It was notable, too, that my co-author, Matthew Schmitz, and I weren’t early MAGA die-hards. Not Mike Cernovich or Jack Posobiec or the late Scott Adams, but, for lack of a better word, respectable conservatives with mainstream careers. Hard to imagine as it might seem today, Trump in 2022 was seen as a lost cause in our milieu: dogged by numerous lawfare prosecutions and civil suits, deranged by his belief that Joe Biden had “stolen” the previous election.

Even so, we proclaimed that “He’s Still the One” (a headline echoing the Shania Twain song). Trump was still the best choice for those who believed that the conventional “conservative movement is part of the problem,” as the essay contended. “Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement.”

But now, Trump has abandoned the intuitions and commitments that seemed to set him apart from the post-Nixon Republican mainstream, not least an aversion to wanton bloodshed and destruction. 

Psychoanalysis speaks of “determination by the signifier”: the way people end up inhabiting the picture of them inscribed by others (parents, social institutions, and the like). You become what they say you are. Just so, Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent. Ordinary Americans do their best to protect their pocketbooks and 401(k) accounts from his whims; other world leaders increasingly look beyond him in preparing for the unstable international order he will leave behind.

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Iranian strategist: no ceasefire on our agenda

By Sohrab Ahmari

Why this happened will be a historian’s debate for decades to come. But a first-blush analysis must return to the character factor that was too quickly dismissed by those of us who were thrilled by his shattering of GOP policy orthodoxies.

Trump had famously described George W. Bush’s Iraq War as a “big, fat mistake” in a 2016 Republican primary debate. And four years later, he’d vented the American people’s fatigue with the Middle East more generally, blaming bipartisan hawks for sinking “$8 trillion” into the region that could’ve been spent “fixing our roads in this country” or “fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals even, our schools even — it’s crazy.”

Well, here we are: Trump has now launched a broadly unpopular invasion of Iran in conjunction with Israel. And this, in pursuit of vague objectives that shift depending on which Cabinet member you ask and when. The result: an open-ended regional war that has decimated America’s military basing architecture in the Middle East, triggered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and sent gas prices spiking back home (the sharpest four-week rise since Hurricane Katrina). An expeditionary force of 2,500 Marines is on its way to the Gulf as I write. What Trump reportedly envisioned as a quickie, Venezuela-style affair will thus widen into a prolonged operation with a ground component.

I can’t claim to speak for my co-author, but this was exactly the type of scenario I had in mind when, back in 2022, I celebrated Trump for ditching the foreign-policy consensus of conventional conservatism. And lest the hawks and pro-Israel hard-liners who now lord it over MAGA attempt gaslighting, the Trump campaign in 2024 listed the plank “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE” near the top of its platform.

Pro-war pundits insist that there is no betrayal, no switcheroo. They dig up obscure, decades-old anti-Iran statements from Trump: You fell for the “PEACE TICKET” sloganeering from 18 months ago? Well, sucker, you should have combed through 1980s news clippings! They also point to polls showing that the war — erm, “excursion” — is overwhelmingly popular among self-identified “MAGA Republicans.” Last week, Senate Republicans posted a graphic on X touting “94% support” for the war in a huge font; beneath it, in minuscule font: “of MAGA Republicans.”

Such arguments, of course, elide the fact that Trump supporters recoiling from the war might decline to identify as “MAGA Republicans,” thus leaving a self-selecting pool of hard-liners who would be as likely to back Trump if he made peace with Tehran and converted to Twelver Shiism tomorrow.

Then, too, “MAGA Republicans” are only a part of the coalition Trump assembled in 2016 and expanded over the decade that followed. That broader coalition also included many Independents, of whom only about a third approve of the Iran war (at best). The full Trump coalition also included nearly half of Hispanic men, a fifth of black men, and normally Democratic-leaning Obama-to-Trump voters: the groups, in short, that were drawn by Trump’s talk of leaving the Mideast behind to build up roads, schools, hospitals.

These voters may not have called themselves “MAGA Republicans,” but they were willing to place a bet on Trump as a force for domestic renewal and foreign-policy restraint. Yet they are being told, in effect, to go stuff their complaints. The new coalition is to be much smaller: MAGA die-hards plus the pro-war pundits and donors — many of whom couldn’t wait to be rid of Trump back in 2022, when DeSantis was still viable.

One almost wishes, however, that they had succeeded with DeSantis, who by all accounts is a competent crisis manager who has cooperated effectively with Sunshine State lawmakers to legislate his priorities. As president, DeSantis would have been an old-school, donor-beholden hawk. But we are getting the same thing with the second Trump administration, only with the chaos, messaging confusion, and sheer incompetence characteristic of the multiply-bankrupt ex-developer and reality-TV shouter.

If the United States was bound to waste $200 billion (the Pentagon’s latest ask from Congress) on another Mideast war radiating instability into Europe and beyond, would that it were under a commander in chief blessed with an orderly mind and advised by policy heavyweights instead of yes men. A president who wouldn’t be surprised by the Iranians lashing out at the Gulf — something they repeatedly threatened to do in case of attack. A president who wouldn’t suddenly beg European allies to join him in the adventure, then insult them when they declined. A president whose son-in-law wouldn’t shamelessly commingle diplomacy with the pursuit of profit.

Yes, the Republican Party is structurally militaristic, as Michael Lind has argued in these pages. Yes, donors wield far too much unaccountable power over it (and over the Democrats, as well). But those of us reckoning with the scale of these failures must return to the character problem that first gave rise to the Never Trump movement. Among those of us who made our peace with Trump, it was too easy to praise his “animal instincts” — a phrase I often used in this context — by way of overlooking his lack of personal virtue. Sound instincts are, of course, part of leadership. But without the ballast of character and prudence, they can veer in any direction or fall under the sway of any whispered counsel, no matter how foolish.

Trump lacked that ballast. He was never the one.

The rise of AI, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, is now reviving that old dread, but this time it portends a far more volatile political horizon than the last one. It’s now the college-educated, office-dwelling winners of the age of the internet and globalization, who are suddenly discovering that they, too, can become the needless things alongside the blue-collar manufacturing base that Trump and MAGA has thus far failed to revive. 

We will soon find out which way the political winds will shift in response. The first act of the AI revolution was a content explosion. Generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google Gemini flooded the internet in the early 2020s with cheap words, cheap images, and cheap expertise, warping media, education, and the economy of attention into something closer to a hall of mirrors. That phase began bending politics by accelerating misinformation, flattening expertise, and lowering the costs of persuasion. We are now entering a more destabilizing phase: job loss.

As of 2026, AI “coming for jobs” is no longer a speculative future-of-work panel at Davos. In a limited sense, it’s already here. By the end of 2025, AI had been cited as a contributing factor in nearly 55,000 domestic layoffs, according to executive-coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The January jobs report was rosier than expected, but the underlying data was grim. Healthcare and social assistance accounted for 124,000 of the 130,000 jobs gained last month, industries essentially dedicated to managing an aging, poorer population. An AI executive at a top consulting firm told me last week that end-of-year updates — Opus 4.5, the Anthropic model that launched at the end of November; and GPT-5.2, the OpenAI model that launched in December — have crossed a threshold and can be trusted to handle more complex tasks with fewer mistakes. “Most people don’t realize it yet. Now [AI] is at the level where I think we’ll start seeing real economic impacts this year, and it will snowball relatively fast,” she told me. Investors have noticed, and software stocks are being punished on Wall Street as markets begin to price in the possibility that AI handles the bulk of global programming.

The snowball may have already begun rolling. In January, American employers announced more than 108,000 job cuts, the worst start to a year since the 2009 Great Recession, with layoffs up 118% year over year and up more than 200% since late 2025. The casualties are not obscure startups. Amazon eliminated roughly 16,000 corporate jobs in a single month as part of a broader plan to trim tens of thousands of white-collar roles. Meta pruned 1,000 jobs from its virtual reality unit Reality Labs. Salesforce’s CEO acknowledged that the company shed 4,000 customer-support workers after AI tools absorbed roughly half of the workload. What we’re seeing now isn’t mass unemployment but a subtler erosion: fewer entry points, thinner career ladders, and a growing sense that the white-collar future once sold as stable and dignified is about to go the way of the video store clerk. 

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The mutual-aid delusion

By Ryan Zickgraf

It’s about to get worse: CEOs aren’t hiding it anymore; they’re now openly advocating reorganizing firms around AI labor as a cost-cutting imperative. Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20% in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is sounding an even louder alarm, predicting that most white-collar work “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” Progressives like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes are calling this development a deliberate class war by Big Tech CEOs against white-collar workers for being too uppity, but this is not a conspiracy against professionals. It is capitalism working exactly as intended. The software doesn’t have to be perfect; if it can get to “good enough” at drafting reports, writing code, moderating content, summarizing documents, or optimizing logistics, then the $120,000-a-year credentialed professional becomes extinct, as more profit can be extracted. Robots and conveyor belts did this to factories and will continue to do so; now models and chatbots are doing it to the cognitive economy, turning thinking into the next assembly line.

This will upend politics because jobs lie at the heart of America’s social contract. As Franklin Roosevelt warned a century ago, “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” We have already seen how downward mobility reshapes politics because we’re still feeling the tremors of the last employment-quake. In the 50 years since Terkel’s Working, deindustrialized and job-starved blue-collar communities lost more than jobs. Factory closures unraveled unions, apprenticeships, and entire local economies, shunting displaced workers into a service sector defined by precarity and downward mobility. Elites sold the transition as inevitable progress and told blue-collar workers to “learn to code,” as if your uncle could simply download a new career. The promised “knowledge economy” absorbed a narrow slice of the workforce, leaving the rest to navigate wage stagnation, disability rolls, and social decay in towns that had lost their reason to exist. Over time, this produced institutional estrangement: trust in government, the media, and expertise waned; participation declined; and resentment grew. 

And so, the anxiety born of the previous wave of automation and the legitimate economic grievances of blue-collar communities were largely rerouted into a new political identity, one that fused material loss with cultural resentment. As unions withered and Democrats recast themselves as the party of the ascendant professional classes, many working-class voters concluded that no one in power was actually trying to rebuild the world they had lost. Into that vacuum stepped MAGA and a Right-wing populism that promised results but has instead given rise to a politics of recognition — an inverse woke — embodied in the unlikely avatar of Donald Trump.

So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile. 

Marx, the prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution, would argue that as economic obsolescence metastasizes into political instability, a revolution will soon be upon us. After all, yesterday’s bourgeoisie is soon to become tomorrow’s proletariat. That’s unlikely, but if AI brings about a college-educated jobs apocalypse rather than a utopia of zero work and universal high income, then we will see a more drastic political shock over the next decade than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Call it W.H. Auden for the white-collar age. “The Age of Anxiety” was the poet’s name for a post-WWII world in which the old guarantees had collapsed, and everyone felt one missed-step away from the void: “the wolves will get you if the moths won’t,” he warned. Large catastrophe or nibbling decay: either way, your previous life is over.  

In the short term — the next one to three years — the primary victim of this upheaval will inevitably be the Republican party and the MAGA movement. Economy and jobs remain the top issues for American voters. Whether it is fully deserved or not, the electorate will blame the incumbent leadership for the AI-driven displacement. The current administration, having tethered its brand to a return to American greatness and a blue-collar resurgence, will find itself presiding over a white-collar bloodbath. The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a massacre for the GOP as voters react to tariff-driven inflation and rising costs for everyone. By 2030, both parties will face the wrath of young people who are expected to build a life on internships, side hustles, and selling themselves on OnlyFans. 

But this isn’t necessarily a victory for the center-Left or center-Right. Mainstream democrats are trapped between worker-friendly rhetoric and donor-class dependence on the industries driving automation. Republicans are trapped between populist grievance, pro-market orthodoxy, and vying for Big Tech’s hand in political marriage. The lesson that the pandemic-era satire Eddington expertly captured was this pathology: social media trained Americans to see their neighbors as existential enemies based on voting behavior, while the political establishment quietly benefited from the infrastructure boom, tax abatements, and data-center gold rush that accompanied the platform economy. The culture war supplied the noise, and capital captured the signal.

But maybe not forever. We are already seeing the emergence of a new, non-partisan “AI Populism” where something like the “Humanists” square off against “Tech Accelerationists.” Across the country, local communities are already revolting against the construction of massive AI data centers, even without the sting of massive job loss. These eerie windowless temples of compute strain local power grids and suck up millions of gallons of water, and arrive with the footprint of a fleet of spaceships: alien, resource-hungry, and indifferent to local life. The political backlash is no joke. These fights are erupting in swing states and battleground districts, animating local elections and straining party coalitions. 

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How Big Tech killed literary culture

By Nicholas Carr

In Pennsylvania this week, the Montour County commission denied rezoning for a proposed data center tied to a major tech company after residents warned it would hike utility bills and worsen energy insecurity in a region already wary of industrial disruption. In Arizona, grassroots groups gathered enough signatures to put data center siting decisions on the ballot, signaling that tech infrastructure could soon be one of the few issues that actually mobilize voters outside the traditional culture wars. These skirmishes are shaping up to be an early indicator of what the next phase of the AI revolution will look like politically. Not a clean Left-Right realignment, but a messy conflict between those who bear the costs of automation and those who harvest its efficiencies.

The Republican Party finds itself in a weird squeeze on the AI question. Many GOP lawmakers and governors have enthusiastically backed Big Tech’s AI build-out as an economic and national-security imperative. President Trump’s pro-AI infrastructure agenda — from rapid data center approvals to limiting state and local regulatory power — has been presented as a key front in a global competition with China. At the same time, rank-and-file voters in data center host states are increasingly troubled by the real costs — from utility bills to grid strain — that these facilities impose, leaving Republicans vulnerable to being tagged as defenders of distant tech interests at the expense of Main Street.

Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to make sense of this new landscape. Party standard-bearers like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro have heralded AI as the future of the economy of their jurisdictions, while also awkwardly defending the backlash. Some progressives have embraced calls to slow or regulate data-center construction, framing it as an issue of worker protection, environmental justice, and local control. Others worry that overt opposition to AI infrastructure will hand Republicans a cudgel to beat them with on innovation and growth.

There’s a bizarre alignment emerging where figures as ideologically opposed as Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis find themselves on the same side. In a post on X over the weekend, Sanders said that the key disruptors of the 20th century economy — automobiles, radio, TV, computers, the internet — pale in comparison to the revolution AI will bring about. This week, Sanders is traveling to Stanford, the heart of the Big Tech beast, with US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to call for a moratorium on construction of new AI data centers to “make sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires.” Meanwhile, in December, DeSantis proposed an “AI Bill of Rights” to safeguard Florida residents by addressing the misuse of personal data and allowing local governments to block new data centers. “I really fear that if this is not addressed in an intelligent and proper way, it could set off an age of darkness and deceit,” DeSantis said during a press conference. When a democratic socialist and Florida’s No. 1 Right-wing culture warrior start sounding like joint authors, something real is happening.

If we look a decade ahead, the AI revolution may force a complete rewrite of the old political spectrum of  “Liberal vs. Conservative”, which will collapse into incoherence. In its place, we could see a structural realignment around — to borrow from Marx — who controls the Means of Prediction.

As AI automates the “cognition economy,” the debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) will shift from Silicon Valley pipe dreams to the center of the debate. Governments will be pressured to tax “robot labor” simply to prevent the total collapse of the consumer economy. If people don’t have wages, they can’t buy the products the AI is making. Just as the 19th-century state had to break up the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age, 21st-century politics will be a battle between the federal government and a handful of what Sanders calls tech oligarchies. These companies now control the world’s primary compute resources — the digital equivalent of oil or steel. Or we could see the opposite: a command-and-control economy, as the state and tech formally merge and the trend of state capitalism takes firmer hold. 

The danger, I believe, isn’t that AI will produce a single coherent political movement or a technofascist state (so put away your dog-eared copy of 1984). Instead, it may fracture the old coalitions faster than new ones can form, producing a volatile landscape of backlash, regulatory whiplash, and even more opportunistic demagoguery. On the far Left, we see a rise in techno-skepticism and a demand for the abolition of “bullshit jobs” — the idea that we should stop pretending we need 40 hours of work if the AI can do it in four. On the far Right, nationalist protectionism may not align with the needs of the global AI industry. The future, for better or worse, is up for grabs. 

From this vantage point, the AI revolution is the final insult to the American worker, but over the rest of the 2020s, it may also represent the final test for American democracy. The Third Industrial Revolution taught factory towns that the future could arrive without them; the Fourth is teaching the same lesson to the laptop class. And when millions of people are suddenly told, by code, that they are surplus, it won’t be the moths that get the elites. The wolves will find them first.

The California governor is all but openly campaigning for the Democratic nomination, with his aggressive press operation and willingness to engage with Right-wing podcasters. Conventional wisdom suggests his bid will flame out. He presides over a state drowning in social and economic woes. California is expensive, its streets are filled with the homeless, and the state’s population is no longer growing.

The knock on Newsom is that he’s a coastal liberal who has never run in an election where he’s had to take Republicans all that seriously. Vice President JD Vance, who seems poised to be the Republican nominee two and a half years from now, is likely enthused about the possibility of facing down Newsom on the debate stage. 

Newsom is slick, too slick, and he oozes California privilege. He was the guy who imposed Covid lockdowns and then went dining at the tony French Laundry restaurant. He is a creature of San Francisco’s Democratic elite, a relentless ladder-climber who owes his early career success to billionaire heir Gordon Getty, a family friend, and to Willie Brown, the Democratic power broker and former mayor who also elevated Kamala Harris..

There is nothing terribly inspirational about Newsom’s backstory. He played the inside game well, got himself elected mayor, then lieutenant governor, then governor. Now, he thrills the Democratic base as he apes Donald Trump on X. (“SEND IN THE ADULTS!!! GRANDPA IS TIRED” Newsom’s press office replied recently to a Trump video.) In a few years, he’ll be left in the dust by some other Democrat, perhaps a more “serious” standard-bearer like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttgieg, Joe Biden’s former transportation secretary and a 2020 contender. 

All of this isn’t wrong, and could come to pass. But there is a certain kind of pundit who underrates Newsom’s appeal and can’t quite comprehend that this California liberal could be poised to seize the Democratic nomination and become the next president of the United States.

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Can Democrats save free speech?

By Ross Barkan

Isn’t Newsom just Hillary Clinton with hair gel and a smarmy grin? Maybe. What he also is, however, is a budding media star, equally comfortable on television and podcasts, and he relishes a political brawl. He has no trouble with Fox News, and he hosted the late Charlie Kirk on his own podcast, which has become strikingly popular. In 2023, he staged a Fox debate with Ron DeSantis, who looked like, for a brief moment, he could be the next Republican nominee. Pundits derided the Newsom-DeSantis debate as a publicity stunt, but it was, for the California governor, a chance to flex real media muscle. 

What became clear was that DeSantis, for all his braying about the “free state” of Florida and California’s ills, could not dominate Newsom. Republicans, until then, had imagined Newsom to be another liberal patsy. They didn’t think he could hit back. One conservative who did notice Newsom’s potential, Matthew J. Peterson, then editor-in-chief of The Blaze, put it best: “he’s comfortable in his own skin like Trump, and doesn’t just want to be there, but is comfortable and assured and loves being there.”

Indeed, Newsom has more in common with Trump than many Democratic or Republican pundits might believe, and this will be a strength for him in 2028, not a weakness. He is savvy at holding the spotlight, identifying and bludgeoning enemies, and adapting to shifting political moods. 

In the old Fox formulation, bullies versus nerds, alphas versus betas, it was increasingly obvious that Newsom, the oily former jock, was a man fit for the quasi-demented and deeply influential arena of cable TV. Unlike DeSantis, who was also an outstanding amateur baseball player — he participated in the Little League World Series and captained his Yale squad — Newsom retained his ex-jock aura, or at least the sensibility of a guy who was comfortable with athletes and celebrities.

He swaggered and slithered like Jerry Maguire. This, too, would be Vance’s problem if he ended up on a debate stage with Newsom. For all Vance’s tough talk, he still sounds like the doughy, overachieving Yale Law grad who is secretly pleased with himself for rustling up a pair of blue jeans in his bedroom closet. Newsom, meanwhile, is a bit like the guy who cut class all the time and bedded the homecoming queen. 

If his Trump resistance is shtick, it’s effective shtick. He has read the national electorate well. He executed on a successful push to get a gerrymandering referendum passed in California, countering the Texan push to add more GOP House seats. A Democratic-base voter is desperate for a politician who will mock and belittle Trump on Trump’s own terms. And even the happy warriors like Zohran Mamdani, who don’t sound like Trump, understand that you’ve got to be able to mix it up with the president and his supporters. Mamdani’s chummy White House visit didn’t hurt him because he didn’t offer Trump any concessions or even smile for photos. 

Newsom has never had much of a fixed ideology — he occupies the Left flank these days, but was a centrist, business-friendly mayor of San Francisco — and he’ll be able to conform himself, come 2028, to whatever mood the voters might feel. This, again, is like Trump — or maybe another famous politician born in 1946, Bill Clinton. Newsom knows conservatives expect little from him. In that way, they are no better than the Democrats, coddled in their bubbles, and they are used to punching at what never punches back. The older Republicans can still remember Sean Hannity’s nightly thrashing of Alan Colmes. In Newsom, they see only the latest woke lib, when they would be better off conceiving of Newsom as a West Coast Clinton: debonair, chameleonic, and cutthroat when needed. Clinton exuded alpha charm. He commanded a press conference room and a TV screen. Newsom isn’t so different.

The other knock against Newsom is electability. If he does beat the field in 2028, including Kamala Harris, how can he possibly triumph in the purple states? Didn’t a Californian just go zero-for-7 in the key 2024 battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia? Newsom could certainly struggle in the rural towns and swing suburbs. It’s not like he has any experience winning these people over.

But don’t be too certain of the electability arguments. Recent history has shown that there’s no way to really tell which kind of candidate can triumph. A black man with a foreign-sounding middle name and less than one term in the Senate wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. A fading reality television star who boasted about his sexual conquests and demonized war heroes wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. And in New York City, a 34-year-old Muslim socialist wasn’t supposed to beat back (twice) a former three-term governor. American politics is getting stranger all the time. And President Gavin Newsom, if still unlikely, is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. One challenge Newsom will have is convincing an electorate weary of political elites and eager for outsiders that he is one of them — or close enough, anyway. In such an anti-establishment country, can the chosen son of Democratic San Francisco actually get himself elected president? Soon enough, we’ll know.

Trumpism, at its core, is the American version of the transatlantic phenomenon of national populism. Local variants in the West differ, but they share common characteristics: opposition to mass immigration, for instance, as well as socially conservative programmes and protectionist trade policies previously favoured by the trade unions.

Many of these voters and their ancestors used to find a home in the parties of the centre-left, such as the New Deal Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK and the Social Democrats in Germany. But the replacement of the union by the university as their social and ideological base — now defined by identity politics, equity and a quasi-religious obsession with long-term climate change — has driven away these parties’ core supporters. At the same time, many have been repelled by the post-Thatcher and post-Reagan conservatives who sought to cut their government benefits, supported the mass importation of cheap labour from abroad, and backed inconclusive or doomed “forever wars” following 9/11.

Donald Trump was not the first candidate to seize this national-populist mantle in the US. In 1992, thanks to his economic nationalism, Ross Perot won more votes than any third-party contender for the White House since former president Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Populist candidates for the Republican presidential nomination such as Patrick Buchanan, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have also sounded national-populist themes, only to have their campaigns starved of funds by the party’s libertarian and globalist donor elite.

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The Donald Trump Monster Movie

By Michael Lind

Trump was unique in that his wealth, along with small donor contributions, allowed him to personally fund much of his successful campaign to win the nomination in 2016, in spite of a big donor boycott. In the election that followed, he won because he appealed to national-populist voters, particularly in the deindustrialised swing states of the Midwest. He added their support to the existing Republican base of economic libertarians and evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics.

