You need a better nickname for Giuliani than just Rudy.
Not like there's a paucity from which to choose: SHIRT-TUCKING GUY. Bad Hair Dye Guy, Mr Fartypants, or just THE MAN WHO WON'T GO AWAY.
I thought after he was lightly tapped on the back and screamed he'd been assaulted that we'd all come to settle on the "assailant's" preferred term for him: Scumbag.
Matt Levine, please do not confuse crony capitalism with capitalism. The ability to manipulate the strike price for nickel futures because you’re too big to fail is by definition not true capitalism.
I read Linkers newsletter when it came out earlier this week.
A few points he missed:
DeSantis set up his own election police force that ONLY reports to him. Directly.
Yeah...What could go wrong with that? Let's see....
Gov. DeSantis claims that there are election "irregularities" in Miami-Dade and Orlando (or Tampa, Jacksonville, Tallahassee - any two (or three) will do) the day of the 2024 presidential election, for which he is the GOP nominee.
Proof? We've learned that we don't need that. He just has to claim it. Then send his "police" into to impound - for safe keeping, ya know - the ballots in Miami-Dade/Orlando. And that his police force will need to conduct an "investigation" and "audit" the ballots.
Well, wouldn't you know it...it's going to take a few weeks. Like 4 months. Well past the certification dates. Just have to use the counted votes, I guess.
Looky there!! DeSantis is going to carry FL.
Now, repeat in GA, PA, AZ, WI.
The idea that DeSantis wouldn't pulled that is belied by every action he has taken in the last 2 years with respect to the election laws in FL.
You have the plan -- they have it too. They have plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D -- they have whole alphabet of plans. And they have the money and time to set up all the pieces. Last time was a planned conspiracy set up before the election with a full set of measures to try, one after another, from legislatures to courts to what was supposed to be a Q-type storming of the Bastille to shut down the count, all of which had been focused on an ultimate goal of forcing the election into the House. Fortunately for us (for a brief interval of a handful of years-- enjoy it as a last brief "Indian Summer" before the long blast of permanent winter) t hey were an inept bunch, and the entourage of servile lickspittles turned out to have enough people in it who were not ready (this time) to go along. Next time will be different. If it's DeSantis, it will be under mature emotional control, and will not be botched.
We've never had a post Roe election. We'll see. (I'm talking a general election in 2024, not 2022). It's going to get bad by then.
I completely agree with Linker and his rankings. DeSantis WILL be better than Trump. I suspect that Trump tried to usurp power not only because he did not believe he lost (lots of people around him told that yes he lost) but also because he did not want to let go of his followers. Like O'Brien from "1984" said, "power is not ruling over things; power is ruling over people". Trump's greatest power is over his followers. We simply do not know at this time whether DeSantis is similarly addicted to power, but all of his background (Harvard/Yale education, military service, even his first actions in the beginning of COVID) argue against this. When I look at his culture war fights, I can't help but think that he is forced to fight them - how else is he going to displace Trump? This is so like Reagan in 1970s ("welfare queens", "Panama canal - we built it, we paid for it, it's ours", etc...)
Not being snarky here but do YOU live in Florida? I do and I have a completely different perspective on DeSantis who built most of his campaign in 2018 on building a wall in... Texas!
His "evolution" on handling COVID is a perfect illustration. Early on he basically just did the normal "governor thing" not knowing any more about COVID than anyone else and just following Trump's lead which was to let the CDC and NIH do their thing. AND then came the reality of how devastating COVID was for Florida economically. Then he tried to control the statistics. Then he tried to silence anyone who did not agree with him. Then he took decision making away from school boards and local governments for pandemic management. Then he wanted to prevent private businesses from choosing their own COVID strategies. Then he started suing academics and medical professionals and prevent them from serving as experts in courts saying that to disagree with the governor was a conflict of interest. He publicly mocked people who wore masks. Instead of preventing sickness by promoting vaccinations he promoted therapies for people AFTER they got sick. Essentially his COVID policy post-Trump was to simply do the opposite of whatever the Biden administration suggested. His handling of COVID was to turn it into a culture war issue.
His addiction to power is absolute.
If you participate in Florida centered social media platforms you will see the same blind PERSONAL devotion to DeSantis that Trump once enjoyed. He will not even try to displace Trump. He is rationally preparing for the circumstances where Trump will be unwilling or unable to run. It is a good bet because he will already have his campaign well underway before the other "wannabes" even get started. He already has FOXNews in his corner. The ONLY way he does not run is IF Trump does run. Trump would eat DeSantis for supper on any debate stage just as he did with all the Republican also-rans in 2016. And to seriously challenge Trump would be alienating to a huge swath of Republican voters. To challenge Trump is to be disloyal and disrespectful.
Finally the advantage DeSantis has is his sterling MAGA/culture wars record as Governor. Most of his competitors will be sitting Senators who haven't actually put any policies into action. His nearest experienced competitor on that level is Abbot of Texas.
