Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is enthralling conservatives, while incensing his critics, in a political landscape where left and right are no longer defined by policy substance.
Debates on tax rates, the social safety net, or how big the Pentagon budget should be are mere trifles compared to what truly animates the body politic—which is dumb culture war battles.
These days, politics is increasingly distilled down to fights between feuding tribes on Twitter, focused on the culture war outrages of the day. DeSantis has proven deft at wading into these fights and pushing legislation squarely at the heart of them.
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Potentially the most cynical player we’ve seen on the national political stage in a long time, DeSantis has made a clear calculation: No matter whether these laws live or die in the courts, he can—at least short-term, and at least among his most hardened base—turn culture war legal losses into political wins.
Last year, DeSantis moved against social media companies, pushing a law that is almost certainly unconstitutional, and not compatible with the First Amendment.
More recently, he championed Florida’s “instruction” law that some DeSantis defenders erroneously (and nauseatingly) describe as an “anti-grooming” law—and which DeSantis detractors have also (not quite accurately but catchily) dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. This bill is less obviously unconstitutional, but there are First Amendment and equal protection issues with it that could prove its undoing.
This week, DeSantis moved on to fixing one big liability associated with last year’s social media law: the cronyist, sell-out-to-Big-Mouse exemption it gave to Disney and others in the theme park business who dominate Florida’s economy.
On the one hand, this would appear to correct a major flaw with the social media bill that underlined its probable unconstitutionality. On the other, the fact that this comes after DeSantis and Disney got into a spat over the “instruction” law makes it plain that Florida’s social media law was (and remains) politically motivated. This makes the latter of those two laws even less likely to pass constitutional muster when push comes to shove, and it also serves to remind people of the original cronyism problem.
What’s interesting about this is that there is exactly no chance that DeSantis, a man with a J.D. from Harvard, does not know all this. However despicable, risible, or just merely irritating you may find him, the guy is no dummy. DeSantis knows exactly what he’s doing, and he understands that no matter the outcome of each case challenging the culture war laws he has championed, the governor has a way to emerge a winner—at least among the most hardcore of his GOP base.
If DeSantis and Republicans somehow prevail, and these laws are deemed constitutional by courts, DeSantis will be the culture war gladiator who delivered victories for his adoring crowd.
If, however, courts nix the laws or force Florida back to the drawing board, the governor is more than capable of turning that to his advantage, too.
If the “instruction” law is outright struck down and quickly, DeSantis is less likely to wind up being plausibly blamed for LGBTQ+ kids’ suicides, which some predict the law remaining on the books will spark en masse. Avoiding that is obviously good for him. A bonus, however, will be that DeSantis will be free to rail against “judicial activism,” “the liberal elite,” and just about anyone else not culturally aligned with his base and who opposed him on the law (presumably, the “liberal elite” will also include those of us not on the left, but who simply found ourselves repeatedly headdesking while reading the thing because the legal drafting is just so bad).
With the social media law, including the Disney amendments, DeSantis will be relieved of having to oversee execution of a law that is clearly not in line with the U.S. Constitution. He also won’t have to deal with the uncomfortable reality that the law would inevitably be used by “the libs,” the “woke brigade,” “socialists” or whoever else to force Trump-friendly sites like GETTR or Parler to moderate their content in a “consistent” manner. Nor will he have to own a situation in which a leftist candidate for public office—let’s say one actively using social media to promote gender fluidity theory or even post pornography—uses the law to force their way onto former President Trump’s supposedly family-friendly TRUTHSocial social media site.
And DeSantis can still bash “woke corporations,” “California commies,” and (once again) “activist judges”—while racking up legal bills that Sunshine State taxpayers will have to foot—as he banks any and all available political dividends.
This begs the question: Is anyone else potentially running for president in 2024 quite this crafty?
Trump keeps fighting 18-month-old battles over whether he won or lost the 2020 election (Piers Morgan is right: He lost). Ted Cruz is still busy being Ted Cruz, getting an extra dollop of bad press, but little love from the base compared to his major rivals.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has shown a willingness to needle DeSantis—if not explicitly by name, certainly by implication—for not being quite the ”keep the state open during COVID” champion he claims to be—and also for issuing rather top-down, statist, and un-libertarian pandemic-related diktats that overrode the preferences of local government entities. But for now, Noem’s pretty dependent on him remaining in the spotlight to keep her out of obscurity.
The reality is, if DeSantis runs in 2024, he’ll enter the race possibly more hated even than Trump—at least when it comes to liberals, and probably quite a few independents, too.
And though he’ll start off with a following on the right that may be narrower than Trump’s, it might actually end up more fanatically devoted to DeSantis. Losing his culture war legal battles looks likely—but DeSantis can (and likely will) leverage such setbacks to inch ever closer to the 2024 nomination.
