I have a new article up at The UnPopulist addressing a recent debate—touched off by a New York Times op-ed—about who is more dangerous: Donald Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis?
This question of “who is more dangerous” involves a lot of tricky projections. Perhaps, as I put it, “an authoritarian without the discipline to see his schemes through is less dangerous than an authoritarian capable of consistently bending the system to his will.” But I am more concerned about a question that comes first. Is DeSantis any kind of alternative to the populist-authoritarian wing of the right that was represented by Trump? The answer is “no.”
In fact, I argue, he is systematically pursuing an Americanized version of Viktor Orban’s traditionalist-authoritarian system in Hungary. My article lays out the elements of that model and how they have been imported into an American context. I focus specifically on DeSantis’s approach to higher education.
Five years ago, the Orbán regime harassed and forced out the Central European University, a world-class academic program. In its place, Orbán has used billions in government funds to prop up the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, an academic program that is less impressive but has a curriculum built around nationalism. All of this is money that is not going into Hungary’s existing universities, nor into its notoriously underfunded primary and secondary schools.
DeSantis seems intent on copying this with his takeover of New College, a small liberal arts school within the Florida public university system. He has stacked the board of trustees with conservative culture warriors who quickly fired the university’s president and talked about firing much of its faculty. A particularly revealing comment came from trustee Chris Rufo—a conservative activist who made his name crusading against “critical race theory” as a catchall for left-of-center views: “We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we'll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”
It is a frank admission that the college will now have an explicit ideological mission, and students will be expected to align themselves with it.
Read the whole thing, and also check out an interview I recently did for Symposium in which I talked to David Baer and Dalibor Rohac about the elements of the “Orban model.” Both of them stressed that the political conditions in Hungary are far more conducive to Orbanism than those of the US. But in my article, I offer this rejoinder:
This approach is very hard to replicate on the national level in the US, where there are many institutional checks, and it is difficult to gain and keep the kind of dominant conservative majority the nationalists fantasize about. But Orbánism is much easier to replicate on the state level, where it is easier to gain a legislative majority and where governors tend to have more unilateral power.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once described the states as “laboratories of democracy,” but “red state” governors are starting to use them as laboratories of autocracy.
Hence Ron DeSantis’s attempt to turn Florida into a tropical Hungary.
Like Orban, DeSantis has been justifying his grab for power by pointing to the repellent politics of what is now called “wokism.” Like many other people on the right, he noticed a few years back that being anti-woke is clearly politically popular. Yet he may be jumping on the anti-woke bandwagon just at the point when it comes cracking apart from carrying too many opportunists.
The warning sign for this is a cringe-inducing flub by conservative writer Bethany Mandel, who was on television to promote her book and was asked point-blank how she defines “woke” and…had no answer. At all. Here’s the wider context, which makes it clear she has never had a particularly good answer. It’s one of those clips that you know you are going to be seeing again and again for years, because it provide pretty compelling evidence that opponents of wokism simply have no clue what they’re talking about.
For some people, that’s true—and it makes life just a little bit harder for those of us who do know what we're talking about.
This has become a running theme recently. Conservatives and Republicans keep declaring that “wokeness” is the enemy and consequently that whoever they want to cast as their enemy must be “woke”—and, above all else, that wokeness is such a profound threat that it serves as an all-purpose justification for whatever the conservatives want to do. But when asked to define what they mean by “woke,” they produce vague and insipid answers.
In looking at this, I realized that I gave early warning in a piece written almost a year and a half ago for Symposium: “If Everything Is Woke, Nothing Is.”
Opposition to left-wing “wokeness” is becoming, not just a successful political cause, but a bandwagon. That’s cause for a certain amount of celebration, but also for caution, because where there’s a bandwagon, there are bandwagon-jumpers. Some of them are going to try to take the energy and momentum of a broadly appealing anti-woke coalition and try to divert it for much narrower purposes of their own—or break it all to pieces.
I gave some examples from the time, and the problem has only multiplied since then.
The problem is that the movement designated by inexact slang terms like “wokeness” or “political correctness” is real and destructive. I have a few pieces coming up that will look at newer examples. But this is why it’s so unfortunate that the opposition to wokeness is being hijacked and driven into a ditch.
“But when asked to define what they mean by “woke,” they produce vague and insipid answers.”
Kind of like “democracy”? 😒
“Some of them are going to try to take the energy and momentum of a broadly appealing anti-woke coalition and try to divert it for much narrower purposes of their own—or break it all to pieces.”
Unfortunately, I remember how some ‘conservatives’ acted a few years ago, replacing “anti-woke” with “Tea Party” in the above quote to our detriment.