It is a consensus that the great rising figure of the Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, will be in charge of contesting Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The governor of Florida represents, for the increasingly weak anti-Trump wing of the right, a possible salvation, a synthesis of the cultural invective characteristic of anti-Obama republicanism and the conservative ‘country club’ elitism associated with its more recent aspects. aristocratic. The Republican constituency does not seem convinced, however: according to the latest polls, Trump has a polling lead of nearly 30%, and what he briefly peeked out as an alternative—DeSantis Republicanism, Trumpism without Trump—seems to evaporate. Worse still: DeSantis has not yet confirmed his candidacy, with which the former president, who announced himself as a candidate months ago, leads him by entire campaign weeks. With more than a year to go until the elections: does the DeSantis movement have a future, or is Trump the absolute owner of the Republican party?
Despite the response, given the familiar alternative of Trump – increasingly suspicious, even by those who knew to be his allies, such as Fox News – DeSantis’ vision, different in some key points, offers a new evolution of the Republican party. This possibility makes the need to understand in greater depth his ideological proposal and vision urgent, and mainly his relationship with previous generations of right-wing thought and politics.
DeSantis is primarily a culture warrior, the latest in a lineage stretching back to the 1980s, whose story is essential to understanding both his appeal to the GOP leadership and his apparent electoral failure.
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We must first define the culture war at a general level, and understand its role in contemporary politics. It can be understood, in a simple way, as a product of a high ideological polarization at a political and/or social level that manifests itself in a high degree of conflict and disagreement in matters of different magnitude.
These matters do not tend to be of an economic nature, but social or, as the very name of the cultural phenomenon indicates. We could include among those: war in Ukraine, the rights of trans and LGBT populations, critical race theory (CRT), precautionary measures for the COVID pandemic, the role of the police in the society, unauthorized immigration, firearms regulation, the founding of the USA, and climate change.
The nature of the phenomenon makes it difficult to determine causal factors as both sides are unable to even understand the position of their adversaries. The Republican party, particularly since the rise of Trump, has pursued these goals in a uniform and committed manner.
In the Obama era, meanwhile, some focal points of discussion were the president’s citizenship (a spurious controversy started by Trump himself), the investigation into the events in Benghazi, Obamacare, firearms regulation and marriage. egalitarian. You could see the beginning of this attitude in the Republican political leadership when Mitch McConnell, then the leader of Congress, determined that the party’s objective during Obama’s first presidential term would be to make his re-election impossible. That attitude marked the attitude of the Congress then completely dominated by the Republicans, and made Obama a president incapable of carrying out lasting legislative action.
Despite this transformation, some issues, such as immigration and racial discrimination, are perennial concerns in the political debate, and represent two founding conflicts in the United States. Therefore, they present constant fronts within the political arc over the last 250 years, recently revealed by the rise in police violence, the BlackLivesMatter protests, the coup attempt on January 6, 2020, and the fabricated controversies surrounding what Republicans call critical race theory and its teaching in schools.
It should not be thought that these controversies are ‘more real’ than those with shorter histories, since in the present they all manifest the same attitude by transforming conflict and disagreement into political modalities in themselves. Having lost the belief that through politics it is possible to effect virtuous transformations of society, the culture war appropriates and exacerbates social polarization to ensure the continuity of the culture warrior (in this case the Republican party) in power. Its mission is to divide, to reduce all problems to a confrontation between irreconcilable factions whose very survival depends on the issue on the table.
The origin of this modality, even before Obama and McConnell, lies in the 80s of the previous great Ronald of the right: Reagan. At that time the fighting, mostly aftertastes and repetitions of the liberation and countercultural movements of the 1960s, gravitated around themes that remain current, such as homosexuality, abortion, and censorship. However, other debates, from the ‘canon wars’ (around the identity biases that conditioned the very definition of the notion of the canon) to the historical reality of evolution, seem mostly settled.
The militancy of the “New Left” displayed a critical attitude towards the government, the state, and a large part of society, rejecting compulsory military service and the Vietnam War, the anti-communist persecutions of McCarthyism, racial segregation and the ties of restrictive family structures.
Modern conservatism, which was founded in the 1950s in the magazine National Review, Financed and led by right-wing media intellectual William F. Buckley, it came to power with Reagan. His mission was to eradicate these transformations. In the 1970s, for their part, the ‘neoconservative’ factions of the party led by former New Left figures such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz incorporated the militancy that characterized left-wing activism with elite right-wing positions, establishing fertile ground for what would later be Reaganism.
DeSantis begins to gain support from the Democrats and in Florida they are already comparing him to Reagan
When he took office, Reagan implemented a program of both political and economic and cultural measures that legitimized and exacerbated the conservative reaction to the advancement of minority rights. Through bombastic neoconservative rhetoric, and Kristol et al’s liking for greater US military interventionism, Reagan launched wars in Libya and Iraq, and fomented clandestine attacks around the world, including the failed ‘war on drugs.’ This went hand in hand with the culture wars and assured Reaganism and its heirs of complete domination of American politics that survived, in one way or another, until the rise of Trump.
Unlike both his Republican and Democratic predecessors, Trump was a wrecking ball, ideologically idiosyncratic—indifferent to abortion or LGBT rights, two central fights for conservatism—and blasé, capable of tearing apart enemies and supporters alike since Jeb Bush. to Ted Cruz. It was this irreverence and indiscipline towards the party line that earned him both the staunch loyalty of his anti-establishment supporters and his extraordinary position within the contemporary political landscape.
Trump raised the combativeness of neoconservative rhetoric and reconciled it with populist and isolationist positions opposed to the traditional elitism and militarism of that group. The neoconservatives, who held the reins of power until then, lead the Republican militancy against of the former president and current candidate.
DeSantis, for his part, shares Trump’s combativeness, but is a politician in the most traditional sense of the word. A brilliant negotiator, his first gubernatorial bid looked like a flop until he won Trump’s support.
At the start of his tenure, he appeared to be relatively moderate in orientation, always sticking to the party line diplomatically. After taking a strong stand against any public health measures in response to the COVID pandemic, this changed. The post-pandemic DeSantis takes aim at anyone who gets in his way, from teachers and education specialists to megacorporations like Disney and Anheuser-Busch InBev, whom he accuses of being ‘woke.’ Even so, he maintains his political prowess, having won his re-election by the largest margin seen in 40 years in Florida. His term as governor transformed the state into a Republican stronghold, and he cultivated relationships with both the Trumpist and ‘Never Trumper’ wings of the party without drawing particular rejection from the right wing.
By combining Trump’s violent rhetoric with a political skill that he never cared about, DeSantis seemed to offer a better project than the former president for next year’s elections. However, to date, everything seems to have come to nothing, and the one who returns to the Republican presidential ticket is Trump.
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2023-05-18 20:10:06
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