by DeSantis’ presidential speech often dealt with the governor as this singular force stopping social decline. His vision encompassed schools, corporations, markets, and government bureaucracy. This at times uncomfortably subverted traditional conservative ideas about federalism and the individual: using government to create space for a specific conception of the individual and interfering with business and local government, if necessary, to do so. The speech wasn’t especially about preserving the Everglades or raising teacher pay or rebuilding bridges after hurricanes, which he has worked to address and which are actually the kind of problems people have now.
DeSantis combines intensity and action, which could be the source of some of the weirdness that followed him and his campaign, from the launch of Twitter Spaces to X.com. videos with the edgelord aesthetic. He talks about rebuilding bridges physically, but in a way in which only he can marshal the powers of the State to get a bridge rebuilt in time in a crisis, rather than through effective, collaborative management that is unfazed by events.
In November, DeSantis hosted an event in New Hampshire dedicated to medical freedom, where he campaigned with Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the mRNA vaccine skeptic whom he named surgeon general. By contrast, the next day, at a series of Nikki Haley events, the pandemic only appeared in cursory mentions of Covid aid fraud and mental health crises.
Dr. Ladapo spoke about DeSantis and the pandemic in terms of Ayn Rand-style historical scope. “You could see that he recognized that this wasn’t a battle over policy, like ‘I think this is the way we should do it.’ “No, I think this is the way we should do it.” No, that’s not what it was. “This is not what it is,” he told attendees. “This was a battle for the existence of human beings, the autonomy of human beings, the capacity, the right or the position of human beings over institutions.”
DeSantis’ rise to a potential rival to Trump coincided with one of the most disturbing periods in American life. It’s clear that the pandemic has reshaped some people’s lives in a frontal and tangible way that ruined their health or intensified their political opinions, and other people never want to hear about the pandemic again, no matter how much those years have changed. . any aspect of their lives. For Republicans who want to forget 2020 and 2021, the courage they found then in DeSantis might not have had so much to do with crushing the woke left and a corroded society, but rather with the permission to overcome the pandemic before most. state.