In different ways, DeSantis’s Pseudo-Trumpism and Nikki Haley’s Pre-Trumpism are attempts to build bridges between these raucous MAGA newcomers and the remnants of the older Bush Republican party — at least those who had not already quit the party out of disgust with the populist parvenus who have crashed the country club.

DeSantis, when he launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, looked like he might be able to bring together the different factions of the post-2016 Republican party. During the Sixties and Seventies, Richard Nixon managed to be acceptable both to the Goldwater-Reagan Right wing of the party and the moderate, business-backed “Rockefeller Republicans”.  In the same way, DeSantis sought to be “Trumpy” on immigration and culture-war issues, while implicitly signalling to traditional Republicans that he would not be as heretical as Trump on economics and foreign policy.

And on immigration at least, DeSantis successfully made the issue his own, by, among other things, signing into law a Florida statute mandating background checks by employers to discourage illegal immigrant employment (like many “far-Right” national populist proposals, this was a policy supported by many pro-labour Democrats as recently at the Nineties). In the culture war, too, DeSantis out-Trumped Trump. But DeSantis’s battle against the Walt Disney Company, which supported controversial sex education and gender policies, ultimately backfired by making him look more-than-a-little-ridiculous for waging a quixotic battle against the House of Mouse.

While DeSantis and his strategists were misled into thinking that America’s culture wars matter as much to Republican voters as they do to Republican pundits, Trump proved otherwise. In March last year, he attacked DeSantis for supporting cuts to the type of entitlement programmes cherished by national-populist voters when the Florida Governor was merely a conventional Republican representative in Congress. “People are finding out that Ron wanted to destroy Social Security and raise its minimum wage to 70, and he fought very hard to do it,” Trump declared. “He also had very strong plans for cutting Medicare and still does.”

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DeSantis has failed America's charisma test

By David A. Bell

This was a powerful argument: 79% of the public oppose Social Security benefit cuts and 67% oppose raising Medicare premiums. Among Republicans alone, nearly half — 42% — favour raising taxes on households that earn over $400,000 a year to cutting benefits, compared with only 37% who disagree with the idea. DeSantis weakly tried to fight back by repudiating his own former positions and by pointing out that Trump once said benefit cuts might be considered in the future — but the blows didn’t land.

As this suggests, however incoherent Trump may sometimes be, he has tapped into a worldview with certain coherent public policy positions, whether they be on government entitlements, immigration or forever wars. Members of the declining Republican establishment who hope that they can revive their old Bush-era programme of benefits cuts and foreign adventures, while pacifying national populist voters with performative denunciations of wokeness, will be disappointed by DeSantis’s failure. If there’s a conclusion to be drawn from his rise and fall, it’s that Trump voters want the real thing, not a placebo.

And for the same reason, if Pseudo-Trumpism is this month’s loser, then next month’s will surely be Trump’s remaining challenger. For who is Nikki Haley but the pre-Trumpist tasked with putting the old band of Bush-era libertarians, neoconservatives and corporate globalists back together? As much as they despise it, Trumpism is supported by a sizeable minority of the electorate. And even once he exits the political stage, the taste for national populism he has inspired is unlikely to disappear.

Iowa and New Hampshire. Those states: that vision. The glory of American small-town quirkiness. Amid the vastness of the United States — sea to shining sea and all that — Iowa and New Hampshire have been, since 1972 when the caucuses became the kick-off event for the presidential race, a tether, a tent peg holding the whole political structure to firm ground, to a place, where people actually live, and think, and talk to each other.

So when you hear that Donald Trump is ahead in the national Republican polls, with all the other Republican hopefuls competing merely for second place in the race for the nomination, remember that not a single vote has yet been cast. And when they start the process on January 15 and 23, Iowa and New Hampshire will make up their own minds, thank you very much. In their own way.

This means talking to the candidates, often with no cameras present. Actually meeting them face to face. It means discovering that Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida, may well have fulfilled his promise to visit all 99 counties in the whole of the largely empty state of Iowa — but that, in all of them, he seemed to those who met him, a bit weird. That Vivek Ramaswamy, the libertarian tech bro who has been living full time (without mum) in the capital Des Moines, is hugely polished but maybe too polished to be true. And weird to boot. It means that the black Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was a nice fellow but little more (he’s dropped out now) And that Doug Burgum, the Governor of North Dakota, might make a passable Agriculture Secretary (though he has also now dropped out).

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Alright, I know what you’re thinking: Donald Trump is way ahead in the Iowa polls as well as the nationals. And let’s be clear: ahead in a way that is unprecedented in recent Iowa history. Trump is averaging just under 50% support among Iowa Republicans, with DeSantis and Nikki Haley tied at second but with less that 20% support each. It’s a slam-dunk, isn’t it? As Trump himself is beginning to ask, isn’t it time to end this meaningless process, appoint the big man, and get to work on Biden?

Not so fast. Remember it’s “Iowa and New Hampshire” they are a double act, these reality checks in the snow. Trump will (almost certainly) win Iowa. He would be finished if he did not, given his current poll lead. But even though the Democrat Dick Gephardt — to his mum’s joy — won in 1988, along with Bob Dole for the Republicans. Neither got the final nod: in the end, it was George H. W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis. In more recent times, we did not get president Ted Cruz (who beat Trump in Iowa in 2016) or Mike Huckabee as the final candidate (although he won there in 2008).

Winning is not the thing. These contests — taken together — are about momentum, direction of travel.  The appeal in each state has to be different. You can triumph in one and collapse in the next. Here’s why: just because they are cold and their inhabitants overwhelmingly white, and there aren’t any big cities, doesn’t mean their populations think the same. They are diverse.

New Hampshire is a tougher place than placid, midwestern, God-fearing Iowa. Its population is mobile and transient. A survey for the University of New Hampshire found that only a third of state residents aged 25 and older were born there. It’s a high-income state too (hence the immigration) and one of the least religious in the whole USA. Look at its cross-party support for abortion rights: with 69% saying abortion should be allowed in some circumstances, it’s among the highest state percentages in the nation.

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That’s why second place in Iowa this time round matters hugely — if Nikki Haley can beat Ron DeSantis, she is suddenly the huge story, the coming woman. In New Hampshire, she already appears to be in second place. Yes, alright: still 27 points or so behind Trump but stuff happens. Trump has largely ignored all the traditions of campaigning in both states — the town hall meetings, the cosy chats in over-heated diners, and we don’t yet know if this will have an impact. If she were to overtake a faltering Trump in New Hampshire, the next big contest is her home state of South Carolina. She would be motoring: very much in the race and ready to pounce just as Trump begins his most serious court appearances.

And yes, Iowa and New Hampshire are small scale and hokey but they are also tricky to manage. This year, trickier than ever. Because this year a terrible crime has been committed by Joe Biden — or so his many Iowa and New Hampshire critics aver. Something which could blow apart the Republican race.

Folks: Joe Biden has murdered Iowa and New Hampshire. He always hated them; never did well in them during his multiple presidential runs. And now there is blood in the snow. Iowa succumbed to the slaughter without much of a fight as Biden decreed that the caucus will become a write-in for the Dems (literally on postcards), whose results will be revealed in March. It is no longer the kick-off event. It no longer affords the victor momentum. It is no longer a contest worth thinking about.

In New Hampshire though, Biden went for the kill and missed. He attempted to demote it, while taking his name off the ballot. But New Hampshire is still alive: and the tradition that it holds the first primary is so important to local Democrats (it’s actually a state law) that they are now locked in an ill-tempered struggle with the White House which looks likely to cause Biden significant grief at a potentially crucial moment.

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New Hampshire Democrats are holding a primary in the teeth of his opposition. And there is a candidate, a congressman called Dean Phillips, who has paid $1,000 dollars to put his name on the ballot. But can Phillips be allowed to win? Should Biden supporters ignore it, write in the president’s name, organise for Mr Phillips to be offered the ambassadorship to Tahiti?

Politico’s Jonathan Martin, a veteran commentator, has a message from history: “Other incumbent presidents have won New Hampshire but still been bruised by the stronger-than-expected showing of their opponents. That list includes, perhaps most famously, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 …. and Gerald Ford in 1976 and George H.W. Bush in 1992, who both had to fend off opponents to their right. None of them survived to win another term.”

President Phillips? Probably not. No: certainly not. But he could still have a real impact: a troubled re-election campaign could yet be made more troubled still. And here is why the Democrats’ difficulties matter in the Republican race: there is not much to do in Iowa; it gets dark early in the winter. If you are an Iowan Democrat, you really do look forward to the jamboree coming to town every four years. So if this time, you know your opinion doesn’t count. So how about… whisper it… becoming a Republican for a night? You can: Iowa has same-day registration rights. Your nice neighbours are already voting for Trump: maybe go with them to the church hall and pay a small dollar sum and take part. Cast a ballot. And remember these are Midwesterners with no sense of wickedness or irony: they will take it seriously and vote not for Trump (who, if they are Democrats they will think is evil), but for someone they can approve of, probably Haley, even if she might go on to win the nomination and beat their man Biden next November.

Might the result of the Iowa Republican caucus be significantly affected by disaffected Dems? It’s not beyond the realms of the possible. Trump in Trouble would be the headline. New Hampshire is suddenly in play. With two fingers raised to New York and LA and indeed to Washington DC: snow-bound, small-town Iowa and New Hampshire gloriously reminding the world, and the Donald, that place matters, and these places live on to fight another day.

The debate showcased desperate attempts to create viral moments. DeSantis brought props to make his points, including a sexually explicit book aimed at children and a map that plots “the human faeces that are found on the streets of San Francisco”. Newsom, meanwhile, rarely missed an opportunity to twist the knife into DeSantis’s flailing presidential bid, repeatedly mocking his sinking polling. “When are you going to drop out and give Nikki Haley a shot to win?” Newsom jabbed.

Amid the rancour, though, there was a strange sense of clarity. Perhaps the two governors have more in common than they realise.

I’ve watched Newsom’s rise and his particular brand of politics, close-up in California. He has long baited Republican leaders with his culture-war bravado, and last night was no different. He charged that his opponent on the stage was focused on rolling back “hard-earned national rights on voting rights and civil rights, human rights and women’s rights, not just access to abortion, but also access to contraception”.

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While Newsom stressed that his advocacy is a fight over the existential balance of maintaining America’s democracy, his forays into the culture war conceal a record that is hardly radical or transformative. In reality, Newsom is a moderate Democrat who has ascended to power by courting headlines and mobilising voters through the hypnotising politics of identity, but never going so far as to offend his base of wealthy donor interests.

DeSantis, for his part, has offered a mirror image to Newsom’s approach, energising conservative activists with his promise to “fight back against woke indoctrination” that he says is spreading like a “virus” in American society. With the exception of a now-abandoned push to penalise Disney, he has largely ignored major economic policy, and leaned heavily into laws that ban drag shows and curtail what he sees as excesses on university campuses. While DeSantis had some success in changing a few academic policies, most of his legislative initiatives have been blocked by the courts. Still, his crusade is broadly popular among the Republican Party base.

Jousting with Newsom, DeSantis repeatedly brought up squalor and homelessness in California, charging that Democrats threatened to bring such problems to the rest of the country. There was, however, little discussion of the particular government policies and socioeconomic trends that have driven the rampant lawlessness and homeless encampments. The Florida governor simply charged that they were examples of “Leftist ideology” and “Leftist principles”.

Maybe so, but Newsom has also hitched his fortunes on a political style that we see rising in both parties, a form of polarising culture war that captures the emotions of voters, while concealing his ambitions. In many ways he has convinced voters to see past these issues by constantly taking on more existential issues of fundamental rights and privileges, from abortion to gay rights, issues that are hardly at stake in modern California.

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The pattern began early in his career. It was just months after his first election to lead San Francisco, elected in part to take on the homeless crisis in the city that Newsom issued marriage licences to same-sex couples at city hall. The gambit, though overturned by local courts, and later vindicated by the Supreme Court, was a prescient move that made him a household name and catapulted him into the good graces of social liberals — who showered him with campaign donations and adoration. Meanwhile, the problems on the streets of San Francisco, among the poor and addicted, were never seriously solved.

Then, last year, Newsom repeated a strategy he has used in the past by airing advertisements that touted the conservative credentials of a Republican opponent he saw as least likely to run a competitive campaign. The ads reminded voters that Brian Dahle, a Right-wing lawmaker, strongly supported gun rights and opposed abortion. Thanks to a quirk in the California election system, which allows open participation in primaries, the overture worked as intended. GOP voters flocked to Dahle, elevating him as the party nominee, just as Newsom had intended. The culture war blitz eliminated any real challenge to Newsom and he glided to an easy victory.

More recently, Newsom has poured millions of dollars into a Super PAC airing ads outside of California that depict the governor as the last best hope to take on Trump and a party bent on depriving women and minorities of their rights. It’s not clear how Newsom, as a governor, would play such a role outside his own state.

It’s all part of what DeSantis and many others charge is a “shadow campaign” for the presidency. In any other context, a sitting governor openly campaigning against an incumbent president of his party would provoke outrage among the party faithful. But Newsom’s pledge that he is fighting for the rights of the most vulnerable provide a convenient veneer for his blatant White House ambitions, just as his embrace of culture war issues have served his political fortunes in the past. The brazen bid is a gamble that President Joe Biden may fall ill or drop out of the campaign at some point, a potential scenario that many insiders share.

The idea of a slick California politician seizing the nomination may seem absurd. After all, the state has never looked less glittering, as DeSantis was keen to point out. Yet it is precisely Newsom’s Californian path that could help him take the helm of the modern Democratic Party. Though Newsom’s mother struggled financially, much of his life was shaped by his relationship with San Francisco’s gilded elite and its politics of balkanised identity groups. For his entire career, he has learned to navigate the interests of highly educated professionals and jet-setting philanthropists, a coalition that now calls the shots everywhere.

Rubbing shoulders with Pacific Heights socialites paid dividends from Newsom’s start in politics. The mayor at the time granted Newsom a seat on a local traffic board, then appointed him to the city council when a vacancy opened up. In many ways, it just made sense. Here was a young ambitious moderate with boundless ambition and limitless access to the city’s donor class.

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When critics questioned the velvet-glove treatment, Mayor Willie Brown justified his decision as simply fulfilling a quota. ”He is young, male and appears to be straight,” shrugged Brown, a reference to the fact that city hall was bereft of white male heterosexuals. The twist on diversity, a uniquely San Francisco concern at the time, has loomed large in Newsom’s career ever since.

Look no further than Newsom’s reparations commission as an example of the weight of identity in forging his political profile. The committee has a vast mandate to study the impact of racial discrimination and slavery on black Californians, making it the most audacious effort of its type in the country. But it has no power to enact any actual policies, leaving it toothless. Newsom can campaign on the precedent and under the mantle of civil rights without any of the troubling work of cutting expensive checks to pay for historical sins.

Or take his recent appointment of Laphonza Butler to fill the seat opened by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein. His press release touted his own pick as the “the first Black lesbian to openly serve in Congress”, with no mention of the fact that her previous experience featured lobbying for Uber and AirBnB, and as a consultant for Newsom’s own inner circle of operatives.

Channelling the vast resources of the donor class, while firing up the passions of voters with emotionally laden rhetoric around identity is certainly not limited to Newsom. But his skill in doing so goes largely unrecognised.

During the debate, Newsom repeatedly denied the claim that he is pursuing a stealth bid for the Democratic nomination. He was there, he said, to defend the country against the far right. “You and President Trump are trying to light democracy on fire,” he glared at DeSantis.

His denials betray an obvious ambition for the Oval Office, a dream he has touted behind closed doors and as early as his second year on the San Francisco supervisor board. “If you’re in politics and you want to make an impact,” Newsom told reporters in 1998, “you should be as successful as possible, and the most influential position is President.”

Today, something like that disappointment and horror can be found in the response of America’s political establishment to the as-yet unstoppable Donald Trump. His Democratic enemies have deployed two impeachments and multiple lawsuits, some more frivolous than others, but they have proven as ineffective in stopping his return as the A-bomb was in halting the Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds (1953). Consider the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls: 53.9% of Republican voters favour Trump for the 2024 presidential election, compared to only 18.1% for his closest challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The other candidates, including entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former vice-president Mike Pence, are in the single digits.

Will Trump’s indictment this week, which charged him with plotting to overturn his 2020 defeat, shift the dial? It seems unlikely. Only 19% of likely Republican primary voters believe that Trump “threatened American democracy” by challenging the 2020 election results, while only 17% believe that he has committed serious crimes. Moreover, when it comes to the presidential election itself, among registered voters, Monday’s polls showed Trump and Biden in a dead heat, with each winning 43% of the vote. If helped by third-party candidates who tend to siphon off otherwise Democratic voters, Trump could not only be nominated again by the Republican party, but also elected to a second term.

All of this is good news for Trumpism, defined as the cult of personality of Donald Trump. But for the other two tendencies in the Republican Party — post-Trumpism and pseudo-Trumpism — it is not good news at all.

As a political framework, Post-Trumpism seeks to build a new conservative governing philosophy that rejects the Goldwater-Reagan-Bush fusion of economic libertarianism, military adventurism and lip service to social conservatism that dominated the Republican party. In his first campaign and his presidency, Trump took a chainsaw to American conservative establishment’s three-legged stool. He substituted narrow transactional economic nationalism — symbolised by tariffs and a “border wall” to block the flow of illegal immigration — for the Reagan Right’s traditional support for free trade and cheap-labour immigration. While President George W. Bush had championed a global democratic revolution, Trump rejected crusading neoconservatism for a kind of Nixonian Realpolitik, denouncing the Iraq War and refraining from starting any other new “wars of choice”. And, despite his opposition to abortion and transgender military service members, Trump reflected the trend of Republican voters in embracing gay rights.

Since the Sixties, there has been a large constituency of American voters, mostly but not exclusively white and non-college-educated, who have preferred a combination of economic nationalism, moderate social policies, and fewer foreign wars and military engagements. However, the growing influence in both parties of wealthy individuals and corporate donors, who tend to share libertarian economic and social views, combined with the decline of trade unions and old-fashioned political party machines, meant that this synthesis was unrepresented by donor-dependent Clinton Democrats and Bush Republicans. It is no coincidence that the two presidential candidates who had the most success in mobilising voters with these third-way views — the Dallas electronics billionaire H. Ross Perot, who won 19% of the popular vote in 1992, the highest percentage since 1912, and the New York real estate mogul Donald Trump in 2020 — were able to finance at least part of their own campaigns.

Like Perot, Trump benefited from a combination of issues that made him a favourite among many white working-class voters in Midwestern industrial states. Comparisons of Trump and his supporters to fascists are the dishonest propaganda of partisan Democrats, who compared Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush to Hitler, too.  The genuine equivalents of Trump are contemporary leaders of the populist Right in the UK and Europe, such as Boris Johnson and the late Silvio Berlusconi. With varying degrees of success, Trump and his European peers succeeded in tapping into concerns about trade, immigration and cultural Leftism that had driven many voters who had left social-democratic parties for the nationalist Right.

The problem for all these movements is the challenge of becoming a permanent wing, if not the dominant wing, of the Right once the charismatic tribune has passed from the scene. In the Republican Party, foreshadowing what a post-Trumpist wing would look like, politicians such as Senators Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance have broken with legacy Reaganism on issues ranging from child benefits to the legitimacy of labour unions to worker safety. So far, however, most elected Republicans have been unwilling to repudiate the Reaganite consensus, while they wait to see if Trumpism was an ephemeral flash in the pan. Paradoxically, the longer Trump is active in politics and monopolises attention, the more the development of post-Trumpism without Trump is delayed.

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What about other factions in the Republican party? At this point, many Never-Trumpers have abandoned the party altogether for the Democrats. That leaves what might be called pseudo-Trumpists — opportunistic Republican politicians and strategists trying to borrow some issues from Trump, without alienating the substantial group of legacy Reaganites.

This group includes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once a typical Reagan-Bush conservative, and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who worked in finance, hardly a bastion of conservative populism. Like Youngkin, DeSantis has refused to adopt the economic heresies of Trump about entitlements and trade, for fear of offending the free-marketeers and hawks of the old Reagan coalition. In response, the Trump campaign has shrewdly seized upon his past votes for cutting Social Security and Medicare, in an attempt to undercut the appeal of the Florida governor to working-class Republican voters. For now, it’s working.

From afar, this might all seem like a gift for the Democrats. But it isn’t. Paradoxically, the persistence of Trumpism also hurts Democratic party coalition-building in the long run, if not immediately.

No doubt many Democrats would welcome a Biden-Trump rematch. After all, apocalyptic and hysterical opposition to Trump united the Democratic Party’s otherwise fragile coalition: a peculiar assortment of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street tycoons; green crony capitalists seeking government subsidies; virtue-signalling professionals in the non-profit and academic sectors; public-sector unions; and socially moderate black and Hispanic voters wary of a Republican Party with a history of flirting with racists.

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This rhetoric of anti-Trumpism, however, will make it more difficult for Democrats to win back voters, including growing numbers of Hispanics and some black voters, who have left the Democrats for the Republicans in recent elections. According to the logic of anti-Trumpism, if ex-Democrats who voted for Trump once or twice are America’s version of the Nazis, then it would be immoral to appeal to their votes. And it would be just as immoral to acknowledge that Trump has exploited legitimate concerns about bad trade deals and illegal immigration. As long as Trump is around to serve as a demonic figure whom the Democratic base can unite against, it will be difficult to argue that the Democrats need to modify their policies to have broader electoral appeal.

Trump’s legacy, then, might end up resembling that of William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner” and agrarian populist who won the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1896, 1900 and 1908. Like Trump, Bryan was a polarising figure, adored by his followers and viewed by the Eastern Seaboard establishment as a dangerous demagogue who threatened democracy and civilisation. And like Trump, Bryan led his party to permanently break with its older small-government, anti-statist ideology. Without Bryan’s campaigns as an icebreaker, the more thoughtful and moderate reformism of later Progressives and New Dealers might not have come about. But before others could separate the worthwhile from the eccentric in his legacy, Bryan had to depart from the scene. More than a century later, the same may be true of Donald Trump.

That we’re talking about Casey DeSantis at all speaks to how unusual she is. For a politician’s wife to be this involved, this early, is virtually unheard of: the primary season doesn’t kick off until early next year, and if current polls are to be believed, Ron doesn’t stand much of a chance. The likelihood that this is all for naught doesn’t seem to have pierced the fantasy, though. It’s tradition for First Ladies to have a signature issue, and on the eve of her husband’s inauguration as Florida Governor, Casey was asked what hers would be; she replied, “I’d like to pick more than one.”

Her new campaign ad contains hints as to what these might be. It’s a fascinating piece of media: one that doesn’t just lean into the culture wars, but treats them with the urgency and gravitas of an actual war. A horror-movie soundtrack plays over washed-out footage of choice moments from the pandemic and beyond: toddlers weeping behind their government-mandated masks, a little girl patting the leather-covered head of a “puppy play” kinkster at a pride parade, a crowd of LGBT activists chanting, “We’re coming for your children!” The message, obviously, is that the only thing standing between us and this ultra-woke dystopia is Casey DeSantis’s husband, who is famous for being shaped like a concrete cinderblock with roughly the same amount of charisma.

Political wives on the Right tend to be supporting players, eschewing involvement except for when they’re called onstage, usually with a gaggle of children in tow, to humanise the candidate. (See, folks? He walks! He talks! He has procreative sexual intercourse!) Otherwise, they are noncombatants, and to strike out at them has always been considered a shot below the belt. Recall that in the early days of the 2016 campaign season — when it was still possible for Donald Trump to shock people — his threat to “spill the beans” about the wife of then-political adversary Ted Cruz was seen as an outrageous norm violation. Even once a husband has ascended to office, the wife’s involvement is viewed as more of a nice-to-have than a requirement. Melania Trump was so uninterested in the role of First Lady that theories began to circulate that it wasn’t actually her, but a stunt double at her husband’s side.

