Ron DeSantis would methodically strangle democracy through a series of illiberal Orbanist steps like he has modeled in Florida. jonathanchait writes
During the Donald Trump era, democracy itself has become the preeminent question of American politics. Yet Trump himself has played a paradoxical role in this development. While his overtly authoritarian personality brought the democracy question to the fore, the sheer grossness of his behavior also served to blot out the deeper ideological causes of the rift.
Half a dozen years ago, I wrote a cover story for this magazine arguing that the authoritarian danger posed by Donald Trump was not limited to his personal fascination with dictatorships and power but also grew more broadly out of the soil of American reactionary politics. Here was the argument. Unlike the Eisenhower-era Republican Party, and unlike the conservative parties in every other democratic country, the conservative movement never accepted the democratic legitimacy of the welfare state.
It follows from this premise that any attempt to associate non-Trump elements of the Republican Party with authoritarianism is transparently disingenuous. In my DeSantis profile, I wrote that his candidacy reflects the calculation that “any former Republican voter who opposed Trump on moral rather than aesthetic grounds is gone and not worth trying to bring back.”
National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry acknowledges a handful of DeSantis’s illiberal abuses of power only to dismiss them as trifling. In a column defending DeSantis, the subject of boosterish coverage in his and every major conservative publication, Lowry largely reduces the liberal critique to a straw man.
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