DeSantis is a truer believer, if a lesser politician, than Trump
As given voice by Donald Trump, American right-wing populism has sounded more like a howl of rage or a whine of self-pity than a rational plan for the country’s future. When he ran for re-election, the Republican Party could not even bring itself to write a platform. “Trumpism” blurred boundaries between his policies and his needs and interests, distinctions that vanished as his obsession with his loss in 2020 consumed his message. Reactive and emotional, Mr Trump has reigned as the id of populism, and that has made him dangerous to democracy. Ron DeSantis, the chilly, cerebral governor of Florida, has an outside chance of becoming its superego, and thus dangerous to the Democrats.
Mr DeSantis may wind up as just another speed-bump under Mr Trump’s relentless wheels. But more than any other Republican, he has extracted a coherent agenda from the jumble of Trumpian fears and hostilities, pointing the way towards a Trumpism without Trump. And if that has worked in Florida—a diverse state and once a political toss-up that has gone solidly Republican under Mr DeSantis—Democrats would be unwise to dismiss its appeal. Mr DeSantis’s zeal for culture war is not a sideline to this potential successor ideology. It is the unifying principle.
The end of the cold war was hard on American conservatism. Anti-communism had served as what the writer William F. Buckley called the “harnessing bias” of the movement. With the Soviet Union gone, old divisions began widening again between libertarians and religious conservatives. Isolationism, protectionism and nativism, conservative strains that retreated at the outbreak of the second world war, began creeping back.
2023-05-24 07:05:55
Source from www.economist.com
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