For a political wife to be involved and to also place herself in the line of fire, then, is a relationship model more reminiscent of the political power couples of the Left. Think of the Clintons circa 1994, or, to a lesser extent, the Obamas — both pairings in which the presence of a politically engaged wife gave rise to jabs (from the Right, this time) about who really wore the pants in the presidency.

And here’s where Ron DeSantis’s novel theory about why his wife’s ad triggered the “America’s Karen” barb might contain a grain of truth: “It shows my wife is an incredibly strong first lady, a fantastic mother and great wife, and that threatens the Left,” he said, on Fox News.

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As expressed, this seems like baloney. And yet, if only by accident, it does point at something real: Casey DeSantis is not simply a woman, but an archetype of in-your-face femininity, in a way that is, if not threatening, certainly outré in progressive circles. For all the legit complaints one might aim at the first lady of Florida, the one her critics reach for most regularly is, “I mean, just look at her”. The gloves! The capes! The hair! The eyebrows! The criticism of her personal aesthetic finds two items of widespread consensus: the first is that she is trying to be Jackie Kennedy. The second is that she needs to stop.

Does she, though? Criticising a woman’s appearance seems like a strange way to register one’s objections in a political disagreement, particularly when you’re a member of the tribe which not long ago was decrying the practice as unforgivably sexist. But also: Jackie is the country’s most famous icon of poise, class and femininity. She is the aspirational model of political wifedom, at least stylewise (perhaps not so much the actual marriage). Why shouldn’t Casey DeSantis model herself on her? Because Michelle Obama did it first? Because her husband isn’t a Kennedy, making her basically white trash? Are we doing “stolen valour” on pastel-coloured shift dresses now?

Maybe we are. The candy-coloured capelet paired with forearm-length white gloves certainly hits differently today from how it did in the Sixties. Casey DeSantis’s femininity is of a kind that is often accompanied by the modifier “performative”, the implicit suggestion being that it’s something akin to female drag for women. It’s less an aesthetic, more a costume: a uniform you don before a busy evening of serving the patriarchy.

Here, I have a different theory: that Casey DeSantis’s wardrobe is not about patriarchy, but public service — or at least, I think she thinks of it this way. This is a woman who, as a local TV personality on the eve of her nuptials, held a contest in which she allowed viewers to choose her wedding dress. Casey understands better than most, and certainly better than the last few First Ladies, just what kind of magic can happen at the nexus of fashion and populism. One wonders, then, when people complain that she needs to stop trying to be Jackie Kennedy, what the source of the angst really is. Are they mocking her because she can’t pull it off? Or are they worried because what if she can?

In this sense, Casey DeSantis is a First Lady for the influencer era. Politically involved, wildly photogenic, and utterly cognisant of who her audience is and how to connect with them. That she’s also an exemplar of this unabashed, practically countercultural breed of femininity may or may not be something she did on purpose just to annoy progressives. But the fact that it does annoy them is undoubtedly beneficial to her, and by extension, her husband. Every time she steps out wearing one of those outfits, every time she invokes her status as a wife and mom on the front lines of the culture wars, two things happen. The first is that she makes Ron DeSantis seem not just human, but presidential: it’s “dress for the job you want”, when the job you want is First Lady of the United States.

The second is that she baits her husband’s political opponents, a group of people who would otherwise sincerely describe themselves as feminists, into calling her a tacky bimbo who needs to sit down and shut up.

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That a politically engaged and outspoken woman can now be unironically denigrated as “America’s Karen” by members of the media elite speaks to a growing confusion surrounding how, exactly, we are supposed to feel about middle-aged women who kick up a fuss. Upper-middle class, educated, suburban white women who care more about policy, and family, than they care about party affiliation, were until recently seen as a powerful and respectable swing voting bloc. Politicians have been courting this demographic since at least 1996, when Bill Clinton won with 53% of the “soccer mom” vote by focusing on popular-with-the-ladies issues such as crime, education and family leave. (That Clinton was popular with the ladies himself probably also helped on this front, but we don’t like talking about that.)

But when the issues animating suburban women, from inflation to education to crime, are increasingly coded as Right-wing, so too are the women who mobilise and get loud to effect political change. Yesterday’s applause for the the politically active mom is today’s hit piece on why she’s actually a white supremacist. Yesterday’s icon of empowered feminism is today’s Right-wing termagant, marinating in ignorant privilege and demanding to speak to the manager. And if the progressive side doesn’t want these women, they might at least consider what will happen if its opponent successfully remakes itself as the place where women can go to have it all: a career, and a family, and an empowered voice in politics.

The thing about America’s Karen: she votes.

Yes, you want her, look at her you know you do.
Possible she wants you too, there is one way to ask her.

In the new version of The Little Mermaid, presumably out of deference to our evolving, post-MeToo sensibilities surrounding sexual consent, that line has been subtly changed. In 2023, Sebastian’s advice is: “Use your words, boy, and ask her.”

Not so romantic, but in this case, the question does seem necessary, since Ariel’s feelings are far from obvious. While 1989 Ariel makes it quite clear that she’s keen, our contemporary one, played by the pop singer Halle Bailey, has no thoughts of kissing at all — because, in a truly massive departure from the animated source material, she’s forgotten she needs to in order to win her freedom.

It’s not hard to see how the film’s writers might have talked themselves into giving their new Ariel amnesia: it’s not very feminist to have your heroine spend the bulk of her screen time voicelessly thirsting after a man, after all. But in stripping Ariel of her goal — stay human by seducing the prince — the writers have effectively gutted the character: now, she wanders vacantly through every scene with neither purpose nor agency.

I realise that this is a very adult complaint about a film that is ostensibly for children — but then, I’m not sure children are The Little Mermaid‘s intended audience. Like so many of Disney’s live-action remakes, this movie is for the now-middle aged millennial women who grew up watching (and loving) the 1989 original — only to become scandalised, as adults, by their heterocentrism, their whiteness, their phobias and isms. While Disney World is embroiled in an ongoing conflict with Florida governor Ron DeSantis — a sort of proxy war for the soul of the nation — the Disney content mill is plagued by the same anxieties as much of its adult audience.

The beloved but problematic cartoons from the bad old days remain available on the Disney+ streaming service, but come affixed with a hectoring title card that you cannot fast forward through: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” it reads. “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

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Meanwhile, many of its newer offerings are meant to be part of that future, explicitly catering to progressive sensibilities — and, perhaps equally important, sparking consternation among conservatives. The Little Mermaid — with its vague handwaving in the direction of consent culture, its dutiful nods to the environmental damage wrought by humans on the undersea world, and a black actress bringing the house down in a traditionally white role — is clearly intended to be part of that “more inclusive future”. As is the 2022 movie Lightyear, which featured an, albeit chaste, lesbian kiss, and Frozen 2, which was animated by an anti-colonialist message.

In fact, that heady mix of liberal millennial guilt and Nineties-era nostalgia is an animating force behind much of today’s most controversial entertainment, from the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters to the release of new, sensitivity-edited editions of works by Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine. Kids don’t notice this stuff, but adults do, which is entirely the point: all these choices generated a backlash from the Right, which in turn generated a backlash to the backlash from the Left, which in turn generated months’ worth of frantic coverage from a media establishment that relies on rage-clicks to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, in the quest to make The Little Mermaid inclusive, Disney seems to have forgotten that it should also be watchable, and the resulting film feels at once bloated and muted. Gone are the fish playing musical instruments, the whispering moray eels who recruit Ariel to Ursula’s lair. Bailey, a phenomenal singer, is miscast as a character who is silent during most of the story’s pivotal moments. And yet, more positive reviews, while noticeably cagey about the quality of the film itself, lavish praise on both her performance as Ariel and on the Disney corporation for selecting her. “If these films are to have any purpose beyond being nostalgia-powered cash-ins, it must be to allow all children — not just the white ones — to see themselves as Magic Kingdom denizens,” suggested the Guardian, while a Variety critic adds that, “the most important thing about remaking this particular favourite for a fresh generation is maintaining the fantasy that any of us can be Ariel”.

In other words: even if the movie is bad, it has the best intentions. It’s on the right side of history. And isn’t that what matters?

In this framework, any objection to movies such as The Little Mermaid can be understood as conservatives having a meltdown over the mere inclusion of diverse characters on screen. Perhaps this is true in some cases. But I suspect that what people really object to is a Hollywood apparatus that does not seek to entertain an audience so much as hand-hold it to the morally correct conclusions.

When Ted Lasso — a show featuring a multiracial cast, strong female characters, and an uplifting message of sportsmanship, self-betterment, and general decency — became the subject of backlash during its recent third and final season, it wasn’t because people suddenly became incensed by its diversity. It was because it started featuring scenes that could have migrated out of one of those dramatised instructional videos they show during DEI compliance training: such as the locker room lecture about looking at nude photos that followed a massive celebrity leak. If people balk at this, perhaps it’s less because they disagree with the substance of the message, and more because they resent its intrusiveness — can’t a guy just enjoy a TV show without having lessons in moral betterment foisted upon him, Sesame Street-style, by a bunch of actors dressed up as footballers?

At the root of this is the notion that art is inherently political, and hence that every mainstream entertainment property must necessarily double as either a morality play, or a salvo in the ongoing culture wars. For those who subscribe to this framework, there is no opting out; if your film doesn’t announce its politics, a set of politics will be assigned to it by a critical apparatus that is increasingly incapable of understanding art in anything but crude identitarian terms. One of the more incisive reviews of The Little Mermaid, written by Wesley Morris of the New York Times, describes the film as “everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval”. He’s right. And yet, even as he notes that the film is something of a trainwreck — and even as he admits that obsessing over the political correctness of movies like this is “a misery” — he nevertheless insists that it, and the other Disney films like it, are “important, culturally reparative work”. And so he reinforces the idea that art described as “important” need not concern itself with being beautiful, or moving, or funny.

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Critics and creators alike are increasingly caught in the trap of the “important” movie, which substitutes political pieties for a good story and markets itself on controversy instead of hype. Long before The Little Mermaid hit cinemas, progressives understood that they were basically obligated to support it for political reasons; even now, the narrative persists that anyone who dislikes the movie must be a racist troll (that is, unless they’re denouncing it for not being woke enough). And the “important” movie is many things: explicitly moral and painstakingly diverse. Checking its privilege. Centring marginalised voices. Sparking conversations and moving toward a more inclusive future. And yet it is invariably bad in every way — including the ways in which it attempts to do better.

Consider the original Little Mermaid, a story about a young woman who yearned for independence; who made a reckless, impulsive bargain in the hopes of pursuing the life she wanted; who learns that choices like this have a ripple effect well beyond the confines of one’s own life. Now consider the politically correct version of the same story, in which Ariel is conveniently saved, by amnesia, from knowing what she’s done — and hence deprived of any opportunity to own it, to reckon with it. The former story is about a girl who does things; the latter is about a girl to whom things happen. Which of these is supposed to be a vision of female empowerment, again?

This is perhaps the worst thing about Disney’s contemporary remakes: not that they are blatant cash grabs, but that they are infantilising. The original Little Mermaid placed infinitely more trust in its intended audience of children than the new version places in those same children, now that they’re grown up. And while it still includes that moment, at the end, in which Sebastian waxes wise about autonomy — “Children got to be free to lead their own lives” — it’s hard to fathom, after two hours and fifteen minutes of Ariel stumbling like a hapless sleepwalker through her own story, that anyone really believes it.

At first glance, this group — made up of internet-savvy provocateurs, anonymous contributors, eccentric celebrities, and some vestigial “alt-Right” figureheads — still seems to be supporting Donald Trump, their once and future president. In 2016, they viewed him as a figure of entertainment, a political outsider who was wittily disruptive and assumed the status of a fantastical, Warhammer-esque “God-Emperor”. The portly University of Chicago graduate William Thomas Clark, also known as “Kantbot”, was among those who fervently amplified this narrative, riding a small wave of internet virality after he was filmed shrieking about Trump “completing the system of German idealism”.

Though pollsters and political scientists continue to debate the extent to which this group swayed the outcome of the election, there’s little doubt that their online activities played a role in shaping the larger narrative. Their memes and posts, known for their unique blend of political cynicism, irreverence and humour, served to attract some undecided voters and further embolden Trump supporters. Twitter user @Ricky_Vaughn99, one of the most prominent and vitriolic voices within this community, expressed a keen insight into the fiery populist movements emerging on both the Left and Right. “There is definitely anger among the youth,” he told me in 2016. “The Bernie people are angry. The #BlackLivesMatter people are angry.” (Vaughn, it bears noting, was later outed as Douglass Mackey and convicted by a federal jury of depriving individuals of their constitutional right to vote for his role in a conspiracy that used memes to convince black voters to vote via text, which is not possible.)

Trump, a master of obtaining free publicity in his own right, benefited immensely from the countless articles scrutinising the role of the alt-Right in his campaign — articles of which I wrote more than my fair share. However, it was only after the election, as the alt-Right splintered into factions such as the “Post-Left”, the “Based Right” and a partly tongue-in-cheek, partly earnest “racist Right”, that the complexity of the Online Right’s influence began to fully reveal itself.

Into this arena steps Ron DeSantis, an exceedingly unexciting and well-qualified gentleman known for his relentless pursuit of upper-middle-class excellence. Whether it was leading his Yale baseball team in batting average, graduating with honours from Harvard Law School, or earning a Bronze Star and other military medals in Iraq, DeSantis has consistently demonstrated an unwavering dedication to lining his CV. And now, he’s aiming to add the support of the Online Right to it.

As befits such a plodding overachiever, DeSantis’s approach has been methodical and overt. His systematic attempts to usurp Trump’s dominance in this arena reveal his characteristic ambition, yet also underscore a glaring deficiency in political charisma. Despite his obvious intellect, DeSantis’s rigid demeanour and unusually high-pitched voice can seem off-putting to those accustomed to Trump’s brash and theatrical style.

In a move that couldn’t be more emblematic of his ham-fisted efforts to capture the Online Right, DeSantis chose to formally announce his candidacy in a glitch-ridden Twitter Spaces session, alongside none other than Elon Musk, a veritable rock star within these circles. Despite technical difficulties and a less-than-stellar audience count of around 150,000 listeners, DeSantis pressed on, evidently reading his campaign announcement off a script. Immediately afterwards, DeSantis’s campaign released a video featuring Musk so prominently that one might have mistaken him for DeSantis’s running mate.

Elsewhere, DeSantis’s campaign seems to have actively courted Seth Dillon, the head of the Right-leaning satire site, The Babylon Bee. In return, apparently, the Bee has been churning out pro-DeSantis content in support of his ongoing dispute with Disney, and even purging those who publicly clash with DeSantis’s associates. Only last week, for instance, Gavin Mario Wax, a pro-Trump Bee staffer, was unceremoniously fired by Dillon for a brusque tweet directed at Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s top media advisor. The spat culminated in Dillon telling Wax — via Twitter, of course, because this is how HR business is transacted today — to remove his association with The Bee from his Twitter bio, triggering a fiery response from its readers, particularly those loyal to Trump.

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As DeSantis wrestled with these issues, Trump, who had seemed adrift on the meme and comedy performance fronts for months, found his groove again with a lively CNN Town Hall. Trump delighted the audience with memorably nasty lines, showing a return to form that contrasted starkly with his opponent’s struggles. Later, on the day of DeSantis’s fraught Twitter Spaces event, Trump’s team did not miss the opportunity to land a body blow: they shared a bizarre fan-made parody of the event, which was doctored to include figures such as Hitler, George Soros, and the devil. And the jabs didn’t end there. Donald Trump Jr. later posted an AI-generated video featuring DeSantis superimposed onto Steve Carell’s character from The Office.

Not everyone in the Online Right was forthcoming with applause, however. For instance, prominent figurehead @LindyMan, a lawyer named Paul Skallas, misses the charm of the 2016 meme war. In a now-deleted tweet, he mourned the loss of “crude photoshops”, deeming the recent onslaught of Trump memes “too much” and comparing their appearance to “encountering a neanderthal on the street”. Despite this, a number of high-profile Online Right figures have told me that Trump still maintains an edge as a captivating figure. But even so, the tenor of the meme landscape has undoubtedly evolved since 2016. Back then, the goal was conversion; today, the aim seems to be to galvanise an existing base.

By this metric, Trump’s recent performance is certainly better than it was following his 2020 loss, though not quite at its 2016 peak. DeSantis, meanwhile, merely provides meme material, à la Jeb Bush, through a persona that lends itself to ridicule. His technical debacle during the Twitter Spaces event didn’t help his cause either. The stark contrast between the two candidates only fed the popular alpha/beta dichotomy that fuels many Online Right memes.

Even the proxy battles, such as the Babylon Bee incident, have taken an eccentric turn. An otherwise unremarkable Twitter scrap between Claremont fellow Dave Reaboi, a DeSantis supporter, and Trump-backing pundit Scott Greer led to an amusing ad hominem exchange over physical stature, age and marital status. This might seem absurd and pointless, yet it aligns with the dynamics of an online arena that amplifies and distorts, especially during political primaries.

These online dust-ups, all too easily dismissed as mere noise, play a critical role in shaping the narrative of a primary election. As thousands of them unfold in real time, they offer raw material for the media to dissect and amplify, drawing attention away from policy issues and focusing instead on personality clashes and personal drama. This can have a significant distorting effect, as perceptions of the candidates end up being influenced as much by these disputes as by their actual policy positions or leadership abilities — two areas in which DeSantis, at least on paper, would seem to hold an edge over Trump. Some Online Right posters have told me they hate seeing their cohort descend into this sort of linguistic violence, but this is precisely what happens during a political dogfight: a political poster can choose to either see the show — and thus risk losing the war for attention — or weigh in and gain followers by being the show.

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In such a scenario, how can DeSantis hope to win? At present, his primary tactic seems to be to harvest online discourse and then turn off the internet — with the result that his attempts to sell himself to the Online Right come across as an application for admission to Harvard rather than genuine engagement. It’s as though the group’s highly memeable and mockable concerns — lax policing, black-on-white and black-on-black crime, corporate and public school diversity programming, transgender rights, unsafe lockdowns and hastily released vaccines — have been diluted in his new strategic approach, which merely involves attempting to address these concerns through legislation.

In other words, DeSantis, a decidedly offline figure, is attempting to serve up a beggar’s banquet of Online Right issues. The problem is that this offering feels disingenuous to the intended consumer. It’s akin to a diner at a restaurant, peering down at the plate of food they’ve ordered from DeSantis’s meme-inspired menu. A friend notices their hesitation and asks: “Is there a problem?” The diner responds: “This is what I ordered, but now that I see it, I realise it was a bad choice.” It’s as if there’s a growing sense of buyer’s remorse with regard to the dullness of DeSantis, or a shock that he is either cynically or selflessly attempting to turn their smoke-filled chatroom banter into a cohesive political platform.

From this perspective, the overarching lesson is that the best and most viral memes cannot be forced into existence through market research (a lesson Hillary Clinton’s social media team learnt all too well). They are an improvisational performance that one can neither script nor control. And, for the time being, despite his age and political scars, Trump remains the most adroit improviser in the Republican field. As we hurtle towards the 2024 election, this tale of two meme strategies will continue to unfold. For now, though, “The Donald” still appears to be winning the war.

And yet… With DeSantis expected to launch his campaign this week, polls show Trump has opened up a 36-point advantage. His lead has evaporated, and his opponent gathers momentum by the day.

Spare a moment of pity for DeSantis’s poor historical timing. He faces an unprecedented opponent, a president twice impeached, who won a second nomination but lost re-election, and still enjoys the affection of millions of Republican voters. So, DeSantis finds himself stuck, forced to strike a balance between criticising Trump and avoiding the appearance of disloyalty. And while the currently unemployed Trump is free to campaign and raise funds around the country, DeSantis again must maintain a balance, positioning himself as a national candidate while still doing his job back home in Florida. That’s what led to scenes like the one in the state capital last week: Before a cheering crowd DeSantis signed a series of sweeping, headline-grabbing bills sure to appeal to a national conservative audience — a ban on transgender care for children, a ban on drag shows — and afterwards, like a celebrating pop star, he tossed Sharpie markers into the crowd.

This balancing act between local and national, responsibility and ambition, doesn’t always win adoration, though. It led DeSantis to pick a fight with one of the most powerful entities in his state: Disney. The feud started a year ago, when DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which restricts the teaching of gender identity to young students. It was an “anti-woke” signal to conservatives across the country. Disney objected. DeSantis responded by trying to seize a special tax district that gives Disney a measure of autonomy. And last Thursday, Disney returned a thunderous salvo, cancelling a billion-dollar expansion plan that would have brought 2,000 jobs to Florida. The move shook other business leaders — and political donors — and called into question DeSantis’s ability to navigate tricky political terrain. While Trump has struggled to pin one of his famously pithy nicknames on his opponent, the six-syllable “DeSanctimonious”, DeSantis seems to have earned one on his own; the day Disney cancelled its big Florida plans, “DeSatan” trended across US social media.

In Florida, the editorial board of the Orlando newspaper seemed grief-stricken by Disney’s withdrawal: “All gone,” it wrote. “All sacrificed on the altar of one man’s outsized ambition and arrogance.” The Trump campaign took notice, and hurried to release a statement: “Ron DeSantis’ failed war on Disney has done little for his limping shadow campaign and now is doing even less for Florida’s economy.”

DeSantis’s trip to Iowa was illustrative of the difficult line he is trying to tread. During a pair of speeches, he delivered largely rote remarks, rehashing points from his book The Courage to Be Free, staking out a series of anti-woke positions within the current American culture war while also trying to leave himself room to manoeuvre in a broader general election. “As much as I wish that a majority of this country were Republicans, that is not the case,” he told the crowd. “So, you want to win the Republicans, of course, but you also gotta win independents.”

The modern moment, though, belongs to Trump. While DeSantis attempts to build a campaign framework of policies and principles and positions, Trump operates in a field of personality and identity. While DeSantis delivered stump speeches in Iowa, the rest of the nation discussed Trump’s incendiary town hall interview on CNN, where he aired political grievances and fired up an adoring crowd. He senses DeSantis’s hesitancy. “He’s got no personality,” he told The Messenger. “And I don’t think he’s got a lot of political skill.”

With days remaining before his official entry into the presidential race, DeSantis finds himself unable to openly criticise the popular ex-president, and instead must describe himself as continuing the Trump legacy without the messiness of Trump the man. Just as conservative. Just as tough. But a lot less lunatic. DeSantis uses this contrast to make implicit swipes at Trump: “There’s no drama in our administration,” he said in March. “There’s no palace intrigue.”

It’s the sort of stance that appeals to moderates and soothes donors. And again, a brilliant tactic from 2016. The trouble is that since then the road to the White House has been littered with the bodies of Trump’s more-sane opponents: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, on and on. Of them, DeSantis seems to be modelling himself on Ted Cruz, who in 2016 used a Trump-lite strategy to win the primary in Iowa — and who then suffered withering humiliation from full-strength Trump, until nothing remained of his campaign but ashes and apologies.

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DeSantis is stepping into the same trap. After Trump’s town hall meeting on CNN, the pro-DeSantis political action committee Never Back Down posted a tweet that would, in Trumpian terms, seem downright polite. But at least it called out Trump’s false claims about rigged elections, his sexual assault case, and his role in January 6, landing on the less-than-inflammatory line, “How does this Make America Great Again?”

When Trump’s allies reacted with outrage, the group — incredibly, considering its only reason for existing — retreated. “That post was a massive mistake,” said one DeSantis ally, inadvertently revealing the power Trump holds over the Republican Party: even his most formidable opponent shies away from any substantial criticism. In the meantime, Trump feels no such compunction. It doesn’t matter that much of Trump’s mockery targets DeSantis’s positions that Trump recently held himself, such as a national sales tax or raising the retirement age to 70.

