The DeSantis presidential pitch typically was concerning the governor as this singular pressure stopping societal decline. His imaginative and prescient encompassed faculties, firms, the markets and authorities forms. This, at occasions, uneasily subverted conventional conservative concepts about federalism and the person — utilizing authorities to create house for a particular conception of the person and interfering with enterprise and native authorities, if essential, to do it. The pitch wasn’t particularly about preserving the Everglades or elevating instructor pay or getting bridges rebuilt after hurricanes, which he has labored to do and are literally the type of issues individuals have now.
Mr. DeSantis marries depth and motion, which is likely to be the supply of among the weirdness that adopted him and his marketing campaign, from the Twitter Areas launch to the X.com movies 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 disaster, reasonably 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 mNRA vaccine skeptic he made surgeon normal. 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 possibly can see that he acknowledged that this wasn’t some battle over coverage, like ‘I feel that is the way in which we should always do it.’ ‘No, I feel that is the way in which we should always do it.’ No, that’s not what this was. That’s not what that is,” he instructed attendees. “This was a battle over the existence of human beings, the autonomy of human beings, the power, the fitting or the place of human beings over establishments.”
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 individuals 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 individuals by no means wish to hear concerning the pandemic once more, regardless of how a lot these years might need modified any facet 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.
