DeSantis vs Trump pits accomplishments against narrative
In a potential 2024 election match-up, the ex-president portrays himself as the people’s hero, but the governor has a stronger record.
The dry language of Florida’s Constitution offers only a hint of the consequential political moment the next two months represent for the Sunshine State, the Republican Party and the nation.
Article III, Section 3 provides that the state Legislature shall meet in session “on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March of each odd-numbered year” and that the sitting “shall not exceed sixty consecutive days.” This being an odd-numbered year, the bland prose ensures that for two months starting Tuesday, Tallahassee will be the center of the political universe.
Not that there will be much drama in the state capitol. Republicans hold supermajorities in both legislative houses, giving them more or less complete control of the agenda and guaranteeing smooth sailing for the party’s legislative goals.
But the session is freighted with wider significance. Not only will it presumably mark a lengthy overture to the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis. Its business, the long roll of laws it is expected to enact, sets up a defining struggle for the future of the party and what it means to be conservative in the current age.
We haven’t seen a contest like the one in prospect between Mr. DeSantis and Donald Trump. This isn’t, for the most part, a struggle over policy differences or divergent values. And while the two men are quite different, it isn’t even primarily a battle of personalities.
Methodically, with focused attention to political detail, the Florida governor is building a record of executive and legislative accomplishment that represents, like it or not, one of the most systematically comprehensive attempts in living memory to give practical expression to an evolving political philosophy.
To listen to much of the media, you’d think modern Florida is like Germany in 1933, in the early stages of a totalitarian takeover. They accuse the governor, as they always accuse conservatives, of waging a “culture war.” What they mean is that it’s fine when progressive elites advance their radical cultural agenda with new ideas, demands and rules, but resisting it is an act of aggression.
Evidently, for a large majority of Floridians, and for a sizable, though crucially indeterminate, number of Republicans nationally, the DeSantis approach—including direct challenges to media distortions—is highly appealing. With measures designed to have both symbolic and practical effect on immigration, education, abortion, sex and gender identity, criminal law, gun possession and energy consumption among others, the 2023 session will build explicitly on what Mr. DeSantis already laid down in last year’s session and in his handling of the Covid crisis.
He means to present the Republican Party as a constructive force that can both advance an agenda of economic freedom and embark on the long, painstaking process of rolling back the progressive march through America’s major cultural, social and business institutions—one law, one executive action, at a time.
It is a populist approach that embraces the power of government to change private behavior and culture in a way that makes some traditional conservatives queasy. That train left the station long ago, however, leaving the last members of that dwindling band of old-schoolers to jump on board or seek a home elsewhere.
But there is almost nothing in it that Mr. Trump would oppose. The question Mr. DeSantis poses to Republican voters is this: Do you want a populist conservatism based on a record of achievement or a leader who articulates your grievances better than anyone but doesn’t seem to care much about actually addressing them?
That isn’t a rhetorical question. While Mr. DeSantis offers an agenda, Mr. Trump offers a story. Mr. DeSantis can cite a stronger record of accomplishment in policy and electoral politics, while the former president claims a compelling narrative in which he plays the starring role, a melodrama that pits dark powerful forces against the people’s hero. Mr. Trump’s many travails—the threat of criminal indictment, his own wild claims of stolen elections, hostile media on all sides—give his story meaning to voters who have lost faith in traditional approaches to governing.
There will be one or two substantive differences. Mr. Trump has figured that protecting Social Security and Medicare is a winning message given his likely opponent’s past support for fiscal reform.
But the contest is above all one between a plan rooted in real-world execution and a tale floating on a cloud of fiction. The contrast was on sharp display over the weekend. While Mr. DeSantis was talking up his plans to the Club for Growth a few miles from Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach’s most famous resident told his story at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington.
“They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,” Mr. Trump said of his many enemies, “and I’m just standing in their way.”
Will those 16 words of storytelling resonate more strongly than 60 days of legislation? We’re about to find out.
WSJ
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