Trump isn’t DeSantis’s only obstacle, of course. Democrats and allies have already begun to attack. On Saturday the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organisation in America, issued a travel warning for the state of Florida, saying in a statement: “Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

But DeSantis’s most immediate challenges will come from other Republicans, who will use him as a shield to absorb Trump’s blows, and pummel him with their own. There will be many, but a few are notable: Tim Scott, a senator from South Carolina; Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations; Will Hurd, a former CIA officer and representative from Texas; Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech mogul from Ohio; and of course Mike Pence, Trump’s longsuffering vice president. Each of these will intrigue voters in different ways, and their rise gives an indication of where the Republican Party is leaning. Scott is black, Hurd’s father is black, Haley and Ramaswamy are Indian-American. Conservative donors recognise that an anti-woke argument carries extra weight coming from a non-white candidate.

All of these Republican opponents will fail, however. Under Trump, much of the Republican Party has evolved from a traditional political organisation to become an identity movement centered on Trump as a personality; even after all his misdeeds, he holds a lock on more than two thirds of GOP voters. They won’t be dislodged, which means that the vast cast of Republican hopefuls will fight over the scraps. The only candidate with any hope of overthrowing him is DeSantis, who seems to be stumbling around the paddock on his way to the race.

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Here again, though, his recent visit to Iowa offers some interesting clues as to a potential path to victory. The trip offered a showdown, of sorts, because Trump planned to visit Iowa at the same time. Which candidate would make a better speech? Which would draw bigger crowds?

But it never came to be. After a severe weather forecast Trump cancelled his appearance. The bad weather never materialised, though, and Iowans whispered that maybe Trump wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a small crowd. So, at the last moment, DeSantis re-directed his campaign caravan from the eastern edge of Iowa to the central state capital, Des Moines. He attended an outdoor barbecue party just a short distance from the site of Trump’s scheduled appearance, making a show of enjoying the weather. He spent time with influential Iowan politicians and activists, and political reporters left with spare time after Trump’s cancellation and — for a moment — seized the national conversation.

It was an impressive feat of logistics. More than that, though, it showed a nimbleness of mind and willingness by DeSantis to jab Trump in a way that diminishes him without alienating his legions of supporters.

But the forces arrayed against DeSantis are many, and powerful. He faces angry locals, upset about his handling of the Disney affair. Democratic foes across the country see him as a slicker, and in some ways more dangerous, version of Trump. His fellow Republicans paint him as a weaker, water-coloured variant. But perhaps his most powerful opponent is circumstance itself. Trump is a world-historic figure. He punches low and hard. He and his proxies have excoriated DeSantis, spending $8 million in April alone to call him names like “Pudding Fingers” and “Ron DeSalesTax”.

DeSantis’s methods seem outmoded in response. He apparently hopes to tiptoe through a primary while preserving hopes for a broader constituency in the general election. It is a strategy born of blissful ignorance: Trump has rendered that entire style of politics obsolete.

As you may have guessed, Young is no doctor. But for 25 years, up until his most recent arrest in the summer of 2022, the retired pro-tennis player from Utah peddled his life-threatening cures to sick and desperate Americans. He is not alone. Far beyond the familiar landscape of yoga, chiropractics and aromatherapy lies a Wild West of supposed cure-alls, many of them driven by small-scale entrepreneurs who hope to parlay a unique product or brand into a sprawling business empire. Such characters have always floated around the margins of America’s healthcare scene, but right now, fringe practitioners are having a moment. The alternative-medicine lobby that backs them has never been more powerful.

The story of its rise to power begins in the mid-Nineties, around the same time that Young first started dabbling in alternative health: pairing tennis-related diet and exercise advice with a line of branded dietary supplements. The supplement industry was going through a sea change, thanks to the nascent alternative healthcare lobby, which scored a massive and improbable victory in the halls of Congress in 1994. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act broadened the definition of a food supplement to include almost any vitamin, mineral, plant or hormone. It also, critically, shifted the burden of proof away from manufacturers to the federal Food and Drug Administration, which had to identify dangerous products on a case-by-case basis, a resource-intensive prospect that allows tens of thousands of quacks to sell shady products with relative impunity.

This lax regulatory environment made selling supplements far more profitable. Between 1994 and 2002, the US supplement industry mushroomed from $4 billion in annual sales to $18.7 billion, and the number of dietary supplements advertised grew too, from 4,000 to 29,000. Bolstered by the efforts of its Republican Senator, Orrin Hatch, the supplement industry was centred in Utah, which became a sort of Silicon Valley of suspect health claims.

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This was the ideal environment for Young, who rose to fame after publishing a bestselling book on the importance of an alkaline diet, The pH Miracle Diet, in 2000. The book was innocuous enough — it recommended exercise and a plant-heavy diet, and offered a blend of American can-doism and hucksterism that is tolerated, or even looked upon fondly, by the American public. This is where Young might have stayed, had his fantastical beliefs not led him down a much darker path.

The problem was that Young thought he had made a paradigm-shifting discovery: that germs were a myth, and that all diseases were caused by the body becoming overly acidic. When he began treating cancer patients at his upscale resort, a former grapefruit and avocado ranch in Valley Centre, he took his groundless theory even further. His de-acidifying treatments denied patients the chance to seek proper healthcare: Naima Houder-Mohammed, a 27-year-old captain in the British military with advanced breast cancer, drained her family’s finances to raise more than $77,000 (£62,700) to fund a visit to the Miracle Ranch.

Young might never have gone so far had the healthcare profession maintained its integrity. In the early days, there was a fairly clear division between people like Young and licensed medical doctors, a division that was enforced by state laws and various gatekeeper institutions — public health agencies, medical universities, and legacy media outlets, none of which would consider Young’s medical theory to be worthy of consideration.

But the alt-health lobby, swelling with profits and energy, began seeking ways to bypass these gatekeepers and make unfettered health claims directly to consumers. By 2005, supplement manufacturers were partnering with libertarian lobbyists to aggressively court small businesses in the alt-health community. Lobbyists held hundreds of Health Freedom Expos, where fringe practitioners gathered to hear them out. Their sales pitch focused on an appealing libertarian message: medical freedom. Instead of convincing the established gatekeepers of medical science that, say, herbs could treat cancer, practitioners should instead convince the public and their elected representatives that Americans had a fundamental right to buy the medicine of their choosing, whether it worked or not.

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It was an ingenious strategy. By 2010, Americans were spending $34 billion out of pocket for alternative healthcare, and industry analysts estimate that spending increased by more than 50% between 2010 and 2020. An estimated 72 million American adults now use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

The political makeup of CAM users shifted too. In 2003, it was extremely progressive Leftists who favoured alternative medicine, a hangover from America’s hippy movement. Twenty years on, it is mainly Conservatives, particularly when it comes to taking dietary supplements. A 2019 industry survey found that the American South has higher rates of supplement use than anywhere else in the country, while a 2008 survey found Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to be heavy users of supplements.

How did a culture known for peace, love, happiness, marijuana and socialism transform into a hotbed of gun rights, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and nationalism? The answer lies in the “medical freedom” movement, which very quickly found synergy with Republican politicians in the early 2010s, after 18 House Republicans, led by Georgia’s Tom Price, first floated the Medical Freedom Act. Not only were Republicans loathe to decry freedom in any form, but presidential candidates including Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Herman Cain also found that they could monetise their campaign email lists to sell quacky medical products to their supporters. At the same time, Right-wing media personalities including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro began promoting supplements and other alt-med products.

It wasn’t long before millions of conservative Americans found themselves bombarded with glowing sales pitches about herbal Viagra, brain-enhancing pills, pendants to ward off electromagnetic frequencies, and handheld lasers that could cure cancer. The pandemic only hastened this trend, as medical freedom lobbyists touted their miracle health cures and rail against mandatory mask-wearing and vaccines.

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Of course, not all alt-med users are poor Conservatives. The field tends to be associated with well-to-do urban women, who spend significant amounts of money on Gwyneth Paltrow-style toxic cleanses and reiki therapy. And it’s true that, among white women, the more money they make, the more likely they are to use mild alternative therapies (mostly mind-body medicine such as yoga) — but that’s alongside routine visits to their private doctors.

Instead, the real victims of the alt-med lobby are poor Americans who struggle to pay for proper healthcare, and who are far more likely to seek out alternative cures for serious diseases. A National Health Interview Survey found that having unmet needs in medical care or having delayed care due to cost were associated with a higher chance of CAM use.

And as long as America’s justice system remains ill-suited to combatting the problem of medical misinformation, that looks unlikely to change. Despite serving several months in jail in 2017 and being ordered by a judge to pay out $105 million in damages to a single patient in a civil lawsuit in 2018, Young has refused to give up his operation. In May 2022, he was hit with further criminal charges related to his treatment of a patient, including that he had committed “wilful cruelty” to an elderly woman suffering from liver and thyroid disease.

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It is unclear whether this will lead to a penalty that finally puts Young out of business — but, either way, the alt-health movement is unlikely to disappear soon. In the years since the pandemic motivated many Republicans to oppose Covid vaccines and mask mandates, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has brought other aspects of the medical freedom movement out of the libertarian fringe and into the conservative mainstream. He has emboldened Republican state lawmakers across the country to introduce hundreds of public health bills this year in the name of liberty: critically, they go beyond targeting Covid-specific mask and vaccine mandates by weakening evidence-based care.

Under the DeSantis agenda, Florida’s proposed medical freedom laws would give doctors and insurers the freedom to refuse treatment to vulnerable Americans and force doctors to inform patients of alternative Covid treatments, regardless of FDA approval. As other red states follow Florida’s lead, America’s alt-health lobby will continue to prey on the poorest in society. They have created a world we cannot escape: where Left is Right, medicine is poison, and the doctor’s white coat is a harbinger of death.

When we spoke earlier this week, he set out a radically different focus for the American military — away from Ukraine, and towards a conflict with China that he believes could come as soon as 2027. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

FS: You’re neither a full isolationist, nor a full maximalist — what’s your vision for American strategy?

EC: My perspective is that the right equilibrium for America, but certainly for a Right-of-centre political movement, is to ask what is in the American people’s concrete interest.

If you look at the voting bloc of the Republican Party — not to say that foreign policy should only serve them — but it’s made up of working- and middle-class Americans. I don’t think our foreign policy has served them. We’ve had this maximalist foreign policy that has proved disastrous. Americans are really tired of the “forever wars”. If you watch Fox News over the course of the day, the ad that leaves the most impressions, though maybe not the most common, is the one that’s for wounded warriors, people who were horribly wounded during Iraq or Afghanistan, or were killed in 9/11, or their widows. That is the mindset of a lot of Republican voters. I think there’s a real distrust and discontent about that foreign policy establishment, which is often the same people making the same arguments that got us into Iraq and the long war in Afghanistan. So what I’m saying is: let’s be unashamed in asking, “What’s in Americans’ interests?”

FS: And what is in their interests — let’s start by asking if America is too committed to the defence of Ukraine.

EC: The way you frame it is exactly the problem — we should be starting with China. It’s very revealing because a lot of not only the Biden administration but many Republicans of that above-the-waterline iceberg agree with you. I think that is the problem, because China is clearly by far the most significant challenge to the concrete, regular American interest. It’s far more formidable economically, but now also militarily.

The way I look at Ukraine is not in a vacuum or separate from China, but precisely through the lens of China, and through the lens of the recognition that we are neglecting the scale of the challenge posed by China. Through the defence strategy that I worked on, and other efforts, we have become more attuned to China, but it’s not a self-referential exercise. It’s more like a business. If you’re GM in the Seventies and you’re changing to adapt to Toyota, but you don’t do enough, you’re going to go out of business — or IBM vis-à-vis Microsoft.

In that context, I would say, yes, we are focusing way too much on Ukraine. I’m not in favour of just simply cutting the Ukrainians off. I think what Russia did and is doing is evil. That’s not the issue. But if our foreign policy is about Americans’ concrete interests, then we’re doing too much. We’ve already spent over $100 billion. We’ve sent equipment, which is not easily replaceable, which is relevant to the potential fight over Taiwan, and certainly the implications as it reverberates through our defence industrial base is very relevant. This stuff sounds arcane, but it’s not. For want of a shoe, the kingdom can be lost. Why are we taking risks on the most significant challenge to the US position in the world and our interest in the world in 150 years? We were a much larger economy than the Soviet Union. We alone were larger than the three Axis Powers, let alone with the British Empire and the Soviet Union. That’s the right way to look at this.

FS: But what does that mean, practically? If you were Senior Advisor to the President right now, what would you tell him to do?

EC: I would say, “I don’t want to talk about Ukraine right now. We’re going to talk about Taiwan and China and Asia first, and once we fix that problem to a satisfactory degree, we’ll spend time and political capital and resources on Ukraine.” I think we should put a lot more pressure and encouragement on Europe to step up and take the primary role. Why is the United States providing the vast majority of military and financial support to Ukraine — certainly in the military context, but also in the civilian area? That makes no sense. Europe is a vastly larger economic area than Russia. It has enormous latent military advantages vis-à-vis Russia. A lot of people have been celebrating US policy saying “American leadership is back” — I actually think this is bad. This is a failure, because if anything, it’s suffocated any effort by Europeans to stand up and say, “We’re going to take leading responsibility.” My basic attitude would be that Americans need to focus on China. We’re not just going to cut the Ukrainians off, but we are going to get the Europeans to do what we’ve been trying to get the Europeans to do since Dwight Eisenhower.

FS: But European countries have stepped up — Germany famously has torn up its postwar neutral position.

EC: No, the Germans haven’t, sorry.

FS: They are committing to vast amounts of increased expenditure on arms. Even if they were committing as much as you want, it’s going to take years or even decades for them to get the kind of military that you would need. You need American power there anyway, don’t you?

EC: Let’s get to the nub of the matter, which is: we don’t have time. It’s the assessment of the US intelligence community that Xi Jinping has ordered the Chinese military to be ready for a successful attack on Taiwan by 2027. It’s not a prediction, but that’s about as much warning as you can expect in the tough world of international politics. So we don’t have time. That’s four years away — in defence planning terms, that’s yesterday. We actually have very limited things that we can do.

The Germans deconstructed their military, not as a result of World War Two, but as a result of the end of history and the peace dividend. They had a very large and impressive military when the Federal Republic was seeking to defend itself against the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc. This has been a matter of policy, particularly under former chancellor Merkel — whose legacy will be ashes in her mouth. But the question is: can Germany do it? They’re not stepping up. Their military budget is going to be way below 2% of GDP again this year. The country that deserves applause, in this respect, is Poland, which is committed to almost 5%, and is actually putting its money where its mouth is.

FS: What about the UK?

EC: I give it a lot of credit for its ambition. Under Boris Johnson, it almost committed to 3% but I think that figure has been knocked down over time. My view is it’s great that Britain is more engaged on the continent, precisely because we are going to have to shift to Asia and the UK has very limited ability to project serious military power. if we’re looking at it from the enlightened, self-interested point of view invented in the United Kingdom, then we can’t get China and Asia wrong.

If China takes over Asia, in a hegemonic situation, which I think is its goal, our interests are going to suffer far more than they would suffer because Asia is a much, much larger economic area than Europe. China is a much larger and more formidable power than Russia is. So the question is, who’s going to bear the cost?

If Europe presents a future administration with “we just can’t do it, it’s going to take us too much time”, then, I’m sorry, you have to bear the consequence of that decision and inability. If you want to change that, we will help you, but we, the American people, are not going to allow China to take over Asia because you won’t take the steps needed to be able to defend yourselves. I think this administration is — and this is the point I made in UnHerd last year — actually not helping Europeans by providing a false sense of assurance about what the United States can and will offer in the future.

FS: Does that mean that attempting to keep back the Russian line in Ukraine or even push it further east is a dead project?

EC: I don’t think that’s true. Obviously, you can do things at the same time. The point is that at the political level, we need to make sure that everything that is even remotely needed for a Taiwan fight is allocated — that the resources go there. We gave a bunch of Abrams tanks to Ukraine — it is pretty hard to imagine Abrams tanks being useful in a fight with China. F16s and F35s are going to have trouble against the Chinese. So I don’t see why we couldn’t give F16s potentially to the Ukrainians. But also the Russians are having real trouble. They’re not ten-feet tall; this is not the Red Army of 1945. The notion that they’re just going to roll over the Ukrainians — you don’t have to accept that, Europe. You’re a huge economic area. The problem is that Europe is not stepping up.

FS: Where does Nato stand in this new world?

EC: During the Cold War, the relative balance of expenditures on defence between America and Europe was closer to 50%. I think we should go back to basics, which is: it’s not about the United States. And this is where that establishment and Europe’s interests do align, because the establishment in Washington loves to be the global leader — the Madeleine Albrights, George W. Bushes. “We stand taller; we’re the indispensable nation.” That’s great for that Washington establishment, but that is not what serves the people who are watching the wounded warriors. Why are the American people spending 3.5% of their GDP? It’s really insane when you think about it, that the Americans in Duluth, or Dubuque, or Denver are spending 3.5% while the Germans — who have more responsibility to provide for collective defence than anybody by orders of magnitude — spend 1.5%. And people say: “Germans don’t feel threatened.” Do you think Americans do? The only way to make this sustainable is to have a more balanced approach. I’m not advocating that the United States get out of Nato — to the contrary. I think the treaty is great. But if you go back and look at the ratification in 1949, this was not supposed to be the outcome — in fact, this was the concern.

FS: The treaty holds that “an attack on one is an attack on all”. That, if Russia invades Poland or Lithuania, it should be treated by America as an attack on America, and therefore would call on all of its defence capabilities.

EC: That’s not actually what the treaty says. And, of course, we would not treat an attack on a European ally the same way as an attack on the United States itself. The whole Nato strategy during the Cold War was explicitly about not doing that. That was why we developed flexible response, because there was a difference between an attack on Western Europe and an attack on the American homeland. Obviously there’s a rhetorical level at which that happens. The good thing is the Russians are not sufficiently threatening to make that a problem, because they can’t threaten European Nato, given the attrition that they’ve had in Ukraine, at least for some time.

That is a problem, much more of a problem, with China, which is, in a sense, the new Soviet Union. The point about Nato is that it’s got this post-Cold War model. We need to go back to something closer to the Cold War model, not the post-Cold War model, which is, basically, America takes care of everything. That benefited the Washington old guard, and benefited a lot of Europeans who could disarm. That doesn’t benefit the regular American people. If Nato continues in this direction, it risks breaking. My approach is designed to sustain Nato over the long term.

FS: What makes you so sure that China is actually planning some kind of attack on Taiwan?

EC: I don’t think it’s much of a debate anymore. The leader of the most unified Chinese government since Mao Zedong has explicitly given instructions to the party-army to be ready to attack Taiwan by 2027. And the Chinese pretty much assume that the Americans would come to Taiwan’s defence. That would mean war. That’s not a prediction, but if you go back to some old British wisdom represented in the Crowe Memorandum before World War One, usually aggressive powers won’t give you a precise date and time on which they’re going to move. And Xi Jinping has actually given us that. So we can never say we haven’t been warned.

The other thing is: it ain’t just rhetoric. Look at the military they’re building: it is obviously designed to take on, not just Taiwan, but the United States, Japan. They’re clearly developing a global military that looks like the American military: aircraft carriers, space satellites, nuclear powered submarines. Their basing architecture: Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, which is on the Atlantic coast of Africa. This is the future. I don’t make any predictions; I have no idea what Xi Jinping is going to decide to do. But if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, maybe it’s a duck.

FS: Do you think it would actually be an attack rather than just a blockade?

EC: One of the lessons of Ukraine is: don’t screw around; don’t pussyfoot around. If you’re going to do something, do it right. If you’re going to send two missiles, send six. I think the Chinese are clearly developing the capability to do just that. Yes — it’s difficult to mount and sustain an amphibious and air invasion across the strait, 100 miles. It’s not impossible. We’ve been able to do it over the last 75 years. With the exception of the Persian Gulf War, we haven’t, but everybody knew that we could drop marines pretty much where we wanted in large parts of the world, and that nobody could do anything about it. That’s one thing we have in our favour, the difficulties of such an operation.

To go back historically: the Wehrmacht was much more powerful than the remaining British Army after Dunkirk, but the Germans couldn’t find a way to get across the Channel and sustain it. That’s the model to think about. But the reason I think they’re not going to do a blockade — which I think they could, it’s not impossible, and that could succeed — is that it would leave a lot to chance. It leaves a lot in the hands of the Taiwanese; it leaves a lot in the hands of the Americans. It cedes the initiative, it cedes the element of surprise, and I just don’t think the Chinese are likely to do that. I think they’re at least as smart as we are — probably smarter given our foreign policy over the last 25 years — and so I would expect them to take the most advantageous approach: something that would move below the threshold of our response.

FS: But China is actually quite a cautious state. Why risk plunging the whole world into war?

EC: I don’t know how the Chinese have gotten this reputation. They won the Civil War through the most brutal means possible. Then they seized Tibet through invasion. They invaded Hainan Island as part of the conclusion of the Civil War, and they were planning on invading Formosa before they directly intervened in the Korean War with huge amounts of troops and fought the Americans and the British to a standstill. They also directly attacked Vietnam in 1979 — their ambitions were to go a lot further.

Why would they do it now? I think they actually feel that they need to. Xi Jinping is saying that the United States is trying to strangle China. You see what he’s doing with Vladimir Putin and Russia — they regard us as being in an almost existential struggle, which is very dangerous. The reason they would use military force is to secure their place as the world’s top economy, and a large guaranteed geo-economic sphere, because they can see what’s happening with things like Aukus and so forth. There’s a lot of balancing behaviour to check China’s overweening ambitions, and if they want to get out from under that, they have a strong incentive to use military force, and they’re preparing to do so.

FS: Let’s say that attack does happen. What do you want the American response to be?

EC: This is a situation where being “half-pregnant” is almost the worst approach. My preferred policy — which is, of course, designed to deter and avoid a war, rather than get into it — is for the United States to act decisively and expeditiously to defeat a Chinese invasion, which would involve anti-ship, anti-air, attacking Chinese ground forces that land on the islands. It almost certainly would involve selective attacks on the Chinese mainland that would be constrained to try to help manage escalation, which would be an uncertain endeavour. The best thing in this situation is to be as prepared as humanly possible, and not to get close to the marginal edge of a conventional fight — and that’s what we’re not doing right now. I think the problem is that if we half-bake it, we could get a situation in which the Chinese do it, and we offer an unsatisfactory or unavailing response, which means we’re at war with China, but we’ve lost. That’s the worst outcome, and that’s actually going to be worse for Europe, because in that situation, there’s going to be a giant sucking sound of every US resource going to the primary theatre.

FS: And that means greater investment in military hardware and deterrence around the South China Sea?

EC: No, actually the reverse. I’m in the “speak softly and carry a big stick” department. I think we are peacocking right now, and probably with the strength of a peacock. It’s mostly for show. Forgive the analogy: if you remember the movie Rocky 4, but Dolph Lundgren is the Soviet boxing star who was all business and quiet, and then you have Apollo Creed in the American flag dancing around, then Dolph Lundgren kills him in the ring. That’s my fear of the situation that we’re heading into.

I actually want us to really focus on sharpening that stick, making it a bigger stick, if you will, and doing less in the way of publicity. All these people are on the island and making all these statements about Taiwan — “the CCP is evil” and all this stuff. Sure, the CCP is evil. I sympathise with Taiwan’s freedom. But we are in a super dangerous situation and should focus on hitting the gym. In Europe — I’m not picking on Ukraine — we’re not anywhere near as disciplined as we want. There’s waste in the defence budget. There are difficulties in resuscitating the defence-industrial base. But that’s the world we have to live in. We have to live in the world of now. By the way, the American people are not showing a lot of interest in dramatic increases in defence spending. This is not 1980.

FS: Isn’t that a problem? If the American people aren’t interested and regard this as another “forever war”, they may not be with you on Taiwan.

