Quite contrary to my expectation the other day (and just about everyone else’s), Ron DeSantis’s second place finish in the Iowa Republican caucuses did not keep him in the running. Yesterday he announced his withdrawal and endorsed Donald Trump for the nomination, leaving Trump facing only one opponent, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, in tomorrow’s crucial New Hampshire primary.
DeSantis’s fall has been remarkable, given the strength of the backing he seemed to have last year from the conservative establishment. But his program, which I (and others) described as “Trumpism without Trump”, never seemed plausible. A charismatic, personable candidate might have made it work, but DeSantis was not that candidate.
The lesson that DeSantis and his backers took from the rise and continued popularity of Trump seemed to be something like the following: What Republican voters want is cruelty; they want policies that will hurt the targets of their animosity (intellectuals, minorities, welfare recipients, immigrants, uppity women, and so on). Trump has those policies, but he’s lazy and ineffective at pursuing them. So the way to the voters’ hearts is to promise the same policies, but with a cold managerial efficiency instead of Trump’s personal foibles.
No doubt this accurately characterises some Republican voters – among them, perhaps, the 21% who voted for DeSantis in Iowa. But in terms of what the large majority are looking for, it’s a complete misunderstanding. They don’t start with policy preferences, they start with tribal feeling. Their first desire is for a candidate who shares and expresses their feelings, a candidate who they can identify with. DeSantis, who never seemed to have any feelings, had no chance.
Other candidates might share Trump’s policies, or even have better ones, but they were never going to do a better job of expressing tribal animosity. Far from effectiveness being a selling point, for many voters it was probably the reverse; the fact that Trump is a showman rather than an administrator is part of his appeal. His hateful policies can be excused on the basis that he isn’t really serious, that it’s all just an act.
If you take Trump to be serious (as I think, fundamentally, he is), his policies would seem deeply scary. But his voters, encouraged by the tone of the media coverage, tend not to take him that way. Moreover, they think, even if he turns out to be serious, he is too incompetent to achieve much. Harping on his incompetence doesn’t do anything to put his supporters off: on the contrary, it reassures them.
DeSantis, on the other hand, is serious; that’s the one description everyone agrees on. He also seems competent, at least at a basic administrative level. True, he’s also dishonest, so he may not have actually had any intention of implementing the wilder Trumpian policies, but it would seem foolish to take the risk.
Beating Trump required offering an alternative vision for the party and the country. His opponents needed to explain that Trump wasn’t a well-meaning incompetent, but a menace to constitutional government. DeSantis proved unequal to that task, and Haley so far isn’t doing much better. It looks as if it will once again be left to the Democrats to save America from itself.
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PS (Friday): Tom Hawking now has quite a nice piece in Crikey on Ron DeSantis in which he makes a similar point about Trump’s performativity:
The drama is what makes Trump palatable. Without it … well, if you could somehow take Donald Trump and subtract everything that makes him Donald Trump — the hair, the makeup, the lawsuits, the burgers, the occasional propensity to shout the quiet part from the rooftops, the laugh-despite-yourself verbal pyrotechnics and the nascent fascism — you’d end up with a decidedly unpleasant and mean-spirited man who no-one really likes.
In other words, you end up with Ron DeSantis.
The World is Not Enough 
“Their first desire is for a candidate who shares and expresses their feelings, a candidate who they can identify with. DeSantis, who never seemed to have any feelings, had no chance.
“Other candidates might share Trump’s policies, or even have better ones, but they were never going to do a better job of expressing tribal animosity.”
Excellent analysis, Charles. That sums it up succinctly.Nice work. Thank you.
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The Jonathan Freedland piece linked there doesn’t display a clear grasp of the idea that people** who vote for Donald Trump are not doing so despite the animosity, the bigotry, and the vaingloriousness, but rather because of*** the animosity, the bigotry, and the vaingloriousness. It’s no good offering those people an alternative to those things, because they don’t want an alternative to those things.** I’m thinking here of the people who vote for Donald Trump in the primaries. Republicans who vote against him in the primaries will still end up voting for him in the general election for a more complex variety of reasons. But so far the majority of the Republicans who have voted in the primaries have voted for him.*** Naturally enough they don’t think of their own emotions as animosity, bigotry, and vaingloriousness, but just because people find different names for them doesn’t prove they’re different things.
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Thanks J-D. No doubt, some of his voters are simply attracted by, as you put it, animosity bigotry & vaingloriousness. But whether that’s true of the majority, or enough of a majority to win just with them, isn’t so clear. What I think is clear is that they won’t vote for an alternative to those things unless they’re offered one. If Trump’s opponents just say, yeah, those are good things but we can do them better, voters will say, no you can’t.
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