Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida could have made his presidential campaign announcement in some idyllic seaside park, surrounded by the wholesome families he's trying to defend from subversive books and the Walt Disney Company. Instead, he did it in a glitchy audio feed with a socially awkward billionaire. Even if the Twitter rollout had worked smoothly — which it definitely did not — it would have been a debacle.
The technological failures are, understandably, dominating the headlines. They were humiliating for everyone involved. But behind these unforced errors lie deeper failures of political judgment by DeSantis, ones that speak to a blinkered and — for all his cultural populism — elitist worldview. How else do you explain a campaign kickoff with more discussion of crytpo regulation than of inflation?
DeSantis' decision to begin his campaign like this is a sign of weakness in three ways. First, there's his inability to see what is obvious to Elon Musk's critics — which is that Musk, while perhaps a genius in some areas, is also often an arrogant screw-up whose projects break down in public.
Second, DeSantis' decision to make his tacit alliance with Musk such an integral part of his campaign identity suggests a submissive and receding quality. He ran for governor in 2018 by emphasizing his worshipful fealty to Donald Trump. Now, coming out of Trump's shadow, he's opted to attach himself to another big, strong friend rather than stand on his own.
Finally, DeSantis doesn't seem to understand Musk's concerns only partly overlap with the concerns of the people he needs to vote for him.
DeSantis is betting anti-wokeness, the belief system that ties him to Musk, is enough to power a presidential race. He's not necessarily wrong: Though polling about the salience of wokeness is mixed, in an April Wall Street Journal survey, 55% of Republicans said "Fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses" was more important than protecting Social Security and Medicare.
But anti-wokeness has different flavors. There are worries about the erosion of what were once called "family values," and then there are the esoteric concerns of Silicon Valley edgelords. DeSantis emphasized the latter Wednesday night, discussing niche issues in language that I suspect is unintelligible to ordinary people, even those who might hate the brand of social justice politics derided as wokeness. He spoke, without much explanation, about college "accreditation cartels," the "ESG movement" — investing that weighs environmental, social and governance factors — and central bank digital currency.
"The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism," DeSantis said later Wednesday night on Fox News. If you spend time on the right-wing internet, that is a platitude. But my guess is that for a lot of people, it's gibberish.
In his recent book, "The Courage to Be Free," DeSantis wrote that his first encounter with the left was at Yale University, where he got his undergraduate degree, and that experiencing "unbridled leftism on campus pushed me to the right." From there, he went to Harvard Law School, which "was just as left-wing as Yale." What he doesn't seem to understand is that for all his hatred of Ivy League pretensions, his political outlook was shaped in the Ivy League's crucible. He speaks the language not of normal people but of right-wing counter-elites, thinkers and activists who come out of the same rarefied milieus as the progressive intellectuals they despise.
Maybe DeSantis' misunderstanding of elitism has tripped him. As he wrote in his book, the word "elite," to him, is not about wealth, talent or achievement. Instead, it's an epithet for progressives, those who share "the ideology and outlook of the ruling class, which one can demonstrate by 'virtue signaling.'" It is, of course, a standard right-wing rhetorical move to suggest that so-called wealth creators are part of an oppressed class. The problem with DeSantis is that he seems to believe it, so when he's speaking to plutocrats on Twitter Spaces, he thinks he's speaking to the people.
The New York Times