How Ron DeSantis won liberal democracy
By 
[Random Federalist Society Hack]: “I have written the most insultingly stupid op-ed you’ll see this month.”
Rich Lowry: “Hold my Cigar City IPA!”
Yeah, DeSantis sure would be a refreshing alternative to Donald Trump’s threat to American democracy!
DeSantis is a flawless sample of this belief system. The conservative argument that democracy is dangerous lies so close to his heart that he wrote an entire book dedicated to the precept that “when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” After the election, DeSantis floated a plan for legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors, negating the election results. (The Supreme Court is ruling on the legality of this method, which may well be the cutting-edge conservative tool to negate elections.) In office, he has engineered a series of disturbingly illiberal schemes to entrench his own power, from instituting a poll tax to disenfranchise some million mostly non-white Floridians to punishing firms that dare to oppose his agenda, among many other steps.
While conservatives frequently blurt out their belief that democracy is bad because “we’re a republic, not a democracy,” they blanch at the authoritarian label. To the extent many of them grudgingly accept that Trump poses some danger to the Republic, they attribute that danger entirely to his idiosyncratic style. As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin puts it, “My quarrel all along with Trump was his longstanding & notorious personal & public character. DeSantis just doesn’t have those issues.”
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.”
Christopher Rufo, who has essentially the same relation to the DeSantis campaign that Don Jr. has to the Trump campaign, essentially confirms this. “The test for ‘NeverTrump’ intellecuals [sic] is where they stand on DeSantis,” he writes, “He should be their guy: elite education, military background, leadership experience, impeccable character. If they can’t get behind him, the takeaway is clear: it’s not about principles; they serve the Left.”
And it’s not just that DeSantis instituted a poll tax; he did so with the direct purpose of nullifying the legally expressed will of a majority of the state’s voters.
The existential problem facing American politics is that for the party of Shelby County v. Holder and Ron DeSantis Trump’s opposition to democracy is a normative rather than aberrant.