Late last week, 50 Venezuelan migrants arrived by plane in Martha’s Vineyard, the summer getaway for America’s rich and powerful. Their presence on the island — a liberal haven that has been untouched by the ongoing border crisis — was the work of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who had sent them in rebuke of Massachussett’s “support for the Biden administration’s open borders policies”. As if on cue, Ken Burns, director of a recently released documentary about the Holocaust, appeared on CNN to agree that DeSantis’s Martha’s Vineyard stunt raised eerie parallels with the subject-matter of his film.
The media comparing DeSantis with Hitler for making rich liberals live with the consequences of their ideas? The headlines write themselves.
It was a characteristic bit of political theatre from DeSantis. Over the past year, the governor has firmly established himself as the main Republican challenger to Donald Trump by picking fights with the national media on issues such as Covid, critical race theory, and gender ideology. His pitch to the base: I’m like Trump, but better — more focused and competent, less embarrassing. Supporters and detractors alike have taken to calling him “Trump with a brain”.
Earlier in the week, I’d seen DeSantis speak at the National Conservatism conference in Aventura, Florida. “NatCon”, as it’s known, is a yearly gathering of nationalist politicians, activists, and journalists organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation and loosely aligned with what has come to be known as the “New Right”. DeSantis gave a nearly hour-long speech at the conference’s opening dinner, rattling off his achievements — banning vaccine passports and mask mandates, keeping Florida open during the pandemic, taking on the liberal media and Disney — in front of a sympathetic crowd. “It was the best speech I’ve ever heard by an American politician”, one British guest gushed.
The whole conference was something of a coronation for DeSantis among the New Right intellectual crowd. At one busy panel, one of his aides, Christina Pushaw, urged Republican politicians to stop granting access to the “Democratic activists” in the mainstream media. The notoriously crotchety paleoconservative Paul Gottfried, a past critic of “populism” and of NatCon, offered a highbrow endorsement of the governor. Quoting Karl Mannheim on conservatism as a “socially situated” movement in defence of a concrete way of life, he praised National Conservatism as an embryonic mass movement and DeSantis as the first leader in years with “a plan to go after the Left”.
Mentions of DeSantis’s main 2024 rival — and the former object of nationalist affections — were, by contrast, few and far between. When the Claremont Institute’s Tom Klingenstein declared, in a rambling speech, that “we were blessed to have Trump”, he was met with tepid applause. Meanwhile, complaints circulated about a day one talk given by pro-Trump journalist Julie Kelly on the plight of the Jan 6 defendants (“Why bring that up here?”, one attendee hissed).
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SubscribeWhy is it so hard to understand what the populist Right in America wants and why they think the way they do? It’s just article after article asking these questions and not understanding the answers.
Excellent comment. Thank you.
Could that (widely held) Normal American value/belief be why the NatCon movement is run by foreigners who demand our treasure, to the tune $10 million a day, and who want us to never-stop killing people in the Middle East for them, and to continue fomenting chaos in other places so that the world doesn’t pay attention to their atrocities?
They are terrified that Americans for America will realize we’re being played.
An American “National Conservative” organization run by a citizen of a hostile foreign power?
It’s called co-opting. Same thing happened with the Tea Party.
Something is rotten in Denmark!
Matt Hindman, That’s a great list!
Much of it boils down to “stop the machine” or “stop the elites.” It’s the world Christopher Lasch foresaw in “Revolt of the Elites.”
What’s the upbeat version of stopping the machine? Truman had some excellent slogans. “Give ’em hell, Harry” “The Buck Stops Here.”
How can this be transformed into a positive vision for America? What’s the opposite of the elite machine that is fundamentally more American?
“Dignity and Respect for Every American.”
That might work. The minority identity groups demand respectability. Conservatives and white men have suffered great indignity at the hands of the Elites.
The renewal of America isn’t going to come from the Left and its stale apparatus. Trump was Sturm and Drang. Sturm and Drang ran for ten short years, but it unleashed human individualism and led to the overthrow of the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Today, like in 1770, we see the reign of the goddess Reason, that is, of mob rule, the stuff of decay.
The terrors of life exceed the terrors of death for a vast swath of young white men. That’s the stuff of Sturm and Drang. It’s the stuff of renewal that brings societies back from the dead.
I think you do not understand MAGA, let alone Ultra MAGA. Your lists are pretty much Republican, but Mainstream Republican just the right end of the Uniparty (Dems and Mainstream Repubs are the Uniparty) – Owned by the Big Money who paid their campaigns, and will give them the insider deals if they vote correctly – to make them very rich after they leave government. Yes your list is necessary – but more.
Americans are becoming MAGA – and your list misses three main points, very big ones:
1) China is the Nation which is Existential Threat to USA and the world.
2) The Great Reset is an even bigger threat than China, in fact incorporates China, And the Uniparty and the WEF and the Corporatocracy, and global Finance. These are out to conquer the Globe. All the top companies and finance are Global, no longer National, and are overtaking all the world from inside..
3) the Constitution is the only tool to fight the Great Reset, and the Constitution’s strength is that it is a Republic – and the real power devolves to the States under it, which makes it responsible directly to the People, because the Federal Government (the Administrative State), is owned by the Great Reset, it does Not serve the people.
MAGA, Make America Great Again – because you see it is not, cannot be, under the current system. The ballot box is the only way the world can be saved, by voting in not the Uniparty, but MAGA populism, which is for USA, not the Great Reset.