EC: That’s exactly the problem and that’s one of the reasons I’m so worried about Ukraine. People say we can walk and chew gum — no, we should be husbanding the voters’ resolve. We should be very careful with their money. I think we can do it. We’re already spending almost a trillion dollars on the defence budget. But then, if we’re going to do that, we can’t think we can fight a proxy war with Russia indefinitely. I’m acutely conscious of whether the American people will support a defensive Taiwan. And the Taiwanese are not helping the cause by spending less per capita on defence than the American people do, which is insane. We are really on a knife edge.

FS: And you don’t buy the reverse argument that weakness on Ukraine would signal weakness on Taiwan?

EC: It’s such a tendentious argument. There’s a group now, particularly more on the Left, of people who are Ukraine hawks, who are starting to call for détente with China. I actually appreciate that, because at least we’re seeing a choice. You find this particularly among hawks, who say, “We’re going to do Ukraine, and it’s going to show China and then we’re going to pivot.” It’s a “we’re going to win the lottery” sort of strategy.

Obviously China is looking to some extent, but China’s main calculation is going to be the balance of military forces vis-à-vis Taiwan, and how resolute the American government and the American people are vis-à-vis this specific conflict. It’s the same argument that defenders of the Vietnam War used: that, if we don’t win in the rice paddies of Vietnam, we’re not going to win in Europe. Europeans at the time were saying: “We actually think this is a waste; we think you’re eroding American people’s support.” And in the wake of Vietnam, initiatives like the Mansfield Amendment tried to pull US forces back from Europe. You have the Robert Kagans of the world, who just constantly harangue the American people to “fight the jungle”, and about “global liberal hegemony”. And they’re tuned out. Of course they’re not going to do that kind of thing. So what we really need to do is be much more careful and respectful and husbanding of the American people’s resolve.

FS: Is there a chance you could make conflict more likely by anticipating it?

EC: It’s a very serious worry. We are now in a situation, because of our neglect of Taiwan, where the Chinese clearly want to subordinate Taiwan. That is not the issue — we are not going to catalyse something that they did not already want. They’ve been working, since the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis, assiduously and carefully and ruthlessly to develop a military to do this. By neglecting our defences there, we’ve now brought it into the realm of the possible. So now we’re in the situation, frankly, that Britain faced in the late Thirties, where you’re understrength in the primary theatre. Your choices are: to be weak and essentially ensure failure — you might avoid the war, but at the cost of all your important interests. Or you can arm — but then you might precipitate, at more of an operational and tactical level, a Chinese response to get out from under this. This is a problem I take very seriously.

FS: The alternative historical analogy is the First World War, which some historians would say that we would have been better off not having and was the worst case for everybody.

EC: The worst case was what happened. The second-worst case would have been German dominance of Europe, which would clearly have turned against British interests very quickly. The best case, and it is directly analogous, is that Britain — and I think Britain actually behaved really admirably from a strategic perspective — reoriented its whole military and strategic policy. The historic enmity with France — it settled that issue. It settled the enmity with Russia; it cut deals with the Japanese. It cut deals with the Americans, who — for all this Special Relationship stuff — saw Great Britain as our primary opponent in the 19th century. Britain settled that as well and focused on Germany.

The problem is it didn’t go far enough. In the decisive moment in the July Crisis, instead of Britain saying clearly it was committed to the alliance with France, it equivocated and hedged. And, more than that, if the British had the military forces already generated and ideally deployed on the continent — that’s the lesson Nato learned in the Cold War — I think the Germans could have been dissuaded. The lesson here is that getting 90% of the way there, or 85% of the way there, is not the same as getting 100% of the way there. You have to get 100% of the way there.

FS: How would you position the two leading Republican candidates — Trump and DeSantis — on these foreign policy questions?

EC: Both Governor DeSantis and Trump are with strategic reality, and where the voters are, far away from that traditional blob, that traditional foreign policy establishment. You have other candidates, like former ambassador and governor Nikki Haley, who are clearly running in that lane. Of course, President Trump was the first not to just talk about China, but really do something about it. Governor DeSantis has been very clear on the primacy of the China threat. I think that that’s very telling.

FS: Is there a difference between them?

EC: I’m not going to characterise their positions. You can go ask them. What I will say is, if you look at what they’ve said, for instance in response to the Tucker Carlson questionnaire, I think they’re both focused on China and they’re both concerned about overexposure in the Ukraine context.

I think that the strategy that I’m advocating for is the natural one for a future Republican administration, hopefully one that would win in 2024. Bear this in mind: the next presidential term is going to include the year 2027. So if you are the president, then you are going to really face the issue: am I going to be the first president to lose a major-power war? The United States withdrew from Vietnam or withdrew from Afghanistan, but we have never lost a major-power war. That is going to be a very sobering bucket of cold water to pour on the presidential administration as they transition, or if it’s a continuation of this administration or another Democrat.

In that context, you need to be super-real, super-practical, because you can’t do the walk and chew gum. But you also can’t take the Rand Paul approach, because then China’s going to take over Asia. That’s clearly going to be bad. So my argument is not going to catch fire in the US Senate necessarily. But what you are going to see is, I think, a future administration saying:  “We’re living in a really tough world and we can’t afford the old shibboleths, the old religion.”

FS: Would you work for either Trump or DeSantis?

EC: At the end of the day, anybody who’s working in a presidential administration is a servant of the people, but, of course, is working as staff to the person who has been elected. But if somebody wanted to put something like the approach that I’m advocating for, I would be honoured to work for them. If they’re not, then I think it’s pretty clear, I’m probably not the right guy.

John McCain used to say that we were living in the most dangerous time, and that was in 2006. And I used to think to myself, actually, that’s probably about the safest time we’ve had since before World War One. I think today is genuinely a really, really dangerous time. Look at what Xi Jinping was caught saying to Vladimir Putin on video: that changes are coming which have not been seen in 100 years. I don’t question this man’s resolve, his seriousness, his ruthless brutality. And I think that’s the kind of attitude that we need to take — obviously not the same attitude or same approach — but that level of sobriety and seriousness is what we need as we move further into this century.

When I wasn’t giving attendance-optional history lectures to hundreds of undergraduates — who’d sit there watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad — I was inveighing against the university’s debased standards: writing in The Atlantic and going on National Public Radio to explain that I didn’t even bother to grade most of these sad, ill-informed consumers who were going into debt for a degree worth less than the paper on which it was printed. By the time I departed in 2016, I was arguing that this mediocre school, and other lesser universities like it, should be taken apart brick by brick. UT-Arlington was doing a disservice to most of its students and defrauding taxpayers along the way.

Now, Republican politicians around the country are taking aim at state higher education institutions. But their reasons differ greatly from my own: they seek control of what is being taught, rather than an overhaul of the system. Most notably, Florida Governor and hopeful Presidential nominee Ron DeSantis has made it his mission to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes at all state-subsidised universities overseen by his administration. He is also advocating for governor-appointed trustees to have the power to eliminate majors in certain subjects.

In January, DeSantis replaced six of the 13 members on the New College of Florida’s board with trusted supporters, including Christopher Rufo, who has spearheaded the nationwide push to restrict critical race theory (CRT) in public-school curricula. Other big-state GOP governors are making similar moves in their states, with Greg Abbott of Texas going after CRT, and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia appointing conservative trustees at the Virginia Military Institute.

DeSantis’s stated reason for taking over New College was that it was no longer serving the students of the state, citing an enrolment decline of 27% between 2016 and 2021, which he attributed to the school’s emphasis on race and gender theory (while conveniently omitting the fact that the incoming class for fall 2022 was the largest in New College’s history). New College doesn’t grade its students, but rather encourages them to explore a variety of liberal arts subjects — though its faculty, student body and course offerings lean far to the Left. The Florida Governor appears to be proposing to turn an offbeat hippie college into an offbeat “Great Books”-inspired college. Critics of DeSantis argue that he is attempting to turn New College into “Hillsdale South” — referencing the influential Right-affiliated college in Michigan where a number of eminent conservative thinkers have taught or been educated.

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Behind DeSantis’s focus on this tiny school — which currently has a total of 700 students — is a bigger project: his move is supposedly the first in a series, per Chris Rufo, that will allow conservatives to effect their own “long march” to reclaim these institutions.

But while his rhetoric is grabbing headlines, DeSantis’s battle for ideological control of curricula is merely a distraction from the much greater crisis in education — the one that troubled me during my own time in academia. Instead of kvetching about CRT and bathroom access, our governors ought to be completely restructuring the country’s lower-tier state universities, which, aside from one or two flagships per state, are generally third-rate operations. Nationwide college enrolment has declined by 9.4% in the past two years, and these schools have been hit especially hard. State-funded universities are having their budgets slashed and adjuncts are even more overworked and underpaid; there is more focus on ineffective online classes, and worse learning outcomes for students who have been paying to watch ill-run Zoom courses in their cramped dorm rooms.

DeSantis’s own state is a textbook example of academic bloat. The State University System of Florida consists of 12 public universities, with 341,000 enrolled students, of which only four are engaged in what the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education refers to as “very high research activity”. The rest of these institutions, such as the enormous Florida Atlantic University, are vast and shabby post-secondary “student warehouses”, similar to UT-Arlington.

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It is these universities, not the tiny New College of Florida, that constitute the real threat to public education — and not because they are “woke”, but because their retention and graduation rates are horrific. They are enrolling students, taking their federally-subsidised student loans, and barely graduating around 50% of them. The students, mostly commuters unsure of what to do with themselves but unable or unwilling to enter the workforce after high school, drift in and either drop out immediately, pocketing their first helping of financial aid, or linger forever, accumulating vast amounts of debt for a degree in a vague, meaningless subject like “Communications” or, as at UT-Arlington, “University Studies”.

The more complicated the system becomes, the more difficult it will be to reform it. America’s public post-secondary education depends on a welter of separate and sometimes overlapping budgets, but to be eligible to get a cut of the all-important $235 billion pool of federal financial aid, colleges have to meet Kafkaesque accreditation standards. Each state works with a cartel-like private accreditor, subjecting all universities to its review, regardless of the ambitions or capabilities of their student bodies. Typically, the result is a report that numbers hundreds of pages with innumerable recommendations, which creates absurd amounts of work for administrators and often drives excessive spending increases in order to meet supposed shortfalls in facility or faculty quality.

DeSantis, like other Republican governors, has little to say about this vast system that serves almost no one and does nearly nothing. He just wants to turn a silly boutique Left-wing school into a silly boutique Right-wing school. If he had genuine vision, befitting a potential president, he’d look to scupper the ageing hulks in his university fleet, sinking the likes of Florida Atlantic University to the bottom of that ocean, and starting from the ground up. Not every university needs to be a research-driven “multiversity” intended to be a “prime instrument of national purpose”, of the sort envisioned by former University of California president Clark Kerr in 1963. What the nation needs more of are small, single-subject institutes of the sort that propelled American higher education forward in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The single-building Litchfield Law School founded by Tapping Reeve in 1774, set the standard for American legal education, educating everyone from Vice President Aaron Burr to Supreme Court Justice Henry Baldwin, before closing in 1833. Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, also confined to a single building, was the centre of Jewish Studies in America, training luminaries such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion until its closure in 1986.

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In other words, DeSantis — indeed, governors of all stripes — should be figuring out how to radically shrink higher education. College must be more than an open-to-all holding cell for twenty-somethings. Community colleges, consistently the best value throughout the US when it comes to technical certifications, can pick up the pre-professional slack, as can trade union training centres and apprenticeships. And focused, single-subject institutes will offer far better training for those with specialised skills. Law school should no longer require a degree for admission — an onerous and stupid prerequisite that sets the US apart from other Anglophone countries — and should also accept far fewer students overall, in order to increase the wages and job opportunities of those who graduate. (At the moment America, a nation of 332 million people, has 1.3 million lawyers.) Meanwhile, American students with talent in specific areas, such as computer science or drama, could be directed to small state institutes that offer rigorous, focused training.

That’s not to say all flagships should be eliminated. Students seeking a wider curriculum, and the attendant rah-rah sporting events and beer-saturated Greek life, should be catered for. The same goes for students who prefer institutions with a certain ideology. There is nothing inherently wrong with a college having a political leaning, as long as it’s not the only option. Left-leaning states such as California should open their own state-subsidised far-Left version of the Hillsdale model. What harm would that cause, provided the state supports a few institutes representative of the Right’s vision of liberal arts?

The structure of American higher education has been deeply informed by politics for centuries, but it has not been informed by much, if any, innovation since Clark Kerr outlined his grand, all-encompassing vision for the “multiversity” five decades ago. Ron DeSantis has awkwardly stumbled upon a solution, but he and his team can’t see the wood for the trees: they want to win votes and donations for a single political slap fight over a 700-student college, at a time when the fate of higher education — and the accompanying $1.75 trillion debt load carried by current and former students — hangs in the balance. The solution, to borrow a phrase of Kafka’s, is nothing short of a “guillotine, just as heavy, just as light”. A courageous politician would let the guillotine drop, taking as many of the higher-ed hydra’s heads with it as it possibly can.

With The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Survival, DeSantis very clearly frames his prospective candidacy in light of our historical moment: he is the tribune of the red states and antidote to the ills of progressivism. He is keen to highlight his achievements as governor: resisting lockdowns, fighting wokeism in schools, and standing up to big corporations like Disney, one of the state’s major employers. His record won him a landslide re-election in November with 59% of the vote, flipping Miami-Dade (with its concentration of Latino voters) and Palm Beach counties from the Democrats. But will his success be enough to snatch the nomination from Trump and the presidency from Joe Biden?

Though the book is generous with praise for Donald Trump, the unstated premise of DeSantis’s run is that he can do what the former president once did but without the outsize flaws. If DeSantis truly wishes to displace Trump as the party’s leader, he must prove that he is a superior vessel for the populist impulses that now predominate in the GOP (“Trumpism without Trump”). The problem with the 45th president, as I have argued before, is that he was not able to follow through on the authentically populist and nationalist instincts that won him the White House in 2016. Under the influence of institutional Republicans, his administration largely stuck to the standard party line, or else failed to deliver in the few instances when the president’s advisers did try to break free of Reaganite dogmas. (In a strange twist, Trump disowned his administration’s most impressive executive achievement — the vaccine roll-out — in order to win culture war points.)

Trump also failed to grow his coalition by winning the support of moderates and independents, who are less likely to care about his partisan vendettas. Per Theodore White, a president with a sharper historical sense would have been more alert to the transformative potential of the present moment which, like the New Deal or the end of the Cold War, marks the epochal movement from one paradigm to another. Such a leader would also not have been so easy to derail or distract.

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How Miami turned red

By Alex Perez

So, does Ron DeSantis fit this bill? By all accounts, he is a far more cerebral politician than Trump ever was, and, being more conscious of the shifting ideological tides in the GOP, he is in theory less likely to be co-opted by the professional conservatives in Washington. DeSantis’s intellectual streak can be seen in his CV: he is an Ivy League graduate, had a stint as a history teacher, and authored a now forgotten 2011 book, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama, in which he derived his vision of conservatism from the framers of the Constitution. DeSantis is able to engage with groups like the National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon”), a gathering of heterodox thinkers, in ways that more pedestrian elected officials can’t. Looking at his pronouncements in these intellectual settings can help piece together DeSantis’s own distinct “sense of history”.

In September, DeSantis gave the headline speech to the NatCon gathering on his home turf in Miami. He seemed aware of what made this era different from Reagan’s: “when Reagan came on the scene, for example, it was really big government that was to blame… You now have a woke mind virus that has infected all these other institutions.” DeSantis was saying what many populist Republicans have been thinking, which is that the private sector needs to be reined in just as much as the state — a sea change in conservative philosophy. And if “culture war is class warfare”, as J.D. Vance (another rising star of the Right) said, then one can expect cultural and economic grievances to be bundled together as the Right takes stands against firms like Disney, fighting against cultural wokeism while also fighting for the material interest of the working class.

But taking a closer look at DeSantis’ war on Disney shows that this is not actually how it works. DeSantis was ruthless in stripping the various privileges that the state had long granted to Disney in response to their opposition to Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. As one impressed conservative columnist put it, here was clear evidence that the governor was ready “to take on Big Business on behalf of the little guy”, which was “Reagan-era Republican heresy”. However, conspicuously absent in DeSantis’s case against “The Happiest Place On Earth” is any mention of its exploitative working conditions or its refusal to pay decent wages to its workers. DeSantis appears to be indifferent to the properly economic dimensions of populism and is only concerned about calling out corporations in so far as a cultural dispute over wokeism is involved. Man cannot live on culture war alone, and it was left to Bernie Sanders to speak up about these bread-and-butter concerns. It doesn’t help DeSantis’s populist bona fides either that even after their feud, Disney lobbyists remained co-chairs for his inauguration.

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Nikki Haley's neocon pantomime

By Michael Cuenco

DeSantis is equally constrained in his conception of populism when it comes to immigration. The governor has been perfectly willing to make an “own the libs” show of bussing migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but has been terribly reluctant to enact universal mandatory E-Verify in his state as a means of screening out undocumented migrant workers from the labour market. Why? Because it would be burdensome on business. After four years in power, it was only a few days ago (and now that he is about to run for president) that DeSantis came out in favour of universalising E-Verify — though this was also his promise when he ran for governor in 2018. But even if he succeeds in getting a law passed, much will depend on the sincerity and effectiveness of enforcement. As Bloomberg reported, “E-Verify Laws Across Southern Red States Are Barely Enforced… Even the most anti-immigration states don’t like cracking down on business.” It seems as if DeSantis (like Trump) wants to come across as an immigration hawk for culture-war purposes but without offending the business-donor class.

What about the anti-woke crusade in education? Surely, as DeSantis must be telling himself, the great mass of voters can get behind that. However, Florida’s war on woke schools is emblematic of what happens when the Right takes culture war as the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Yes, parents have no patience for woke excesses, but neither do they endorse the other extreme, which results in the same pathologies (book bans, political uniformity) but in a conservative direction. Republicans often interpret public opposition to wokeness as license to indulge in their own peculiar moral and cultural tastes, which can be no less alienating. Polling shows that banging on about Critical Race Theory has failed to resonate with all but a small slice of parents across the country. At the end of the day, most voters have little time for the ideological fixations that animate partisans of the Left and Right, and simply want an America that can deliver stability and opportunity for all.

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The coronation of Ron DeSantis

By Park MacDougald

In his 2011 book, DeSantis identified with the founders who supported proposals for a strong national government, or what would eventually become the Constitution. Chief among these were the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. DeSantis even declared that Hamilton was “one of the greatest American statesmen never to serve as president”. Opposing them were the Anti-Federalists, who argued against the idea of an American nation-state and wanted to retain a minimal confederation. These tendencies have remained in tension ever since. The Anti-Federalists tended to be reactive, defined more by what they were against. And despite his professed Hamiltonian affinities, DeSantis has governed more from this negative position, building his political brand in opposition to things, be it wokeism or “Fauci-ism”. (Re-litigating the pandemic in 2024, when most Americans wish to move on, is also not likely to be a vote-getter.) The GOP itself seems to be moving toward an open embrace of Anti-Federalism: witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce” idea.

However, what is needed now is a revival of the Federalist tradition, defined more by what government is for, and infused with a greater level of institutional creativity and ambition. To build a new post-Reaganite order, it is not enough to wage a culture war without also working to change the material and institutional frameworks that shape American life. Like the Federalists themselves, who renovated the republic and used the power of the federal state for economic modernisation, the next generation of statesmen must present a national vision that is more positive than oppositional. One wonders if Ron DeSantis has enough of a “sense of history” to do just that.

It was a farcical conclusion to a very bad week for the former president. Earlier in the week, USA Today published a poll finding that Republican voters preferred Florida governor Ron DeSantis to the ex-president by a 2-to-1 margin, 56% to 33%. Early hopes among Trump die-hards that this result was “biased” were then thoroughly dashed on Wednesday, when the Wall Street Journal and CNN came out with polls showing strikingly similar results. In the Journal poll, DeSantis led Trump 52-38. CNN worded its questions differently, but found that Republican voters preferred a “different candidate” over Trump by a 62-38 margin. DeSantis was the most popular alternative.

It is a dangerous business to predict the political demise of Trump, who has been making pundits look stupid since he stepped onto the national stage. Few took him seriously as a candidate when he first declared in 2015, few believed he could defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and few believed he could come within a few tens of thousands of votes of re-election in 2020. But this time is different. Trump really is done. 

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Ohio and the battle for populist America

By Joel Kotkin

Analysis of his political fortunes has always been somewhat distorted by the fact that he is universally loathed by the American media class — or at least those who exist outside the self-contained bubble of conservative media. How could people vote for such an obviously unfit candidate? Well, pundits said, because they were racists, or economically anxious, or conspiracy-addled lunatics in thrall to lurid theories about paedophile elites. Perhaps it was because the Left had become too woke and abandoned the working class. But, surely, the man was so ludicrous and criminal that the American people would eventually come to their senses and chuck him out. 

The truth was always a lot simpler. Most Trump supporters — aside from a numerically small but electorally important slice of Obama-Trump voters in the Midwest — liked him because they were Republicans and he was the Republican candidate. Recall that Trump won a plurality, not a majority, of the GOP primary vote in 2016, and that was against a fatally crowded establishment field — similar to what Bernie Sanders accomplished in 2020 before Barack Obama intervened to unify his party’s establishment behind Joe Biden. But the voters who backed other GOP candidates were not about to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, no matter what Trump did or said. 

Once Trump was the nominee and, later, the president, the most powerful force in American politics, negative partisanship, was there to do the heavy lifting. For most Right-leaning Americans, you could always tell yourself something along these lines: “Sure, Trump is a loose cannon with a complicated relationship to the truth. But I like his policies, the economy is doing great, the media is biased against him and exaggerates his flaws, and in any case, better him than a Democrat.”

Trump’s talent for polarising the entire political field made it easy for him to shore up Republican support. Whatever he did, good or bad, one could be sure that at least one prominent Democrat (and probably more than one) would respond with something so outrageous to the sensibilities of Republican voters that they would feel they had no choice but to support their man. 

Then, 2020 changed all that. There was, of course, the loss itself, the refusal to concede, and the debacle of January 6, although the latter meant more to voters who were already inclined to dislike him. The bigger problem for Trump was simply that he was no longer president. No more White House press briefings, no more Twitter account, and no more 24/7 Trump news cycle, despite the best efforts of CNN and the January 6 committee. Trump was, of course, still the most famous Republican in the country, and still beloved by most of the base — for a time. But for a man whose singular political genius was his ability to command attention and turn it to his advantage, being one option among many for 2024 — not to mention one with eight years of political baggage in a country where voters are notoriously fickle — was always going to be an uphill battle. 

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The Democrats' false victory

By Joel Kotkin

It took the midterms and their aftermath, however, to deliver the death blow. Everyone in the GOP knew that Trump had backed a number of bad candidates in winnable races, but in the last few months before the election, most believed the hype about an incoming red wave (I did too). But the red wave was fake news, and Trump candidates sank the GOP ticket in major swing states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump responded by lashing out against DeSantis, one of the few Republicans to make an impressive showing in an otherwise disastrous year. In 2016, he had ridiculed candidates such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and it had worked because voters believed in their hearts that they really were low-energy losers. Now Trump was the loser attempting to bully the winner, and the jokes weren’t funny anymore. 

The month and a half since the midterms has been one long, rolling disaster for Trump. Against the wishes of his advisors, he announced his reelection bid barely a week after the electoral bloodbath, earning the endorsement of only one senator. Rupert Murdoch abandoned him. His company was found guilty of criminal tax evasion in Manhattan. He hosted Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes in Mar a Lago; following a massive backlash, his camp was forced to claim that he had been tricked by the rapper’s entourage, only for Kanye to go on Alex Jones a few days later and sing the praises of Hitler. After the release of the “Twitter Files” — internal documents relating to the company’s decision to ban Trump after the Capitol Riot — Trump seemingly called for the suspension of the Constitution. By the time he announced the NFTs, it was hard not to wonder if even he had given up hope. 