So yes, DeSantis would be better than Trump--- if a Banana Republican dictator is what you want.
No, you are on the ground there and certainly should have a better perspective than I do. I don't live in Florida -- I live in Michigan, which used to be a reasonably well-governed middle-of-the-road state that alternated between moderate Republican and moderate Democrat, and whose median voter was not clinically insane. This has completely changed.
I have however some experience of Florida. Although there is much natural remaining beauty there well worth experiencing (which it seems progress is tirelessly in the process of eliminating), I confess to a hearty (and idiosyncratic) antipathy to Florida, or at least to the dominant culture there. My parents retired to St Augustine back in '84, and until they passed away we went there at least once per year to visit. I do have good memories there -- visits to the Castillo, the alligator farm, many lovely parks, and of course holidays with my parents. Once we even saw the blast and heard it crackling in the heavens as a space shuttle ascended from the cape 120 miles down the coast. So not all bad.
But the society my parents found there was wholly unlike, and vastly more intellectually and morally impoverished, than the academic culture they retired from in Michigan -- retired medical professionals and military, mostly, interested in money, in real estate, and in fear and loathing of immigrants and minorities. Particularly annoying were the shiftless, lazy black people, but the browns also received due attention. I recall an afternoon of cocktails in my father's sister's house where she and her husband (a retired surgeon and an immigrant no less) shared their strong feelings about how indolent the local blacks and immigrants were. This was mid July, and even as she spoke, a crew of those very same idle layabouts were outside in her yard working their asses off in the 90 heat and 80% humidity attending to her lawn and shrubbery. This was during the HW Bush years, and all those people I'm sure have joined my parents in the great beyond, so maybe things have changed. Maybe.
My sister lives in Lutz, in a neighborhood where there are actual statues of Donald Trump on people's lawns, in a background landscape of adulatory and belligerent MAGA ornamentation. Her subdivision looks like a pro-facist colony of right-wing bower birds. I Went to Orlando to for a conference there a few years back -- not for pleasure by any means, business; what a horrible city for traffic, and an economy dedicated to extracting $$$$$ from people who, for reasons I cannot fathom, want to mingle with actors on the verge of heat-stroke habilimented as cartoon characters, and form queues over and over again. My mother-in-law was in the Villages until she passed away -- a Phillip K. Dick waking nightmare literally to die in.
I would like to see Key West and the Everglades. My sister seems to like living there, even though she does so literally as a stranger in her own strange chosen land, culturally and politically. Some people seem to like the climate and even more seem to like the society. Those who like the climate don't worry me. It's those who like the society who scare me to pieces.
I can't tell you how perfectly you have described what I see in Florida.
My husband and I spend the summers in northern rural Wisconsin and our winters in the Tampa Bay area. So we experience the MAGA death cult twice a year in two different locales!
We retired to Florida just after DeSantis was sworn in.
We came for the beauty of the beaches and apparently are staying to die in a traffic accident.
Over a quarter of a million people are moving here each year--- many of them are coming for the thrill of living in a MAGA paradise and the privilege of having Ron DeSantis as their governor.
It was perhaps the biggest mistake of our lives and we bought before the real estate market exploded so the thought of selling and getting out occurs to each of us about 20 times a day.
Fortunately our deed restricted community has tight control over yard displays, flags, etc. so at least our neighbors are forced to keep their politics inside and to themselves.
So are the mosquitoes worse in Florida or in Wisconsin?
Wisconsin is pretty amazingly beautiful too.
Bigger and more aggressive in Wisconsin... it is and we would stay here all year... except for the winter.
I hope you are correct and I am mistaken. But try as I might I see not one shred of a scintilla of an iota of evidence that DeSantis is "forced" to fight the culture war against his private preference. DeSantis looks to me like the reptilian sociopathy of Trump under the direction of a disciplined, well-trained intellect focused without human empathy on a single goal: power. Possibly better than Trump in one respect only: Trump's narcissism and love of cruelty for its own sake prevent him from raising and sustaining the self-discipline he really needs to become a Napoleon or Caesar or Mao or Stalin. He may well return to office (he will I suspect unless God calls him off the stage) and his next administration will no doubt turn America into the kind of hell on earth that a Caligula or Idi Amin can create, but Trump himself does not have the skill set and temperament of a truly great tyrant.
DeSantis on the other hand has precisely the qualities needed. Where Trump is helpless to control his narcissism, DeSantis is in full command of his selfishness. For Trump, cruelty is an insatiable appetite he cannot control. Instead of a passion for cruelty, DeSantis has shown ruthlessness, and he rules it with an iron will.
In one crucial respect, they are exactly alike. Neither one as far as am aware has ever shown any evidence of having any purpose in life beyond what he can aggrandize to himself. From what we have seen so far, for both men, the world and all the people in it exist to be eaten.
Aren’t there any politically savvy women writing perceptive, insightful newsletters? Why is it always guys that get the free promos?