I wish you guys would skip the inclusive populism and conspiracy stuff. Zionism/Talmudism and its outpourings have been and are the foremost hurdles to national sovereignty for our People. If you are European diaspora living in America, you are endangered. You’re worried about our values, not realizing that values come from people, and our People should be of primary concern to you. We are your extended family. The way to truly love something is to realize it might be lost. Blood and soil is all that matters in the end. One day you may realize this, hopefully there will still be something left to save.
weird
This idiot begins by saying “quit the conspiracy stuff” and immediately goes in for the biggest — and dumbest — conspiracy of all — “It’s dem Jews what done it.” Pathetic, sad, and above all, real stupid.
Not sure about 8 – I strongly believe Ukrainian that sovereignty deserves to be sustained – but otherwise a really excellent comment.
Yup an isolationist America is usually bad news – Hitler, Syria, Putin.
An interventionist America is also usually bad news – Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, ex-Yugoslavia all spring to mind.
Don’t think your Syria example holds water either as America have been involved with Syria for years.On top of the bombing and other attacks on ISIS there was support and training for the supposed ‘moderate’ rebels that mostly turned out to be Islamic radicals.
Unfortunately, we have been burned too many times now and getting involved in Ukraine just seems like doing the same thing expecting a different result.
Certainly we’ve been burned in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya … But Ukraine is a very different kettle of fish. Not much chance of ISIS taking over there.
But at what cost?
The biggest problem since at least March 2020 is single-factor thinking (a la Greg Gutfeld) with Exhibit A being covid policy based solely on deaths delayed, ignoring other factors like harm to the economy (2nd order affect on deaths) and harms to children.
Help Ukraine yes. But we are at $54B so far in 2022 and heading towards $70B this year! That is close to $1,000 form a family of 4 in the US!
As original poster noted that amount is an insult to working Americans.
It isn’t just the populist right, or even the right in general, that agrees with these points. Real liberals do as well, though of course the self-proclaimed illiberal “liberals” think it’s anathema.
DeSantis is the original clean-cut Boy Scout, compete with a Catholic School blue-collar background, Harvard education and a picture book family, a poster boy for American meritocracy. But he learned some hard-knuckle tactics and strategy with the SEALS and has the judgment and guts to go in for the kill when necessary. Wish we had him earlier.
I’m a DeSantis fan but I’m not certain he was ever a SEAL. I had understood that he was a Judge Advocate (Navy Lawyer) attached to a SEAL Team. Not a military expert but I believe there’s a distinction to be made between being a JAG deployed with SEAL’s and being a SEAL.
DeSantis was senior legal advisor to SEAL commander Dane Thorleifson. That team was heavily involved in the bloody insurgency in Fallujah.
My lawyer in wartime Kuwait was a key guy on my staff, went everywhere and did everything I did. To paint him as an minor-involved outsider would be totally incorrect.
The skepticism around DeSantis is not whether he would essentially be the reincarnation of Trumpism without Trump, it’s about whether he’s genuine about his beliefs and is willing to go against the GOP establishment. While I do believe DeSantis would be a more effective president and is the future of the conservatism (alongside Trump), there is a question around if DeSantis is essentially a ploy by the GOP establishment to get rid of Trump and have someone like DeSantis make neoconservatism fashionable again among the GOP voters.
The question in my mind is whether or not Trump is genuine about his professed beliefs. His despicable performance after August 2018 when he threw away the House to go courting McConnell’s Senate and ended up losing both the House and Senate is foremost in mind. He campaigned for everyone of MCConnell’s creeps, ignored the House Liberty caucus and seemed to rely chiefly on his idiot daughter and son-in-law for reliable advice. His list appointments from Gen. Miley to Gina Haspel told me very clearly that all Trump ever wanted was the same deals for himself and his relations as Joe Biden got for himself and his relations.
Finally, it was Trump who shut down the country in the Spring of 2020 and it was Trump who pumped the first $3 Trillion of stimulus into the economy and launched our current inflation all the while preening about how he’ll be remembered forever as the great savior from a trumped-up plague.
As for DeSantis, acta non verba seems to be his motto and that is good. Trump talks a lot in the end does nothing.
Agreed about how “reliable” Trump is. DeSantis is running for governor in November, and has raised about $140mm for campaigns. HOWEVER, unlike Trump, DeSantis is generously spending it on other candidates around the country. Trump has amassed a little less, BUT HAS NOT SPENT ONE THIN DIME, on any of the congressional and Senate candidates that he has foisted upon us (thinking particularly about Dr. Oz and Hershel Walker), let alone decent candidates that he endorsed to help win the Republican primaries – especially Blake Masters and Vance.
Trump remains all about Trump.
DeSantis’s spending money on other campaigns around the country reminds me of Nixon’s work in the trenches for other GOP candidates after he lost the CA governor’s race. He was repaid at the 68 GOP convention with the nomination.
Nice reminder – perhaps Trump should take notes (rather than risk losing Senate etc, by refusing to spend money on candidates he endorsed)
That is the rub with Trump. He’s a masterful showman but insists on being the Only Show in Town.
De Santis is about as good a candidate as conservatives are likely to get. If you’re waiting for the perfect candidate who ticks all your boxes I’m afraid you’re in for a very long wait.
Contrary to Liberal gloom, some of the migrants are saying they quickly got jobs after being bussed to Washington.
Park MacDougald says: “the old party paid lip service to Christian “family values” while allowing the country’s social fabric to decay” (my emphasis). This implies that the GOP had the power to stop such decay but did not do so because their commitment to family values was only for show. But what actions could a more honest GOP actually have taken?
I think the problem is that no person or party really knows the secret to reversing societal decay, even if they had the political power to implement it.
They’d be better served doing what Spain has done to plug their labour gap. Hundreds of visas have been granted to Venezuelans desperate to get out.
Joe Manchin + Ron DeSantis
Sorry, no Manchin in the Sky.
This is a very crisp essay, and it has inspired a lot interesting comments. Well done, everyone.