Guys like DeSantis have nothing to offer but rage

The danger was never just Donald Trump. That’s not to say he wasn’t dangerous. Any far-right demagogue who achieves real power would be. But Trump is also an obvious buffoon too narcissistic to read the room or to get out of his own way. And as he shrinks into the background, an ever-shriller, ever-sadder voice begging for fealty from his own movement, the reality that he was the symptom, not the disease—an opportunist, not a catalyst—has become blindingly apparent.

To anyone willing to remove their rose-tinted glasses, at least.

But our media and our country alike are only too happy to declare problems solved and move on. So after Trump’s slate of MAGA Senate candidates was wiped out in November, we collectively decided that the conspiratorial idiocy he seemed to have ushered in was on its way out, that normies were retaking the Republican Party, that the threats to democracy and the rule of law were subsiding. Peace in our time, and so on.

Of course, this admixture of naivete and willful ignorance can sustain neither scrutiny nor time. Seeds sown over decades have taken root, their toxic fruit ripening. Trump might be an absurd shadow pleading for relevance and dodging handcuffs. But the danger of the authoritarianism Trump heralded has not passed, and we can’t afford to be numb to the new forms it’s taken.

Let’s start with a disregard for norms. Last year, in two 4-3 decisions split along party lines, North Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled that extreme partisan gerrymandering and a voter ID law passed by the Republican legislature violated the state constitution.

In November, two Republicans were elected to the court, shifting its balance of power. And the second they were sworn in, Republicans in the legislature made an extraordinary request: They asked the court to rehear those cases, not because the facts or the law had changed, but because the court’s political composition had.

In other words, they wanted the court’s Republicans to dispense with any charade that their actions would be governed by anything other than partisan politics; precedent didn’t matter if the court didn’t like it. And all five Republicans agreed.

To be fair, supreme courts overturn precedents all the time. But there’s always an attempt at a legal rationale, even if it’s a thin reed, even if the result is obviously ideological. (See, e.g., Justice Alito’s screed overturning the right to abortion.)

Not here. The court—including the two new justices, who spent the previous year promising that their party wouldn’t influence their decisions—decided that they have the majority, so they’ll help their party engage in vote suppression if they want to.
The precedent they set is that no precedent matters, and no one should imagine otherwise.

In one sense, that might not be a bad thing: If courts are going to be overtly political institutions at the beck and call of their party masters, let’s not pretend they’re anything else.

But in another, it sends a perilous message: If you don’t like a law passed by another faction, it’s illegitimate. Healthy democracies can’t function that way.

That’s the same logic that drove Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to remove Tampa’s district attorney last year, a blatantly unconstitutional exercise of executive power to negate the views of voters DeSantis didn’t like and substitute his own.

DeSantis has become especially brazen in employing what is probably the most disturbing form that this post-Trump authoritarianism has taken. In his budding troll campaign for president—see, e.g., his tax exemption for gas stoves, things I don’t recall seeing in the 30 years I lived in South and Central Florida—he’s found an enemy to rally his troops against.

Several enemies, actually, all neatly packaged under whatever he defines as “woke” today.

Drag queens. Transgender kids. Black history. Books.

Last week, the DeSantis administration moved to revoke the liquor license of the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation because a property it owns hosted a campy, all-ages drag show that, in DeSantis’ mind, corrupted The Kids (at least, the three children the state documented attending the show) by subjecting them to dirty lyric changes in Christmas songs (definitely wouldn’t zoom over a kid’s head), performers whose outfits didn’t cover their whole asses (scandalous), and an image of a finger pointing through a holiday wreath (a six-year-old would absolutely be traumatized by that innuendo!).

This is, naturally, from the same guy who can’t shut his mouth about the rights of parents to choose what’s best for their children—and it’s not like anyone who went to that drag show didn’t know what they were getting—while at the same time demanding to know teenage girls’ menstrual cycles.

But this has nothing to do with actual children being corrupted or the strip-club laws the state alleges the drag show broke.

DeSantis wants people to be mad at drag queens.

Just like he wants them pissed off at teachers and librarians and universities. Guys like DeSantis have nothing to offer but rage. Rage needs a target. It needs a sense of aggrievement, of victimhood, of entitlement. It makes people feel better about themselves by blaming someone else for their life’s frustrations—and, in this case, justifying it as saving the children.

But it’s never been about that. It’s just bullying as politics.

It infected the right long before Trump arrived. Purging him hasn’t gotten rid of it.

This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2023.