If Trump were still president, no doubt he’d be able to rally more support. But he’s only an ex-president, and one who seems more embittered and desperate by the day. Unlike in 2016, he only has one rival. And unluckily for Trump, DeSantis looks like a man who can win.

***

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Except she couldn’t. Because of one man, one word.

For many years, political opponents had complained about the fact that Warren, while a professor at Harvard Law School, had been counted as a native American. It simmered, this row, but never really reached boiling point.

Until Donald Trump. The word: Pocahontas. He used it repeatedly to describe Warren in 2016, when she was stumping for Hillary Clinton. (Warren might have been Hillary’s vice-presidential pick!) A typical example from a rally that summer:

“Pocahontas is not happy, she’s not happy. She’s the worst. You know, Pocahontas — I’m doing such a disservice to Pocahontas, it’s so unfair to Pocahontas — but this Elizabeth Warren, I call her ‘goofy’, Elizabeth Warren, she’s one of the worst senators in the entire United States Senate.”

The earnest fact checkers at the New York Times would tell you that Senator Warren was eventually goaded into taking a DNA test, which suggested that somewhere in her past there was probably some Native American blood. But nothing that justified her signing an ethnic cookbook, “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee”. Not that the facts matter, terribly. Pocahontas hangs round her neck. It was the unspoken issue in 2020 and would be very much spoken were she to become the nominee in 2024.

I don’t mean to diminish her. She is a serious woman with a policy programme that could excite her party. But presidentially, she is toast. The genius of Donald Trump is the damage he can do with a word or a phrase. Pocahontas. Crooked Hillary. Low Energy Jeb. He finds something you might feel about a person, something you might even be ashamed of thinking, something you might not say publicly, and brings it to the fore. Makes it public, and unavoidable: visible from space. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic put it: “The cruelty is the point.”

The Low Energy barb was aimed, of course, at a fellow Republican, dear old Jeb Bush, which brings us to the question at hand. Is Donald Trump — despite his obvious stumble in the midterms, the failure of some of his endorsed candidates, the anger of some party bigwigs towards him — still such a vicious political brawler that no one, man or beast, could withstand the impact of his vitriol? Once he gets going, on Fox News, in debates on all the US networks, perhaps back on Twitter, can he prevent any candidate from garnering the support of serious numbers of Republicans?

Let us assume that Trump supporters, the really hard core, make up 30% of the modern Republican party. Support for the other candidates at the Republican primary is going to be split among the remaining 70%. To succeed, one of them is going to have to become the anointed anti-Trump. Can Trump stop them?

As a recent headline in Politico put it: “Can Trump Do to DeSantis What He Did to Bush?” The smart money is on no. The early effort at bashing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has itself been low energy. Trump rambling about knowing stuff only his wife would know felt crucially out of kilter with the public perception of the DeSantis marriage, as did a trial run of the phrase “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a rally during the election campaign.

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How free should US states be?

By Justin Webb

The thing is: Ron is not sanctimonious. At least not noticeably. His enemies say he’s un-charming and emotionally tin-eared but not sanctimonious. The phrase felt lame, untethered. It lacked the galvanising impact on the hypothalamus, the amygdala, the limbic cortex.

Ah, but wait. He’s only getting going. Perhaps these are what is known in the world of artillery as bracketing shots. They are establishing the target and warming the trigger finger. As Michael Kruse of Politico — the author of the Trump-DeSantis piece — heard from some serious players, the 2024 Republican primary is going to be HUGE and, whatever you might think now about the strength of the players, supremely unpredictable:

“DeSantis’s team is full of smart people,” anti-Trump Republican strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen told Kruse, “but they’ve never faced a face-eating dragon before.”

“Folks forget,” another close Trump adviser said, (we assume with a shudder,) “what DJT can do to somebody.”

To which the anti-Trump crowd respond with what they think is their trump card. Folks are over this stuff. Over Trump because they are over the whole appeal to the limbic cortex malarkey. They are keen on having their children catch up on the learning lost in the pandemic; finding a cure for inflation; working out a plan to end the war in Ukraine.

In fact, whisper it, they are not quite as angry as some of America’s liberal-dominated media might suggest and fear. The Intercept reported in late October a fascinating fact: the net worth of the poorer 50% of Americans has doubled since the first quarter of 2020 and is now far higher than it has ever been in American history. America is still hugely unequal, and poor people are still desperately poor, but assumptions about a class of hard-pressed folk at the ends of their tethers may be wide of the mark.

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Should America be more like Ukraine?

By Mark Lilla

What I picked up following the State Senate candidate Greg Rothman round streets in suburban Pennsylvania for the Today Programme in the week before the election was a disinclination among Trump supporters to be as angry as their man. The personable Mr Rothman (who won his seat and has always supported the former president) was happy to acknowledge that Trump’s ill-discipline, his vitriol, was tiring and potentially off-putting.

But here’s the trap for Republicans tempted to agree. What if the anger drains away? What if the language of the party becomes more temperate again? What if they become… normal again? Having morphed into a firmly anti-establishment, tell it like it is, un-PC party, how do they keep the voters they have attracted to the polls when the message is more subtle. The many Americans who liked Trump because he stuck it to the elites and their ability to dominate the culture (Pocahontas, etc.) might be less energised by a DeSantis who had the same attitude (he does) but not the same bite.

“The biggest complaint you hear about DeSantis is that he never says thank you,” a veteran GOP strategist told Vanity Fair. DeSantis’s personality has been described as a mix of extreme arrogance and painful awkwardness. “He’s missing the sociability gene,” a prominent Republican said.

So is DeSantis likeable enough to be elected president? Trump was not likeable but had this other secret sauce: his extraordinary ability to connect with the dislikeable aspects of all our personalities. DeSantis might only prove dislikeable.

In those circumstances, where does the party turn?

Back to Trump. The face-eating dragon. Roaring again by 2024. Probably losing the general election but that may well be the party’s fate: they rode the dragon and are in the process of discovering: dismounting was never part of the deal.

I have come to realise that party affiliation is far less important to me than fealty to the values that made it possible for me, a Muslim immigrant from India, to prosper in America. In the summer of 1969, I arrived at JFK International Airport as a four-year-old with no English, destined for a new home in New Jersey and then Morgantown, West Virginia. My parents had made a keen study of US history. They knew it was a nation that had its flaws, but they were encouraged by some pivotal developments, particularly the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which banned racial segregation in public schools and declared unequivocally that race cannot play a role in school admissions. This, they thought, was a fair place to raise their kids.

When I came to learn my adopted nation’s history myself, at Martin Luther King Elementary School, I understood that the painful legacy of slavery was part of it. But I also knew that good and thoughtful people in the present had made honest attempts to address these issues — by passing laws banning racial discrimination, for instance. I hardly thought the US perfect but, as a native of India, I understood that societies that dwell forever on historical grievances tend not to be happy, free or prosperous places. America was fundamentally — and wonderfully — different.

But, in recent years, something very disturbing has happened. That is why, on the night of the midterm elections, I drove west after sundown on Route 66 with my friend Harry Jackson, the first black PTSA president at my son’s alma mater. We were driving to a party of kindred spirits, most of whom didn’t look anything like us.

Why? Because the Democratic Party, which once valued fairness and justice, has, alas, been torching the American Dream. Democratic politicians, school boards, governors and even US Supreme Court justices are pushing “equity” over equality, “anti-racist” bigotry over colour-blindness, and mediocrity over merit. Literacy and maths scores are plummeting nationwide, while black and Hispanic kids are falling further and further behind — and yet progressive Democrats are far more interested in bringing crackpot racialist theories into our classrooms. In other words: they choose indoctrination over education.

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Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

As a teenager and young American, I trended liberal. In the Eighties, I opposed former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s military escapades into Central America, his demand that young men register for the draft and his efforts to ban abortion. Decades later, I moved to Virginia as a single mother with a six-year-old son. Though the state’s history was steeped in racism, Virginia had just voted for a black man to be president. I thought it had finally become progressive enough for a woman of colour like me to raise a child freely.

But among the loudest voices ahead of last week’s midterm elections were those of aggrieved parents, who are waking up to the fact that Democrats aren’t defending a fundamental American value: that children should not be judged on the colour of their skin. Affirmative action wasn’t explicitly on the ballot, but the question of whether we are merit-based and colour-blind was the subtext of multiple campaigns.

In Union City, in the San Francisco Bay, Jeff Wang, who immigrated to the US from China in 1984 as a student, won with the campaign mission that his “American Dream” is to help others “achieve their ‘dream’”. In southern California, Republican Michelle Steel, an immigrant from South Korea, faced a tough race in the 45^th Congressional District against her Democratic opponent (who is Taiwanese American). Earlier this year, Steel signed an amicus brief with 81 congressional colleagues against the use of race in college admissions. “Shutting the door to applicants based on race is wrong,” she later wrote. There was not a single Democrat among the signatories. With votes still being counted, Steel is the frontrunner in her race.

I was 13 when the US Supreme Court Justice ruled, in a landmark 1978 case (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke), that universities could take race into account in admissions if there was a “compelling interest” — like needing to remedy past discrimination — but otherwise it banned racial quotas. In theory it makes sense to correct still-raw injustices with so-called affirmative action. But on the ground, we can’t realise “diversity” just by filling race-based quotas. My father ticked so many “diversity” boxes, but as a teen I saw him devastated by a decision: he had found a home at West Virginia University, happily teaching clinical nutrition, but (white) administrators in the late Seventies denied him tenure. I learned what it meant to fight the machine: my father appealed, represented himself and won tenure, not through quotas, but grit.

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America attracts the wrong immigrants

By Justin Webb

The watch party was full of people with equally impressive trajectories. The host was Republican congressional candidate Hung Cao, who arrived in the US as a refugee from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. His family settled in low-income housing in Reston, Virginia; in 1985 Cao entered the first class of a new selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. It had been established to make the US competitive against the Soviet Union in the new field of “STEM”. Back then, local Fairfax County was mostly white, and so was the school, but with increases in the number of Asian technology workers, more of their children started acing the school’s merit-based admissions tests.

Meritocracy, is seemed, was winning. Over the next years, nine states banned public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity at all in admissions to public institutions, kicking off with Proposition 209 in California in 1996. But in the summer of 2003, with my son just a newborn, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Grutter v. Bollinger that universities may use “narrowly-tailored”, “race-conscious” admissions as a “plus” in their efforts to achieve “diversity” on campus — as long as diversity isn’t defined “solely” by race and ethnicity. Former justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion with a sentence that would haunt the court years later. She wrote: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

The goal of diversity is noble in spirit. But the philosophy of “critical race theory” that dominates so many admissions departments today is toxic and illiberal. The focus is on increasing admissions of black and Hispanic students, meaning that hard-working Asian American students become sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, caught in the crosshairs of preferential treatment for other minorities, as part of a war on merit. Indeed, one of America’s best-known “anti-racists”, Ibram X. Kendi, writes: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

In an attempt to stop racism in the name of “diversity”, more states banned race as a factor in hiring or admissions, including Michigan in 2006 and Oklahoma in 2012. In 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that race can be considered in admissions only under “strict scrutiny”. Late the following year, in 2014, a new organisation, Students for Fair Admissions, filed lawsuits on behalf of Asian American students in federal court against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — for, among other things, violations of Title VI of the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any schools that receive federal funding from discriminating against people based on race and other identity markers. The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to land next spring.

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Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

But then came the “racial reckoning” of 2020. In the spring of that year, Harry Jackson’s son was one of six black students admitted to Hung Cao’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. By then, my son was a sophomore at the school, admitted through its race-blind, merit-based admissions process. Little did we know that the school was about to be targeted by “equity warriors”, spurred on by the killing of George Floyd. Our school’s population was 70% Asian — but we were the wrong kind of brown for activists.

That autumn, as my son became a junior and Jackson’s son became a freshman, the local 12-0 Democratic school board became obsessed with rigging the admissions process so that the low number of black and Hispanic students would increase dramatically. In December 2020, in a devastating decision for kids who had been working hard for months to hone their maths skills, the board replaced the school’s merit-based admissions test with a new racially-engineered system that assigned “bonus points” to factors that were seemed like a proxy for race. One of the board members, Abrar Omeish, actually acknowledged in a text message to another member that the new process had an “anti-Asian feel…hate to say it lol”.

In the spring of 2021, a group of our families sued the school board for violating the 14th Amendment, in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. While Democrats condemned us, the Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Republican Glenn Youngkin, understood us. He sent us a video, supporting our efforts to maintain merit-based admissions. At almost 11pm, in his final rally of the election last year, off the backroads of Loudoun County, Virginia, Youngkin declared: “We will not be a Commonwealth of dream stealers. We will be a Commonwealth of dream enablers and builders.” The crowd, including myself, cheered.

And our vision of the American Dream triumphed. In March 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions’ system was “patently unconstitutional”, because it discriminated against Asian American students. In the parlance of “anti-racists”, school officials had put in place systemic racism. The next month, Cao stood with other Asian American families — including my father, then 87, and me — at the steps of the US Supreme Court to argue against racism towards students of Asian descent in admissions to his alma mater. Soon after, Cao, a political newcomer, beat out a tough field of (all white) Republicans to run against Jennifer Wexton, the (white) Democratic incumbent for the 10th Congressional District of Virginia. And it wasn’t long ago that I was back on those steps. On Halloween, I walked into the US Supreme Court, as lawyers from both sides made their arguments in the case against Harvard and the UNC Chapel Hill.

It was hard to watch the so-called liberal justices turn a blind eye to the blatant anti-Asian racism that has become a hallmark of admissions to schools. But I felt great hope as the majority conservative justices expressed outrage over the “race conscious” biases in admissions. My prediction — and that of legal experts — is that the Court will bar Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill from using race in admissions, ending “race-conscious” systems that discriminate against Asian American students. Schools will likely get sneaky about how they use race, but, in a short video filmed outside the Court, I declared that the day was a “win for America” and all children.

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Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

That video, once posted, triggered an assault like I had never witnessed before. Pamela Denise Long, a contributor to Newsweek and the creator of “trauma-informed” “humane antiracism” training, shared an image of me from the video and admonished me for “coming to somebody else’s country” and using “their laws” to win rights. I was disparaged as a “tool of white supremacy”, promoting a “wannabe white supremacist ideology”.

My views fall well within the mainstream of the vast majority of ordinary Americans: a new Pew poll of American adults found 74% think race or ethnicity “shouldn’t be considered” in admissions. Moreover, they are supported by countless black leaders. On the eve of Halloween, as Cao waged his battle for political office, Harry Jackson joined a rally of about 500 Asian Americans supporting the lawsuits against Harvard and the UNC Chapel Hill. “I am an ally!” he said. Next to him, an Asian American boy carried a sign: “I have an American Dream too.”

Any yet, my views get me pilloried. Self-described anti-racists bombard me with the view that I am “white adjacent”, “honorary white”, “white passing”, and part of the “dominant culture”. These attacks are reminiscent of the words of white extremists. And yet they come from a movement called “Foundational Black Americans” — which espouses the “Great Replacement” theory of white supremacists, accusing immigrants, including black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, of stealing resources. In one radio show, founder Tariq Nasheed accuses black immigrants of being “tethers” to America with “anchor babies”, “smelling like booty juice and flies”, “smelling like cheetah pee” and taking jobs and resources owed to black people born in the US. Nasheed says Foundational Black Americans is not a hate group, but rather a “lineage”.

My suspicion that the ire directed at me was a comment on my immigrant status was confirmed on the drive to the watch party. Speeding along the tarmac of Route 66, I got a message: “Go back to India.”

By the time I got there, I’d been accused of coming from an “upper caste family” (though I am Muslim, not Hindu); of being a “white Aryan Indian”, allegedly descending from the Aryan tribe that captured Hitler’s imagination; and of having “musty underarms”. “You Asians are the pets of white supremacy, flat face,” wrote one Twitter user.

It is worth saying again: among all this, it is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who are standing up for us. At the party, I was surrounded by people, like me, who feel they have been mugged by the political party that once shared our values and goals — but now gives us no choice but to reach out to the other side. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin understand our concerns. Joe Biden and the progressive ideologues in his party wish we would go away — and belittle us when we refuse. And refuse we do.

At 10pm, the results were in. In a near-final tally, Wexton won 52.83% of the votes while Cao won 46.98%, narrowing the win to six percentage points, compared to Wexton’s 13 percentage point win in her last election in 2020.

“It hurts,” Cao acknowledged to the crowd, but he also stressed that he would never want “race-conscious” allowances to push him, as a minority, to victory. That is the way it should be, whether in schools or society at large. And he will continue fighting for that version of the American Dream. Like me, he declines to live in a society in which people who ought to know better judge, shame and browbeat us because we embrace honesty, hard work and education. We are not the racists here. We are the American Dream.

But locals have long known that Democrats were due for a collapse. With his victory over perennial loser Charlie Crist, DeSantis transformed Miami from a cultural outpost to a diverse Republican haven heading into the 2024 Presidential election. It’s a fascinating turn for a city that has traditionally been considered more Latin American than American — one that highlights the ongoing political realignment stateside.

Miami has been trending red since 2016, when Trump made initial inroads with Hispanics, but last Tuesday’s “red wave” was a surprise. Most observers expected a modest DeSantis victory or a narrow defeat. But I was certain that DeSantis was poised for a big win. Miami has been steadily shifting rightward for years, and the city’s incompetent Democratic operatives have made matters worse by countering with woke talking points and a fake panic about “disinformation” in Spanish-language media.

The seeds of this shift were planted by the Orange Man himself. With his talk of “bad hombres” at the border and “making America great again”, Trump immediately connected with a sizeable number of working-class Hispanic Miamians, many of whom had previously been apolitical. In these early days, the county’s Right-wing crew was mostly a mix of youngish Miami bros and rabid Cuban anticommunists, who made their presence felt in the caravans that commandeered the streets and worsened already awful Miami traffic in the lead up to the 2016 election.

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This was a boisterous and fun crowd, enamored by the gaudier aspects of the Trumpian aesthetic, and it was not strictly Cuban. It was an intersectional crew of Hispanic dudes, and as the country was engulfed in flames in the summer of 2020, ladies began to join in on the fun. The Right-wing Latina was born. The caravans and boat parades leading up to 2020 were no doubt the best-looking, and most surgically enhanced, political events in American history — complete with one of the all-time great campaign songs. The city’s vibes were red hot. In 2020, Trump lost Miami-Dade County by only seven points, after losing it by 29 four years earlier. Miami was primed to go red, and soon.

As Miami began to shift Right, local progressive outfits, such as Cubanos Pa’lante, and Democratic Hispanic politicians, such as former US representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, doubled down on Latinx-style wokism and the “disinformation” gambit. Hispanic Miami, hypersexualised and constitutionally politically incorrect, is by its very nature an anti-woke city, but progressive Miami Democrats, captured and funded by the woke white Democratic establishment, cannot confront this reality head on. “Latinx” progressives, unable to deviate from the Democratic funding apparatus, could not speak up and say what they knew to be true: that the weird gender and racial obsessions of white progressives alienate working- and middle-class Hispanics.

Many Hispanics, as has been noted ad nauseum as the Rightward shift continues, are “socially conservative”. In Miami, however, such “social conservatism” often means a simple belief that men are men and women are women. The elevation of the trans woman as the embodiment of Democratic femininity was never going to play here — or with Hispanics anywhere.

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Some progressives have tried to explain the Rightward shift of Hispanics by pointing to the supposed “whiteness” of certain Latino demographics. According to woke dogma, Hispanics, especially Cuban Americans, think of themselves as white and are increasingly starting to vote that way. But this is a dodge, conveniently deflecting attention away from the fact that Democratic messaging is full of progressive extremism that appeals to the party’s elite base while alienating everyone else.

The truth is that progressives must focus on wokeness because confronting the reality of what many Hispanics believe on issues like the border, race, and gender would infuriate the elite white women who run the Democratic and media apparatus. This disconnect between the elite party brokers and working-class people of colour is most obvious in Miami, a city that prides itself on its intransigence. Due to their inability to speak honestly, Democrats ceded the most important issues for the city’s voters — crime, immigration, the economy — to Donald Trump and, later, Ron DeSantis.

If you hang around with working-class Hispanics in Miami, you’ll hear some of the most strident immigration policies imaginable: “We gotta close the border, bro. There’re too many people here already.” This isn’t a white dude from Omaha saying this, but a Hispanic guy who probably knows half a dozen people who crossed over illegally. This hardline talk has nothing to do with “whiteness” or Trumpism, but with the realities of living in a city where immigration is a constant. It’s no coincidence that Mexican-Americans living along the Southern border also flipped toward the GOP in 2020. As long as working-class reality is ignored in favor of woke talking points, a truth vacuum will be created.

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Into that truth vacuum walked DeSantis, who adopted and then refined the more popular aspects of the Trumpian brand. “Florida,” DeSantis says, “is where woke goes to die.” Like Trump, DeSantis understands that culture war issues can be winners for conservatives. Unlike Trump, he has proved that he has the focus and discipline to follow through on his rhetoric and win the ensuing battles. He went after critical race theory and gender ideology in public schools, banned medical transitions for minors, picked a fight with Disney over the company’s alleged political meddling, and passed the Stop WOKE Act, which has endeared him to traditional working-class Hispanics. According to NBC News exit polls, DeSantis not only won a supermajority of Cuban Americans but a majority of Puerto Ricans and half of other Latinos.

Of course, Hispanics aren’t the whole story here. Miami-Dade flipped in part because of their Rightward shift, but the influx of blue state lockdown refugees certainly didn’t hurt. DeSantis kept schools and businesses open, proclaimed “the free state of Florida,” and the rest is history. Tech bros flooded into Miami, as did regular Americans looking for freedom in what has traditionally been the most non-American big city in the country.

DeSantis’ strength on cultural issues, coupled with his pro-business and pro-freedom agenda, shows that big-tent Republicanism is still possible, so long as the man leading the charge is capable and competent. The expected national red wave didn’t happen, but if Republicans are smart, they’ll follow the Florida model employed by DeSantis, which will draw both working-class Hispanics and anti-woke, pro-America elites. The Trumpian approach was always going to attract the more rambunctious elements of the Republican base, but DeSantis has proven that his measured, workmanlike approach will retain the working-class types — Hispanic and otherwise — while attracting lapsed Democrats and traditional Republicans.

Miami Democrats will have to change course if they hope to retain the city, but their longstanding inability to deviate from woke talking points will make that extremely difficult. They must break from, or convince, the Democratic Party apparatus that Hispanics — the largest minority demographic in the country — are more traditionally American than they suspected.

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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Not everyone was pleased with this passing of the torch. “Ron is such a fucking lib,” I heard one young man complain to his friend the morning after the speech. Beneath the general enthusiasm for DeSantis, there seemed to be a fear that the energies released by Trump, often destructive but also full of possibility, were in danger of being domesticated.

The first National Conservatism conference, in 2019, had been an attempt to provide some coherence to the Trump-curious wing of the Republican intelligentsia. Like the president it had gathered in support of, that conference was chaotic, controversial, and heterodox in good and bad ways. Tucker Carlson delivered a speech entitled “Big Business Hates Your Family”, while a string of speakers affiliated with the journal American Affairs offered wonky blueprints for nationalist economic policy. The headlines, however, were supplied by Penn law professor Amy Wax, who gave a talk on the need to consider “cultural distance” in US immigration policy. “In effect,” Wax explained, this would mean “taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites”. Conference organiser Yoram Hazony was forced to take to Twitter to defend against accusations of white nationalism. As Pushaw put it: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

This year’s edition, by contrast, was a tamer and more professional affair. The attendees skewed young, bookish, and religious; in the hallways, one heard earnest talk of a “new Apostolic Age” and the errors of Carl Schmitt. Any liberal would have found plenty to describe as “chilling”. But there was no repeat of l’affaire du Wax, and little hint of what V.S. Naipaul used to call “racial passions”. The talk, in the panels and plenary sessions, was of more conventional Republican fare: “woke communism”, religion and the public sphere, pornography and transgenderism, the corrupt media, the threat of China and the deep state.  “I’m trying to figure out how National Conservatism is different from regular conservatism”, one editor remarked to me. “I mean, the Heritage Foundation is funding this thing.”

