Ross Has an Insight

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd St., seemed to be letting his inner Bill Kristol out for a spin over the weekend with this fantasy ("The DeSantis Campaign Is Revealing What Republican Voters Really Want"):

If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.

Based on his own inquiries into what Republican voters wanted, which had led him to believe that a plurality of the party, maybe 40%, would really like to vote for somebody like Ron DeSantis, Trumpish in his style of appointing judges and managing the economy, and opposing "progressive cultural hegemony" fiercely but perhaps in a less annoying manner; though I don't know where he got his opinion that Trump had been managing the economy, as opposed to the TV personalities like Larry Kudlow and out-and-out cranks like Peter Navarro who stumbled into his path; and Douthat's research methods on public opinion may have left something to be desired:

I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality. They didn’t like some of his tweets and insults, so they mostly just tuned them out. They thought that he had the measure of liberals in a way that prior Republicans had not, that his take-no-prisoners style was suited to the scale of liberal media bias and progressive cultural hegemony.

I assume the Catholic lawyers were Connecticut neighbors he met in church and school functions, assuming his kids and theirs were in the same parochial schools, and he didn't talk to the moms. No, that's not a representative sample, Ross.

And while I'm up, Ross, no, DeSantis did not personally turn Florida from Purple to Blue (the process began before he was involved in politics, Trump arguably had more to do with it, and so for that matter did the state's hapless Democrats), and Democrat Donna Deegan got elected mayor of Jacksonville last May and just today Democrat Tom Keen captured an open seat in the Florida House, in a district divided between Osceola and Orange Counties. So the turnaround that began nationwide in 2018 and went kind of wild in 2023 has hit Florida too, just at the moment when DeSantis supposedly wrestled it in the other direction. 

And no, he's not "more adept than Trump" at leaping into cultural battles, which is why it doesn't do him any good. He doesn't "pick fights" with major donors, he just doesn't like hanging out with them, and that's one of the reasons they started losing faith nearly a year ago; and when it gets down to fistfights, that's not doing him any good either. He came out of the fight with Bud Light less popular than Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender influencer who was helping to promote the beer, and he's been slinking away from the war with Disney in recent months. His Covid response, with its irrationality, lies, and thousands of avoidable deaths may have been "exactly in tune with the party's mood", but it's not going to look good in a national campaign.

I just realized this is a fantasy about race mixing: what they're afraid of is that the DNA might be "foreign", something that might "poison the blood of the country".

Also, I don't know about the Catholic dads, but this is exactly the argument you've been making to sell DeSantis since April 2021.

Anyway, it's like everything you could want from Trump with a Yale degree, Douthat thinks, which puts him in mind of the dull fiancé in a romcom (+10 points for referencing the Ralph Bellamy character in His Girl Friday), who gets dumped in act 3 because he's not magic, or

the type of Generation X-er who pretends to be alienated and rebellious but actually has a settled marriage, a padded résumé, a strong belief in systems and arguments and plans — and a constant middle-aged annoyance at the more vibes-based style of his boomer elders and millennial juniors.

That's what he's thinking, in fact (he was born in 1979, just at the end of the Gen X period, and I won't comment on whether I think his résumé is padded or not). He's a bit of a DeSantis himself, flirting with transgression and what voters actually want from their leaders might be quite different from what they say:

The Republican Party in the Trump era has boasted a lot of Gen X leaders, from Cruz and Marco Rubio to Paul Ryan and Haley. But numerically and spiritually, the country belongs to the boomers and millennials, to vibes instead of plans.

This might be especially true for a Republican Party that’s becoming more working-class, with more disaffected and lower-information voters, fewer intensely focused consumers of the news, less interest than the Democratic electorate in policy plans and litmus tests.

It's all those damned workers, wouldn't you know it (mostly Republicans' wishful thinking, as I've often pointed out, but the newer GOPers, still typically Chamber of Commerce proprietors, are certainly less educated than they used to be), who don't comprehend the value of a Yale degree. 

the indictments were the ideal opportunity to break decisively for DeSantis — a figure who, whatever his other faults, seems very unlikely to stuff classified documents in his bathroom or pay hush money to a porn star.

But it doesn’t feel at all surprising that, instead, voters seem ready to break decisively for Trump. The prosecutions created an irresistible drama, a theatrical landscape of persecution rather than a quotidian competition between policy positions, a gripping narrative to join rather than a mere list of promises to back.

And there he achieves a moment of genuine insight, it seems to me, which could have been about his Gen X self. That's indeed why voters shouldn't be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders—and that includes you and me, though we think we're so smart: some of us know how to talk about policy positions, but everybody's a sucker for a story; everybody needs narrativium.

The big partisan difference at the present historical moment is between small-d democrats in search of a story where the protagonist is "the people" and authoritarians for whom it's a Big Man. I'm not going to be embarrassed about being an addict of narrativium, I'm going to be glad I'm on the right side. And, obviously, let policy play its part in the story, because policy is where the people can win, and that's how we small-d democrats roll.

Trump and the Trumpies on the one hand, Douthat and DeSantis on the other, have authoritarian stories to tell, but they're different in important ways: one, which has been developing through Trump's political career, is that the stakes for him are truly extraordinary, death in prison and the disassembly of the business enterprise on which he's labored half a century and the despoiling of his children's inheritances.

I think that's what Douthat dislikes about Trump—the reality of it. It's distasteful. He loves the trolling and insult comedy, he prefers it to policy, but he prefers it in a safe space, with Curtis Yarvin and Ben Shapiro living the wingnut welfare dream and playing at being intellectuals, arguing over what kind of monarch American needs. He likes DeSantis's attempt at a sports story, the college baseball star who grew up to be a politics star, where there aren't any real stakes. That's the Gen X aspect: he hates a story on Trump's appalling, risky scale.

That's where he ended up in yesterday's column after the caucus results came in ("How Trump's Opponents Made Iowa Easy For Him") and DeSantis was wiped out (I hear he's staying in the race in the hope that Trump's legal troubles will in fact do him in and make room for young Ron), completely losing control of his insight and yelling at DeSantis for letting the team down ("you should blame DeSantis, first, for botching a chance to clear the field early and for failing to adapt thereafter") and Haley for running at all ("not her voters so much as the big donors who sustained her and right-of-center media figures who have spent the past few months boosting her—for going all in on a candidate who clearly, clearly has less of a chance of winning a head-to-head battle with Trump than even the disappointing version of DeSantis"). It's not a real consolation, but maybe a good sign, that the Monsignor is going to hate the 2024 election, whatever happens.