JVL pushes Anne Helen Peterson from time to time. She has a really good blog that focuses a lot on work culture and and just American culture in general.
Thank you. Very interesting, somewhat wonkiest but highly helpful.
Is it Musk (or the nickel guy) who is ignoring the rules, or is it the rest of us, if we can reasonably expect those things you described to happen for anyone with enough capital?
I’m going with Trump-like candidate who wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote. And BTW, what’s the deal with all these non-cowboys wearing cowboy boots - DeSantis in photo. Drugstore cowboy as we used to say. He must be shorter than average.
He needs the high heels--- he is really a short man.
all hat no cattle
boots prove it
All hat and no cattle.
😂 😂
Trumpy conservative virtue-signalling.
I used to wear cowboy boots because they felt good on my feet and with warm socks and properly taken care of, they kept my feet warm and dry. That’s probably at least 50% of why cowboys wear them . That and something to do with stirrups. Maybe it’s only virtue signalling if your a politician.
Yes, I meant it for deSantis, not all who wear them.
You can spend serious money on cowboy boots. Maybe it’s also a way to signal casual wealth like rock stars and some popular hellfire preachers who wear expensive, very cool sneakers. Maybe it just makes them happy.
Perhaps.
I grew up in a cowboy town so it just seems wrong when non-cowboys wear them. I’m too judgmental.
Instead of discussing DeSantis, howz about we spend our energy getting out the vote and making sure he is utterly defeated.
I love to see your recommendations but life is short. Keep testing me. Age 81.
There are tons of righteous Pro-EC people out there (GOP, obvs) with ridiculous arguments (more power to small states!) that are transparently wrong. But when I say, 'The EC will be over 5 minutes after the first Republican candidate loses the EC but wins the popular vote' they mostly go quiet.
I don't doubt there are GOP operatives out there already with a 'break glass in case of EC loss/Popular Vote win'
I had hoped, after Romney, that they might start deciding to capture voters' attentions. But it looks more like 'game the system'.
It is always easier to game the system.
Plotting those scenarios is useful, but recent history has taught us that something totally unexpected is just as likely as any of those things.
I’ve startled to dabble in learning more French history, motivated by the thin consolation that if they’re on their 5th republic, maybe we can fix ours if we break it?
Sadly, I’m not sure the second American Republic (third, if we count the Articles, but we never do) is still even a possible improbable if it all comes apart. We’re a pluralistic, multicultural, excessively armed society, driven mad, enraged, and divided by money-making algorithms and greedy, lying infotainment purveyors. It’s hard to knit that back together if it breaks.
Your last sentence is a great encapsulation of everything in JVL's piece today!
But rather than French history, perhaps that of the two World Wars, esp II. It was won by luck, not by competence, not by being on the side of the angels. Luck. Reading about wars through the ages, that seems to me to be the salient feature of pretty much all of them.
Not sure how that bodes for Ukraine.
But sure wish Biden would COMMIT and stop being so wishy washy (I think too much of Obama has rubbed off on him and not the best parts).
Now you've piqued MY interest in French history. I have a general sense of it, but not the specifics of the string of republics. A quick Wikipedia read and I see each had a new Constitution. How did those come about? It looks like the government in their parliamentary system collapsed. That's not us. We have a federal system with each state having some sovereignty. Further, they are small and compact where we are big and dispersed. So, I don't see it.
Ours broke in 1861 and was never really repaired. As long as Blacks were kept under, there was some national unity. But once their civil rights were established, we started slowly to come apart. Somewhere I read the most salient thing about Trump voters was racial resentment. France doesn't have that history.
France does have a history of racial resentment. They call them immigrants and Le Pen stokes it. It runs throughout Europe and probably the whole world. It's just that most countries are not melting pots like ours is so it may come across differently. (And slavery has been around at least since Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt!) Interestingly, I think the UK is probably the most diverse population, in part because of the sweep of their Empire. And we see where it has led them now. France is running to catch up but holding it off so far.
But I have come to believe that we were never a real union, just a confederation. A big one.
We have never had a democratic presidential election (though provision was made for the states to have some democratic process) and there is no democracy in capitalism. So just another failed state in the making apparently.
They did have a feudal system, a peasant uprising and revolution.
With Johnson in limbo, the Israeli government heading for yet another election, Ukraine continuing to burn. and Biden suffering from terrible approval ratings heading into the must-win American midterm elections, this could end up being a tempting window of opportunity for malignant actors to make sudden geopolitical moves. Nations with a target on their back like Taiwan suffer the most during these transitional periods.
If I'm China, I'm in wait and see mode. The fait acompli model for Ukraine worked out spectacularly bad, and NATO is currently strong and united (yeah, I know it isn't a NATO thing in the Pacific). Trump could be back, a DeSantis could be in to be tested, or even a lame duck Biden could be tested. Right now, despite some turmoil, the west is actually riding higher than it has in a while. China is stuck with their own Mussolini bumbling around and generally being a drag on the alliance.