I heard versions of this question a few times. For all the vitriol directed at the Republican establishment, many attendees seemed confused about what the NatCons would do differently from the current party leadership. One Trump supporter suggested that the conference was “controlled opposition” — an attempt to divert anti-establishment energies into a DeSantis presidency that would be heavy on culture-war red meat but would otherwise revert to the pre-2016 status quo. “Have you noticed that none of our nationalists are actually from here?”

This was an obvious dig at Hazony, who is from Israel, and at the seemingly ubiquitous Hungarians, who, outside the main conference hall, manned booths for the Danube Institute, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, and the Hungarian Conservative. It also hinted at more domestic tensions that partly overlap with the “Ron vs. Don” fault line.

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The core constituency for Trump’s populist-inflected nationalism was what the scholar Walter Russell Mead has referred to as “Jacksonian America”. That’s a way of saying white Protestants, many of them of English or Scots-Irish descent, who have been in the country so long that they list their ethnicity simply as “American”, and who tend to suspect that elites lack their single-minded loyalty to the country. Part of Trump’s appeal to these voters, as Christopher Caldwell has noted, was that he was so despised by elites that he “wouldn’t be able to sell out to them even if he wanted to.” With DeSantis, they feel there is no such guarantee.

Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, have long skewed more Catholic and Jewish, with some more recent infusions from post-1965 immigrant groups. Aside from the raw nativism and anti-Semitism present on the far-Right, there are fears, to some extent unavoidable in a diverse society, about who can be trusted to represent whom. Paleoconservatives, now tentatively being welcomed back into the party fold, have always complained about what they see as Israel’s undue influence over the GOP; more recently, there has been the pull exerted on Catholic intellectuals — heavily represented at NatCon — by “integralism”, which maintains that the government of the United States should be subordinated to the Church. For the hard core of Trump’s nationalist support, there is a constant fear that party leaders will attempt to rope them into serving as footsoldiers for someone else’s crusade.

“Yoram is very aware of these issues”, one older attendee told me when I relayed the dig about foreigners. And indeed, this year, for the first time at NatCon, Protestants seemed to have pride of place. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, delivered the conference’s closing address; and Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a Catholic, gave a talk repudiating integralism.

Hazony, meanwhile, in a speech cueing up Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, leaned heavily on Christian themes. “If America’s going to change,” he told the attendees, “It’s going to change because you decide that Christianity is going to be restored as the public culture of the United States… you don’t need to be the majority. There are plenty of places in this country where a Christian majority, a pro-Christian alliance to support Christian values, can still be mustered.”

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For some, however, this embrace of religious nationalism marked a worrying return to the pre-Trump status quo. The GOP, after all, has courted the Christian vote for a long time; one of the original indictments of the ”dead consensus” was the ease with which the old party paid lip service to Christian “family values” while allowing the country’s social fabric to decay. The question hanging over the conference was: is DeSantis really a new and improved Trump, someone who can push forward with a viable alternative to Bush-Romney conservatism? Or is he an instrument of restoration — a movement conservative who recognises that everything must change for everything to stay the same?

The most explicit note of caution in this regard came from billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel. Speaking on the first night of the conference, Thiel warned the assembled NatCons not to fall into “nihilistic negation” of the liberalism represented by states such as California. “The temptation on our side is always going be to just say we’re not California… We don’t like tech, we don’t like California, we don’t like the woke stuff”.

“All of that’s true,” he continued, “but it’s not a way we get back to broad-based growth that’s not just some kind of real-estate racket. We have all these different states where we’re trying different things, and I think DeSantis is probably the best in terms of offering a real alternative to California. But if we’re going to have a high-growth alternative, the test is, do the real estate prices come down? And the fact that real estate in Florida has melted up over the last two or three years is not evidence that you’re succeeding in building a better model than California. I worry that’s evidence you’re becoming like California.”

If DeSantis heard what Thiel had to say, he didn’t give any indication. A few hours later, the brash and confident governor railed against the “biomedical security state”, the “woke mind virus”, the depredations of “Brandon”, the states that kept their schools closed. He proclaimed, in the title of his talk, that “Florida is a model for America.” He closed with that classic staple of Republican rhetoric: a salute to the troops buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

For now, DeSantis remains a cipher — he is all things to all elite factions of the party, even as much of the base remains loyal to Trump. Both the establishment and the populists can read into him a vessel for their vision of the country, and thus far, DeSantis has had to commit to neither. But as a former GOP staffer told me after the conference, remarking on the conference’s embrace of both DeSantis and religious rhetoric, “I fear the NatCons are becoming cheap dates and have fantasies of being more.”

What he meant was, for a politician like DeSantis, the NatCons will be easy to please. Whether he will be compelled to listen to them is a different question.

The Walt Disney Company, founded in 1923 by Walt and brother Roy, was a formidable cultural force throughout its 50-year existence prior to the resort’s inception, but ownership of thousands of acres of Florida land and the unchecked power to shape it granted the corporation unprecedented control and room for continual expansion. The cultural force transformed into an American juggernaut.

To understand the scale and reach of Disney’s power in Florida, one only need look at the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the governing jurisdiction for the land on which Disney World is located. The district, created in 1967 by a special act of the Florida legislature, gave Disney World the power to operate like a county government. There, Disney World functions as its own mini-country in the state of Florida. Disney World has the authority to claim eminent domain and even build a nuclear power plant (pending federal approval); it also operates its own public utilities and has its own fire department.

The state of Florida handed Disney World a once-in-a-generation deal, but it also took much from the accord. In the pre-Disney days, there was no reason to stop in Central Florida, unless one wanted to do battle with a gator. The arrival of Disney World planted the seed for the Florida we know today, one that continually blossoms with the resort’s ever-expanding reach. It’s not an overstatement to say that Disney World opened up Florida to the rest of the country — and the world, for that matter — and that this symbiotic relationship seemed unbreakable.

For so long, you went to Florida to go to Disney, which is to say that Disney was Florida. To think that Disney World would one day become a culture war battleground and the decades-long arrangement destroyed was unthinkable, but the mouse would eventually meet its match in a fellow Central Floridian — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

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In early June, through no fault of my own, I went to Disney World. My girlfriend’s family was making the annual trek to the mouse’s kingdom, so, like a good boyfriend, I donned the Mickey Mouse ears — for the amusement of the young children in our party, I told myself — and stepped into Magic Kingdom on a sweltering Florida morning. As a native Floridian, I’d grown up going to Disney. I understood why children loved Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy and all the others, but I was confounded by the adults — some of them even seemed well-adjusted — who were obsessed with all things Disney.

These obsessives, pejoratively knowns as “Disney adults,” bankroll the entire operation. They construct their identities around their love of the mouse. How an adult can identify with a mouse or a dog or even a fairy is beyond me, but pathological fandom, especially when rooted in childhood nostalgia, will make even the most sensible person act irrationally.

Entering Magic Kingdom, Disney’s World’s flagship theme park, one immediately sees Cinderella’s castle in the distance. To a child, the castle is Cinderella’s actual home, but for the Disney adult it symbolises that they’ve finally arrived at their spiritual home. To a 30-something man like me, who is neither a Disney lover nor hater, the castle is a testament to the insane visionary genius of Walt Disney.

This one-time illustrator cooked up the idea to prop up a princess castle in Central Florida, and here we all are making a beeline for it. What’s even more impressive is that the castle really is beautiful, not kitsch. Looking at it for the first time in years, I thought of my parents and my sister — a Disney adult herself who identifies with Minnie Mouse — and of all the days we spent at the park. 

Even though I knew I was being worked over by Walt’s nostalgia machine, I felt happy and wistful. Walt Disney figured out that everyone wants to return to a state of childhood innocence, and if he could tie the desire for that innocence to his brand — and even intertwine the two — he’d have an empire on his hands. For millions of people, returning to their childhoods means returning to Florida.

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Dreams and nostalgia are tainted by overt politicisation, which is why Disney has always been crafty with their political postures and sloganeering. As I walked through the Magic Kingdom, aware that I was there during Pride Month and that the Walt Disney Company employs large numbers of LGBTQ people, I saw rainbow-coloured mouse ears and rainbow-coloured ice cream bars, but not much else. The stores selling Disney merchandise had a single Pride display with the rainbow ears and other pride-related items, but it didn’t draw attention to itself. This is how Disney likes to operate; the company has “pride” but not in an over-the-top way that alienates more conservative Disney adults. Disney mostly succeeded at keeping its Americana-styled aesthetics intact as its staff has grown increasingly progressive throughout the years.

Yet this delicate balancing act recently ended, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill — better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Keeping as apolitical as possible, the Disney Company did not make an initial statement denouncing the bill, to the surprise of its progressive employees. They threatened a walkout, so Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s hand was forced; he attacked the bill, but employees, angered that the denunciation wasn’t forceful enough, walked out anyway.

DeSantis did not appreciate Disney’s condemnation and called out the company for its ties to communist China. A back and forth ensued, DeSantis setting his sights on bringing Disney down a peg. The Walt Disney Company was officially part of the culture war, and it was up against a confident and game Ron DeSantis.

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The governor, unknown before the pandemic, was thrown into the national spotlight when the mainstream media positioned him as the antithesis of the pro-lockdown New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. When DeSantis refused to lock down Florida during its summer 2020 Covid surge, the media labeled him genocidal, and he was lambasted by critics as “DeathSantis”, but he didn’t change course.

In the end, as blue states clung to overextended lockdowns, DeSantis was vindicated; Florida’s death rate from Covid is comparable to California’s. DeSantis leaned hard into his newfound position as Republican saviour and has proceeded to shape Florida in his image ever since. With the influx of blue state refugees into the state and DeSantis’ sudden ascendance, Florida has entered a renaissance period. DeSantis has taken to calling the state “the free state of Florida”. It was only a matter of time before the state’s newest juggernaut came up against its original powerhouse.

DeSantis’ tussle with Disney World was a genuinely shocking moment. For one thing, it proved that the governor was not a PR-construct doing an impression of Donald Trump. In April of 2022, DeSantis made his move and signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District; it goes into effect June 2023. Disney thought itself untouchable — and it had been for decades — but DeSantis slapped the mouse on the head. The message was clear: this is my state now.

This is the new Florida. The mouse is on the defensive, and the situation has only been made worse by the release of videos showing Disney employees discussing the incorporation of trans-inclusive characters and the like into new programming. Disney can no longer defend its apolitical position.

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In 1965, Walt Disney called his plan to construct Disney World “The Florida Project”. Disney’s plan to transform the centre of the state, as well as its national brand, into an appendage of the mouse, was a resounding success. Walt Disney World is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but the company never expected that this would coincide with the possible end of “The Florida Project”. 

Today, Governor Ron DeSantis and his project of rebranding Florida is now the state’s most formidable force. In a recent interview with Dave Rubin, DeSantis couldn’t have made it any clearer where he stands on the mouse: “I did not take an oath to subcontract my leadership to some corporation in Burbank, California.” Disney World, DeSantis is claiming, was always a California outsider, a usurper. The mouse’s occupation is finally over.

Disney World will certainly maintain its status as a cultural force after the Reedy Creek Improvement District is dissolved, but DeSantis’s assault has wounded a previously invincible titan. To some who’d considered themselves Disney adults, the mouse is now a rodent. Progressives, on the other hand, many of whom have made fun of Disney adults throughout the years for being dorks, have now taken up the Disney cause. They’re donning rainbow-coloured mouse ears — and heading to what is now the most politicised place on earth.

This, increasingly, is what ex-presidents do: they trade on their brand, milking their fanbase for cash. Obama has his media company, his tedious podcast with Bruce Springsteen, his paid appearances. The Clintons had their consultancy and speaking fees. After all, how can they continue to hobnob with their billionaire friends unless they, too, get filthy rich? Trump, I figured, was a little different: already wealthy, it was adoration he sought.

Freedom Tour tickets ran from the thousands for a seat close to the stage all the way down to $45 for those at the back. (There was a still lower level that got you a seat watching a video screen in an overflow hall.) Intrigued, I purchased a ticket for the cheap seats, wondering how the disgraced prophet would try to shore up the faith among his followers. Biden and his media stenographers would have it that these followers are an extremist, angry force active in the land, still fulminating over a thwarted coup attempt. His opposition researchers have already coined a new insult: “ultra MAGA”. And I wanted to know: what is happening to Trumpists during their period in the wilderness?

*

The Austin Exhibition Center is a massive space that’s right downtown: it is easy to reach, so I expected to see some protestors, especially given the role of Trump-appointed justices in the recently leaked Roe v Wade ruling. But there were none, just a dude selling car air fresheners shaped like prominent Democrats (because “Liberals Smell”).

Trump fans, on the other hand, had turned up en masse, and early. It took over an hour to clear security, which provided me with ample time to check for signs of the “multiracial whiteness” that The Washington Post warned us about. And indeed, I saw that Trump had attracted Asians, Hispanics and a small number of black people in addition to white people, although within each of these very broad categories there was great diversity.

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Among the white people, for example, there were representatives of the big-beard-and-shaved-head cohort, older rural Republicans, preppy college kids and black T-shirt Infowars types. The gender split seemed close to 50/50. The vibe was good humoured despite the long line: people were expecting a good show. A Trump impersonator walked up and down, posing for pictures. The woman in front of me asked if she could touch his hair. “Go for it,” he said, adding: “It’s real, completely real.”

*

Dinesh D’Souza was wrapping up as I entered the hall. The Left had captured all the institutions, he said; nothing could be done. Conservatives needed to withdraw and create new ones, a culture within the culture. This got some applause, but the message struck me as defeatist and un-Trumpian.

D’Souza was followed by the author of a business book, who wanted to live in a world where you could still tell jokes without fretting about offending people. He then told a mild gag, about getting punched after “helpfully” fixing a lady’s skirt, which would have been suitable for broadcast pre-watershed any time in the past 50 years. The crowd laughed: this guy was definitely more entertaining than Dinesh D’Souza.

Next up came Kevin Sorbo. Democrats get Jay-Z and Beyonce, MAGA people get the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. An outspoken Christian conservative with a penchant for trolling liberals (“If men can’t comment on abortion because they don’t have a uterus, why does the Left comment on gun control?”), Sorbo was dropped by his Hollywood agents and ejected from every social media platform bar Twitter. But he has fought back by forming his own production company and now makes successful films for the Christian market. I half-remembered a line from The Brothers Karamazov, describing Alyosha, the protagonist: “he had gone beyond the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

To me this has always sounded like the greatest of freedoms, although those who achieve it are not always likeable. Trump had done it; he could afford to. Sorbo had done it and paid a price, but he had survived. The audience, with fewer resources, were being encouraged to do the same, to own the MAGA-ness that earned them the contempt of the elites. “I’m not here to wake up the sheep,” said Sorbo. “I’m here to wake up the lions — and you guys are lions.”

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This would emerge as a major theme of the day. There were barely any references to policy, to Roe v Wade, to Ukraine, or even to the Republican Party. Very little organising was going on. The American Freedom Tour was not a rally; it was a revival meeting bringing believers together so they could strengthen each other in the faith and return renewed to the world to tell the truth.

Sorbo, at least, did not attempt to lead the audience in prayer, though the MC who came on between the “acts” did. The Bible instructed us to pray for our leaders, he said, and that included Joe Biden, even if he was not the audience’s favourite person. He pulled it off: heads were bowed, and everybody went silent to join him in a prayer for the president.

*

By lunchtime it was clear that Trump had drawn a huge crowd: the number “8000” kept coming up. Yet the success in Austin appeared to have caught the organisers off guard: there was hardly any merch for sale, just a whiny-voiced snake oil salesman pitching membership of the “inner circle” for $30,000 a pop, an online system for investors that was supposed to be foolproof, and copies of Trump’s latest book, Our Journey Together, which you could get signed by his son.

Trump had missed an opportunity, as his followers loved T-shirts and hats. The variety was spectacular: a grinning Trump sprinkling stars that formed the word “America”; Trump as Theseus holding up the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa; and “God, Guns and Trump”, to name but a few. “Ultra MAGA” was already a T-shirt. Trump’s fans are serious about their beliefs, but they are also in on the joke.

The tone, however, hardened in the afternoon. Introduced to us as “Donald Trump’s pastor”, Mark Burns, an ultra-energetic black preacher and Christian media entrepreneur, was the first speaker to really push evangelical conservative stances on abortion and gay marriage, but he also came out swinging against transgender athletes, Black Lives Matter and CRT.

And then he invoked the name of Rosa Parks. All American children are raised on the story of how she rejected an unjust law and refused to take her seat at the back of the bus. Burns offered a radical reinterpretation of the story: the second-class citizens of today are not black people but white Christian conservatives, and the time might come when they might have to follow Rosa Parks’ example and reject unjust laws.

*

“It seems from what the speakers are saying that Trump is thinking of running again,” said a middle-aged man, sitting behind me. “I thought he was going to hand over the baton. How old is he?”

His friend did a quick Google search. “It says here he’s 75. He’ll be 77 and a half at the next election.” There was a pause. “He’s still sharp, though.”

“I heard one of the speakers say he is the greatest president of our lifetimes,” said the first man. “Well maybe some of the young folk here don’t remember, but I was around for Reagan…”

The consensus was that Reagan was better than Trump. The conversation then switched to a discussion of Elon Musk’s tweets, the border situation and Disney’s declining stock price. These men were well-informed professionals who had arrived later in the day and were worried they had missed rock star Ted Nugent. Although he was never mentioned by name, Chris Rufo’s influence loomed large in their conversation — and at the Freedom Tour in general. Trumpian causes such as the border wall might get the occasional shout out, but Rufo’s, with his leaks and campaigns against woke institutions, were the driving force. But Rufo is aligned with Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, not Trump. Even at the ex-president’s own event, the centre of gravity seemed to have shifted: the agenda is no longer set by Trump.

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The men behind me had not missed Ted Nugent. The rock star landed, playing the Star-Spangled banner on electric guitar, telling the audience that although he loved us “madly”, he would love us even more if we “went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the Communists”. This soundbite would briefly light up Twitter the next day, juxtaposed with the news of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo. He did not receive boos, but Don Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, de-escalated the rhetoric when she arrived on stage: she settled for sneering at Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and reciting his many failures (high price of gas, debacle in Afghanistan, no baby formula) against Trump’s many victories (low price of gas, victory over Isis, record low unemployment) while repeating the mantra: Trump was right.

In the morning Sorbo had made fun of Obama’s golfing skills; now the attacks on Biden, Big Tech and other bête noirs of the MAGA movement became relentless. I expected things to deteriorate further when Donald Trump Jr took to the stage. This scion of privilege, like his father before him, presents himself as a defender of the working class — with the energy and delivery of a stand-up comedian. Clearly revelling in his heretic status, he was willing to go much further than any of the previous speakers in terms of his selection of targets.

There had been little mention of Ukraine until this point, but Trump Jr attacked the senate for rushing through $40 billion worth of spending on a regime he described as second only to Russia in its corruption. Then he attacked Big Pharma, Big War, defence contractors and the Biden administration for doing nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl over the border from Mexico. The self-proclaimed “prince of MAGA” was leading the audience into territory that until very recently would have been the preserve of the Left. They followed him willingly, cheering at his comments.

And then, finally, eight and a half hours after the show had begun, the man himself took to the stage. Following the energetic and radical performance of the son, the father was content to perform a greatest hits routine — the wall, “fake news”, his successful renegotiations of NAFTA and the bill for Air Force 1, his victory over Isis. Yes, the election was stolen, but he didn’t bang on about it, and he didn’t mention January 6th at all. He was coy about his intentions for 2024, only saying that the audience would be very pleased.

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And the audience was pleased, on the whole. Trump put on a show, and those who saw it were entertained, even if some people got up and left before he was finished (he was an hour late) and so missed the comedy dance moves at the end. Trump was the main draw, required to bring the show together, but he was no longer the main source of energy or ideas. He was, however, “still sharp” — a canny performer who knew how to keep his audience excited enough that they would tune in for the next episode.

I wondered if he has a twist in mind for us. Many a businessmen will pass the family corporation onto his son, and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, erstwhile dictator of Turkmenistan, recently passed on the presidency to his son Serdar. The order of the show kept it in the family: the top three headliners were Trump, his son, and his son’s girlfriend, whose main claim to fame otherwise is years spent as a second tier talking head on Fox News. Suddenly the thought of Don Jr signing his dad’s books no longer seemed absurd but rather one of the rituals through which a patriarch might anoint a successor.

As the Democrats complete their transformation into a party representing the interests and values of the professional-managerial class — and so prove themselves unable to learn from 2016 — it’s worth noting that Trump Jr’s appropriation of hitherto leftist critiques of power drew some of the loudest cheers from the audience. Despite his immense wealth, he has, like his father, the same ability to articulate the concerns of people infinitely poorer than himself. His isn’t “classical” Trumpism; it is a new, more radical mutation.

MAGA isn’t finished, but nor is it fixed, and though the American Freedom Tour wasn’t pointing towards a particular end point, it did prove that something else is being born. But there were still no protestors outside the stadium when I left.

That all changed last month, when a series of high-profile stories swept trans issues into the national spotlight, starting with the victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA women’s swimming championship. Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.

The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.

Then, later the same month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill was vociferously opposed by the White House, much of the media, and major corporations such as Disney and Apple; it prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from preschool to third grade — roughly ages four to nine — and requires that parents be notified about any medical or mental-health issues with their children. Prominent liberals were scathing, with Biden denouncing the law as “hateful”, Pete Buttigieg’s husband warning that it will “kill kids”, and the hosts of the Oscars chanting the word “gay” in protest. The Right, meanwhile, has launched itself into a frenzy, accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom” children and insinuating that opponents of the law are pedophiles.

It is no coincidence that both pillars of the current trans controversies relate to education. A leitmotif of the post-pandemic world has been parental rebellion against progressive excesses in schools and instruction on issues such as race and gender. Remote schooling allowed parents to peek into their children’s classrooms, where they saw elementary schoolers being instructed to rank themselves on an intersectional privilege hierarchy and to celebrate the “black communism” of Angela Davis.

Republicans, sensing opportunity, have embraced the parental crusade with anti-CRT bills, curriculum transparency bills, and, in some states, new restrictions on trans athletes and “gender-affirming” medical procedures. They are responding to the fact that the woke extremism popular with professional educators is deeply unpopular with voters. Indeed, wokeness in general is unpopular, and “educators”, as a class, are something like the Salafists of social justice. This is a specific instance of a general problem for the Democrats: its professional and leadership class is fond of social positions that strike a lot of ordinary people as wacky or perverse.

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Democrats, however, have fallen into what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News fallacy” — the idea that if Republicans are complaining about something, it must be made up. On CRT, for instance, they have used the unconvincing defence that CRT is only taught in law schools and dismissed parental concerns as a product of “disinformation.”

Similarly, they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom — when, in fact the main concern of the bill is gender identity. The strategy, as Leor Sapir has argued, has been to make the debate over the law a debate over gay rights — which are supported by the vast majority of Americans — while dodging the much more contentious issue of whether, and how, schools should be teaching about gender.

This is no idle concern. What evidence we do have suggests that paediatric gender dysphoria is rising at a rate that would be almost impossible to explain purely as a result of greater acceptance or diagnostic sophistication. One clinic in Northern California reported an 500% increase in paediatric referrals for gender dysphoria between 2015 and 2018, while in Sweden, gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls rose by over 1,500% between 2008 and 2018.

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Some researchers, such as Brown University’s Lisa Littman, have argued that this rapid increase is consistent with other social contagions such as anorexia or cutting. This suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to peer influences and social media consumption rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria. But if these messages are reinforced at school, they may be more likely to stick.  This is a particularly explosive issue given that schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.

Although Littman’s work has been denounced as “misinformation”, it has received support from a number of “detransitioners” who have gone public with their stories. Their stories, on the whole, follow a pattern: a girl who is struggling with an unrelated mental health issue such as anxiety or depression falls down an Internet rabbit-hole, where she learns she is unhappy because she was born in the “wrong body”. She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.

Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue. They are left wondering why the adults in their lives allowed them to damage their bodies in the name of what they later come to believe was a delusion. Due in part to stories like these — and to the lack of solid evidence in favour of “gender-affirming” care — a number of European countries have begun to discourage medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria in favour of psychotherapy.

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The Biden administration’s great strength so far has been its ability to recognise when the preferences of the Twitter class are deeply out of step with those of the public and then side with the public. Here, it has done the opposite. Last week, in response to the Florida and two recent Arizona laws (one banning biological males from girls’ sports, the other banning medical transitions for minors), the administration announced that it would be expanding its interpretation of Title IX — a federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education — to include protections for gender identity.

The full implications of the move are unclear, but they could include denying federal education funds to states that bar trans athletes from girls’ sports. Separately, the Justice Department warned states that any attempt to limit access to “gender-affirming” care for children could be in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights law.

Biden may be miscalculating. Americans are by and large tolerant of differences and tend to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to how individuals choose to live their own lives. But they also have a basic sense of fair play and proportion. Majorities oppose laws, such as Arizona’s, prohibiting “gender-transition related medical care for minors”, presumably because they seem to legislate individual medical decisions. But a solid majority believe that trans athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and polling suggests that even a majority of Florida Democrats supports the language of the Parental Rights in Education Act.

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In short, Americans tend to support trans rights when they are analogous to gay rights, meaning when they are seen as a simple matter of accepting those who are different. But they are more sceptical of the maximalist positions pushed by elite progressives — that the Lia Thomases of the world should be permitted to compete as women, or that schools should be allowed to facilitate major medical decisions for children without parental notification or consent.

By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole. For a GOP attempting to rebrand itself as the party of ordinary people, this could be a blessing in disguise.

But comparisons to Weimar are a dime a dozen in the West, and their explanatory power is incredibly questionable. Our modern historical lexicon often seems to be a book with all the pages ripped out, save for one or two badly smudged chapters on the European interwar period. And this is a shame, because there are many other historical periods that could do more to advance our understanding of current political events, both in the US and elsewhere. History is, after all, quite expansive.

More than any other, one particular moment, mostly unknown today, may have a lot to tell us about where the US is headed next: Japan’s bakumatsu period — the polarised and chaotic end period of the old Tokugawa shogunate.

To understand the bakumatsu, one should know what came before it. In 1600, Japan’s ‘warring states era’, or the sengoku jidai, came to a close with the Battle of Sekigahara. Soon afterwards, the victorious Tokugawa clan implemented a policy of almost total national lockdown, known as sakoku (literally: locked country). Generally, foreigners were forbidden from entering the country, and Japanese commoners banned from leaving on pain of death. Though there were some minor exceptions, Japan essentially closed itself off to the rest of the world.

There were a host of benefits to this, including more than two centuries of internal peace, economic growth and innovation in the fields of arts and culture. Under the surface, however, contradictions in Japanese society slowly built up. The samurai were now a caste of warriors without any wars left to fight, while low-born merchants grew in wealth, slowly undermining a society that assigned status according to birth.

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Moreover, the divisions that led to the battle of Sekigahara were never really mended; Japan’s most powerful samurai magnates, or daimyo, were split into two different camps: the tozama, and the fudai. The former were descendants of magnates who had been neutral or against the Tokugawa in 1600, while the latter came from families that had been on the winning side. Still, the tozama remained quite rich and powerful, even later in the 19^th century, but they were barred from almost every important post in the Government. Their resentment at this never dissipated, but merely simmered on a low boil for centuries, waiting for an opportune moment to roar back to life.

This brings us to the bakumatsu period itself. In 1853, the US Navy forcibly entered the bay of Edo (modern day Tokyo), and demanded that the country open itself up to trade. The Japanese, after their centuries of isolation, could do very little to defend themselves against Commodore Perry’s Black Ships. At gunpoint, the Japanese were forced to abandon a policy that had been the cornerstone of their existence for the last two centuries.

The immediate result of this shift in policy was the start of an extreme social and political chain reaction; abandoning isolationism at the hands of foreign barbarians upended not just Japanese public opinion, but the very basis of legitimacy for the Tokugawa shogunate. Meanwhile, uncontrolled foreign trade also led to a collapse of the Japanese currency system, which only inflamed public opinion further. Suddenly, Japanese society went from (a somewhat deceptive) placid calm, to rapid, uncontrollable polarisation. Street violence became common; there were attacks on foreigners by patriotic mobs, and armed violence between supporters of the Shogun and increasingly organised opponents of the status quo.

Sound familiar? Of course, elite consensus in 2016 America turned out to be, if anything, built on an even more precarious foundation than Tokugawa’s peace in 1853. Beneath the surface, all manner of social and economic ills had already built up; deindustrialisation was slowly choking America’s working and middle classes, while the wars in the Middle East were poorly run, costly, and corrupt. And, just as with Commodore Perry, the election of Trump merely served to topple the first domino, unleashing a chain reaction that was already primed into the system, inaugurating a period of intense polarisation that exists to this day.

What bakumatsu Japan and modern America share is a straightforward problem: that smashing an old, non-functional system to the point where it can no longer be repaired is not the same as building anything new. On the American Right, people today refer to the ‘dead consensus’ when they talk about political positions that everyone in the GOP had to hold to be taken seriously pre-2016. They do not talk about a ‘new consensus’, however, because no new consensus exists. And that doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.

To return to the bakumatsu, Japanese society eventually polarised into two broad factions; those who were loyal to the Shogunate, and those who supported the Emperor returning to political power (at this point, the Japanese royal family have been powerless figureheads for about 800 years). What followed was a civil conflict defined by its confused and contradictory nature.

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The backers of the Emperor attacked the Shogunate for being too friendly with the West. But many of the most powerful backers of this putatively xenophobic, anti-Western faction had also been the most eager importers of foreign instructors and weapons, who had then managed to defeat opposition forces with their smaller, far more Westernised armies. And indeed, once they won the ensuing civil war, their post-unification agenda turned out to be… the abolishment of the feudal caste system, the disarmament of the samurai, and the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of Japanese society. Whoops!

While ideology always plays a part in civil conflicts, the bakumatsu is not so much a story of traditionalism versus progressivism as simply what happens when a large political vacuum is created almost overnight, and there’s no good alternative on hand. The result is a very chaotic period of political free-for-all, as old coalitions rapidly collapse and new ones form, and centuries-old grudges suddenly come rearing back to life. And the creation of that vacuum, and the polarisation that fills it, is precisely what we are seeing in America today.

In the case of America, the empire is clearly in a very deep, systemic crisis. The military machine is deeply broken, the policy of spreading liberal democracy is a total failure, and the globalised economy has now frozen and seized up. Nobody, whether they’re on the Left or the Right, really has any solution to these problems. The vacuum is simply too big. And thus, we are slowly beginning to see the same sort of political dynamic manifest in America as it did in Japan during the bakumatsu. In America, just as in Japan, political street violence proliferates, and people form into armed and organised political gangs.

Yet, if 19^th century Japan offers some interesting parallels in terms of what has already happened in the last five years or so, it also gives us some hints of what is in store in America’s immediate future. First, the chaos that defined the bakumatsu suggests it’s probably foolish to expect American polarisation to cool down or improve anytime soon. If anything, it is likely to get a great deal worse, as nobody really has any sort of practical solution on hand to address the fundamental rupture introduced into the American political economy by deindustrialisation. This problem is especially acute, given the supply crisis that is now slowly choking producers and consumers. The current model is broken, but that breach is the result of decades of active policy choices. It can’t be unbroken in a week, and like a rotting tooth, it’s a problem that will keep spreading pain until it is finally dealt with.

Second, one of the most serious potential flashpoints in the years ahead is going to be the relationship between the federal government and various recalcitrant states. In the bakumatsu period, the Tokugawa government slowly lost control over the tozama magnates, who increasingly came to either ignore orders from Edo, or explicitly worked to undermine the Shogun.

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In America, this sort of political brinkmanship is starting to play out. Recently, Oklahoma’s Governor, Kevin Stitt, brazenly defied Washington by firing the commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, replacing him with a man whose first order of business was to free Oklahoma’s guardsmen from any obligation to comply with the Covid vaccine mandates. Though its effect didn’t extend beyond state borders, it’s a fairly ominous sign of where things are headed; the weight of federal writ is clearly not what it once was in America, and if the country continues to polarise and experience economic crisis, these sorts of conflicts will become increasingly common, and increasingly serious. In a couple of years, for example, if federal agents are ordered to arrest or imprison a popular state governor such as Ron DeSantis after some vexing display of Floridian insubordination, nobody really knows what could happen as a result.

More than anything, the most important lesson of the bakumatsu is simply to expect the unexpected in the days and years ahead. Political hypocrisy, back-stabbing, the embrace of exceedingly strange bedfellows, rapidly changing alliances, and much more; these things are not just likely but more or less guaranteed in times like these.

Just like the Japanese weren’t actually fighting merely for or against modernisation, or for or against the Emperor, the figurative (and increasingly literal) battles inside America today aren’t really about race, or taxes, or personal autonomy. They are about the heart, soul, and future of the nation, about what gets to fill the hungry vacuum left behind by the Black Ship that conquered the country in 2016.

The new American Dream has its heart in the states of the old Confederacy. But its allure does not merely lie in a conservative embrace of lower taxes, less regulation and greater self-reliance, although these surely matter. More important are the opportunities that come from building businesses and owning new homes, not for the privileged few but for an increasingly diverse, and growing, populace.

As Marianne Pina, who came to Dallas as a young adult before founding a five-million-dollar business specialising in minority recruitment and job placement, told me: “The American Dream stereotype still exists here. If you work hard, you can make it. It’s still up to you as an individual.”

But lurking in the background, the South’s rebirth remains threatened by its historical demons: racism, white nationalism and overzealous religious fervour. This is partly because, as the political scientist V.O. Key noted, the South remains the only region of America that has been conquered and subjugated. It is, he wrote in 1949, a prisoner of its racial legacy in its politics and social structure; only when that problem has been addressed can the region ascend to its potential.[1. O. Key, Southern Politics, (New York: Vintage,1949), pp.3-18; p.674-5] Indeed, the economic consequences of slavery persisted well into the 1960s.[2. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp.10-15, p.18,p. 25, p.80, p.240]

Even today, despite its ascendance, the South still lags somewhat behind the nation both in income and education levels. It is still castigated by progressive academics (increasingly a redundant concept) for being wedded to “racial conservatism”. It was only in 2013 that liberal chief justice Steve Breyer compared the region’s racial climate to “a plant disease”.

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Anyone who has spent time outside academia knows this is increasingly no longer the case. Ever since the 1960s, business leaders in the South have worked overtime to embrace racial diversity, if not for moral reasons, but economic ones.[3. Wright, p.265-268] Perhaps that explains why people from outside the region are pouring in: the Southern states account for six of the top ten gainers in interstate migration, led by Texas and Florida. In contrast, the biggest losers are the progressive strongholds of New York, Illinois, and California.

Significantly, while the African-American population has declined in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, it is expanding in cities such as Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Atlanta, Houston, and Nashville. Immigrants, mostly from developing countries and Asia, are also moving in. According to research by demographer Wendell Cox, the fastest growth in a city’s foreign-born population over the past decade was in Nashville, where it exceeded 40%, while those in DFW, Houston and Austin increased by more than 25%. Once seen as a dominant immigrant melting pot, Los Angeles, by contrast, saw their foreign-born populations shrink.

“In the past, you would go to New York, but people have found life was very challenging there,” developer La Lou Davies, who moved to Houston from Nigeria, explains. “It’s hard to find a place to live. By the 1990s, people started going to places like Houston, which have lower entry costs for housing and better business environments. Getting that first apartment, or a lease for a business, is so much easier.”

And so it is economic opportunity, rather than reactionary politics, that has fuelled the South’s renewal. Most southern states — even Texas, which is suffering a contraction in its energy industry — have lower unemployment rates than California and those in the Northeast. Overall, southern states have also enjoyed far more robust job growth over the past decade than most of the country, accounting for six of the eleven fastest growing states.

Some progressives have dismissed this growth, suggesting that the South is where capital goes to “slum”, citing low wages, anti-union laws and housing costs. Paul Krugman, for example, ascribes Texas’s success to low wages and better weather, suggesting that he hasn’t visited the state during the impossibly miserable summers.

Certainly, the region’s growth in the post-war era rested largely on low-paying industries such as textile and food processing. Today, however, DFW is home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, ranking behind only New York and Chicago. Even NASDAQ is reportedly considering a move to Dallas-Fort Worth from the New York area.

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Tech employment has also been on the rise. Over the last five years, the South accounted for four of the top eleven tech growth regions: Austin, Orlando, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham all greatly outperformed the glamorous hubs of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Perhaps more important still, the South has become the epicentre for new job creation in professional and business services, the largest well-paying job classification. It also has held on to more manufacturing, and is now emerging as both the industrial, construction and energy capital of the country. For higher paying blue-collar jobs, southern regions account for a majority of the 15 strongest performers, while places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago continue to languish.

Of course, construction plays a huge role. The South — as is evident everywhere from west Houston and north Dallas to the exurbs of Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta — is building far more new houses than their counterparts on either coast. Texas, with one-quarter fewer residents than California, has permitted more than twice as many new housing units this year, and has no housing crisis. Tennessee, now one of the 10 most popular destinations for immigrants from California, last year issued half as many housing units as California, despite having about one-sixth the population.

This is one reason why housing costs, even in the South’s hottest markets, tend to be as low as one-third, when adjusted by income, of places such as coastal California. Indeed, it is the opportunity to own a home that has likely made the South — which accounted for 43% of all sales in July — the predominant place for young families.

Yet the resurgence of America’s South still remains vulnerable. Yes, companies continue to move from the Northeast and California to Texas, Tennessee and other Southern states. But a number of corporate executives, particularly in the tech sector, have responded with horror to their socially conservative legislation. Texas’s recent abortion ban, for example, generated a strong set of counter-measures among tech firms: they blacklisted anti-abortion websites and offered protections for their own employees, including Uber and Lyft drivers who might be liable for transporting women to clinics.

Simply put, laws such the abortion bill, with could be enforced by state-sanctioned vigilantes, are unlikely to be a pull-factor for many would-be Southerners. Recent polls have found the majority of Americans disapprove of the bill, while at least one survey found that tough abortion laws would lead a majority of college-educated workers to move elsewhere.

The future of the South, then, depends on how it negotiates the rise of progressive politics — and its success will depend on how it negotiates their rise. Bills passed to restrict transgender rights, regulate voting or abolish critical race theory may have broader support than restrictions on abortion, but they have still led to boycotts, costing state economies millions of dollars.

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The South’s biggest enemy, however, remains its own troubled historic legacy on race. All too often Southern conservatives allow racism to slip through the cracks. Just last year, for example, several Republican County Chairs in Texas tweeted openly racist memes; one of the offenders was from Harris County, where non-Hispanic whites make up less than one-third of the population. This behaviour, combined with draconian measures such as the abortion bill, could ultimately hand Texas to the Democrats — whose calls for a ban on fracking would, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, would cost more jobs than those lost in the Great Recession.

And then there’s Covid-19, which, given the region’s low vaccination rates, also presents a serious danger to the prosperity of the South. Southern conservatives such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis may be rightfully critical of extreme lockdowns and school closings, but opening up too quickly has had dire consequences in a region that suffers higher obesity and diabetes rates than the rest of the country.

For the South to thrive, then, it needs to find a programme that both respects its traditions and embraces a more pragmatic, economics-oriented focus. It needs to overcome the ghosts of its tragic past and avoid the pitfalls of progressivism. The South, in effect, faces a balancing act. And if it succeeds, it will be the states of the late Confederacy could shape the future of their one-time conquerors.

But DeSantis’s victory lap has been rudely interrupted. Thanks to the Delta variant, the Sunshine State is now the epicentre of the pandemic in the US. In the last week, Florida has broken its records for the number of daily cases and hospitalisations. Last month, it was responsible for one in five of the country’s new cases, despite being home to 6% of Americans.

But as cases rise, DeSantis is steadfast in his refusal to impose the sorts of rules that have been reintroduced in other parts of the country. He has opposed a new indoor mask mandate and resisted vaccine passports. “In Florida, there will be no lockdowns,” DeSantis said recently. “There will be no school closures. There will be no restrictions and no mask mandates.”

Predictably, such stubbornness has cemented his status as a liberal hate figure. Pundits who have been waiting to say “I told you so” for months are making up for lost time. The ever-hyperbolic Washington Post columnist Jenifer Rubin, for example, thinks that by resisting further lockdowns, the likes of DeSantis have “formed a sort of death cult that elevates ‘owning the libs’ over the prevention of needless death”. In the New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that “at every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus”.

But there are also signs that the current surge is hurting DeSantis’s reputation beyond the opinion pages of America’s prestige media. Many assumed that DeSantis would cruise to re-election in 2022, but a poll published this week shows him trailing (albeit narrowly) Representative Charlie Crist, a one-time Republican who served as governor from 2007 to 2011 now running for his old job as a Democrat.

“For as long as we have to contend with the pandemic, then Ron DeSantis lives or dies politically based on how Covid-19 is impacting Florida,” says Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist based in Miami. Florida pollster Brad Coker agrees DeSantis is taking a huge gamble “By sticking to his guns and being consistent, he is seen as a strong executive,” he says. “But he’s also gambling that Covid will not be a much of a factor by the end of the summer”, giving him a clean run at 2022 and potentially 2024.

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DeSantis, it’s worth noting, has been here before. After locking down early on, his was one of the first states to reopen — much to the horror of many commentators. He focused state resources on surging hospital capacity, protecting care homes and PPE supply. He has held firm ever since, resisting pressure to reintroduce rules.

The lethal spikes never arrived with quite the force that so many public health experts predicted. In terms of deaths from Covid-19, Florida’s performance has been middling by US standards. But it has largely avoided the costly social distancing restrictions implemented in other parts of the country. Employment fell by 4.6% in Florida last year, compared with 10.4% in New York and 8% in California. Between the start of November and the end of February, case rates in the three states were roughly the same, only businesses in Florida were open at full capacity.

Since the pandemic started, DeSantis’s greatest asset has been liberal overstatement. His decision to reopen earned him the nickname “DeathSantis”, while photographs of busy beaches (made to look busier thanks to long-lens foreshortening) were presented as evidence of the height of “Florida man” stupidity.

No doubt he hopes his opponents’ previous hyperbole will soften the political impact of the current Delta wave. Moreover, DeSantis firmly believes that restrictions and mask mandates are harder to justify when vaccines have been widely available for months — something which was the stated view of the White House and the CDC until a few weeks ago.

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There is, however, another shadow looming over DeSantis’s political future: the man to whom he owes his rapid rise: Donald Trump. Without the then President’s endorsement, his underdog 2018 gubernatorial bid would likely have failed. That race — and one television advertisement in particular — established DeSantis as a kind of Trump wannabe.

In the 30-second viral video, DeSantis’s wife Casey tells viewers: “Everyone knows my husband Ron was endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad.” DeSantis is then shown teaching his children to build a wall, reading to them from Trump’s memoir The Art of the Deal, and reciting “Make America Great Again”. Mrs DeSantis then says: “People say Ron’s all Trump. But he’s so much more.”

Needless to say the joke was lost on many. But while the Florida governor is capable of nauseating sycophancy towards the 45th president, the relationship between DeSantis and Trump is more complicated than it first seems.

In a world of mini-Trumps, there are comparatively few stylistic similarities between DeSantis and the former President. Yes, there’s the boxy tailoring and the Trumpian pinch of index finger and thumb while he speaks. But DeSantis offers a very different sort of pugilistic conservatism. Trump is a booming heavyweight slugger. DeSantis is a nasal and nimble counterpuncher. Where the former president is off-the-cuff, unapologetic and unfiltered, DeSantis is lawyerly, careful, strategic, even defensive.

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Republican strategist Luke Thompson attributes the idea of DeSantis as Trump to “wishful thinking, pig ignorance or wilful dishonesty”. It is important, he argues, to distinguish between DeSantis the governor and DeSantis the media phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic, DeSantis was governing in the mould of his moderate GOP Floridian predecessors, Jeb Bush and Rick Scott. He was focused on education and on broadening out his appeal to beyond the core Republican vote.

Amandi describes DeSantis as “a canny interpreter of the political environment without the Trump histrionics, which makes him formidable.” Adding to his strengths, says Amandi, is a “nimbleness in cherry picking issues that makes him palatable to moderates. That shows real political tact.”

Then there’s the role of the media. DeSantis emerged as a leading national figure during the pandemic in part because liberal outlets needed a red state counterpoint to Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor whose early pandemic press conferences — part-public health briefings, part-motivational speeches — earned gushing praise.

But that script didn’t quite play out as Cuomo and his media cheerleaders hoped. With the pandemic raging, Cuomo was busy writing a self-laudatory memoir, which earned Cuomo a $4m advance while his advisers were busy trying to cover up deaths in his state’s care homes. Then came the accusations of sexual harassment, corroborated by a report into the New York Governor’s conduct published this week.

“As Cuomo has looked more and more like the absolute monster that he is and exposed the American media as the highly tendentious lickspittle idiots that they are, DeSantis’s standing with Republican primary voters has improved drastically,” says Thompson. “Every unfair attack, every ludicrous effort in character assassination has really bonded the GOP voting bloc to DeSantis and raised his profile.”

Compared with Cuomo, DeSantis’s reputation is relatively untainted. But will his stock continue to rise?

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DeSantis has firmed up his conservative bona fides with a series of laws on hot-button Republican issues. He has passed a (possibly unconstitutional) bill aimed at banning critical race theory from being taught in schools. Though he has refused to explicitly endorse Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, he is one of a number of Republican governors to indulge those claims by introducing a slew of election safeguards. In doing so, he is prioritising popularity among Republicans nationwide over broadening his appeal in Florida.

Nor must we forget that while Florida may be the home of the last Republican president, sulking in his Palm Beach palace, it’s also a veritable graveyard of overhyped GOP contenders. Former Governor Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the state’s Cuban-American senior senator, were Donald Trump’s highest profile victims in the 2016 primary.

But perhaps it’s not so surprising that Republicans from Florida often have their eyes on higher office. After all, Florida is a 21-million-person rebuttal to some of the core assumptions of the contemporary American Left. It is a growing, multiracial, economically vibrant state. And it is only getting redder.

Democrats are eager to paint the modern GOP as a rump party supported by a shrinking demographics in America’s declining backwaters. “I won in the places that are optimistic, diverse, moving forward,” boasted Hillary Clinton after her 2016 defeat. Florida is a brash, cacophonous repudiation of that Democratic assumption. In other words, Florida is a feel-good story for the GOP. And by making himself synonymous with that story, DeSantis can certainly mount a credible 2024 bid.

But the big, orange elephant in the room is the former president, who continues to tease that he will run again. That puts DeSantis and Trump on a collision course. An early skirmish came last month, when the governor asked that the former president postpone a rally in the state scheduled for shortly after the collapse of an apartment building in Surfside. Trump went ahead with a raucous rally. DeSantis, meanwhile, cut a more sombre figure, appearing alongside President Biden in a visit to the site of the catastrophe.

It was proof, if we needed it, that DeSantis is conscious of the need to balance the support of Trump’s base with the risk of alienating other voters. How ironic, then, that whether or not he can keep this balancing act up probably depends not on Florida’s Covid-19 numbers, but on the decisions of the famously capricious and impulsive man to whom he owes his political career.