Politics and Proportion

Why this woke critic refuses to vote for Ron DeSantis (let alone Donald Trump) in 2024

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference on January 18, 2023 in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida to announce the award of $100 million for beach recovery following Hurricanes Ian and Nicole. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Today’s post is on the shorter side, so the paywall comes only at the very end, just before the audio version of the post, which is available only to paying subscribers. This means the entirety of the post is there for everyone to read, paying and non-paying alike.

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Back in mid-December, I wrote a post titled “Judgment Is All We Have.” The occasion was the “Twitter files” controversy, though I illustrated the idea contained in my title by walking readers through the two-decades-old argument about whether it was a good idea for the United States to invade Iraq to topple the government of Saddam Hussein. My point was that rancorous disputes in our politics are often a function of differing elementary judgments about what’s even happening, along with its meaning and significance. Hence the decisive role of judgment—of observing what’s going on, sizing it up, drawing on education and experience and knowledge of history, to decide whether and to what extent this matters and that doesn’t.

Today’s post is about a related mental act: How much does this or that matter? Even when what is happening isn’t seriously up for debate or dispute, people can and do disagree about how important it is.

This comes up a lot for me with regard to “woke” subjects. That’s because I’m a critic of such trends, which can be defined in several different ways but for our purposes are best understood as an effort by left-wing activists to seize control of existing institutions (schools, private companies, government agencies) and use workplace rules and the threat of online public shaming to enforce progressive moral norms and expectations within those institutions.

If you’ve felt coerced to affirm progressive views in your job, and far more so if you’ve been fired or demoted as a result of refusing to capitulate to them, let alone if you’ve been encouraged by them to make life-altering decisions that you’ve come to regret, or noticed your children parroting activist slogans they learned in school and you emphatically disagree with, I empathize with you. I also understand why you might consider such trends to be a big problem—even among the very biggest problems facing the country—and vote accordingly. (For an account of American reality that treats woke trends as our defining problem, I suggest listening to the Republican response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last Tuesday from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.)

But understanding the appeal of anti-woke politics is one thing; going along with it is quite another.

Just How Bad Is a Bad Thing?

I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and if he’s on the ballot again in 2024, I will do the same then—even though on certain cultural issues, he regularly stakes out positions to my left.

Why would I do this? Why not Donald Trump? And if not Trump, why not at least Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? I recently spent some time with people who have been chewed up and spit out by institutions in the grip of woke ideology, and several of them asked me these questions point blank when I described myself as an anti-woke liberal who supports Biden. I wouldn’t describe any of them as long-standing conservatives or Republicans. But all of them have committed to vote for politicians who take a firm stand against woke trends—and in the current political environment, that means voting for Republicans.   

Here's my answer to the question of why I won’t make a similar move myself: first, because there’s a lot more at stake in the 2024 election than woke issues, and my sense of proportion tells me many of those other issues are more important and that the country will be much better off with Democrats attending to them; and second, because even on woke issues, I think both Trump and DeSantis are so harshly illiberal that their anti-woke efforts are likely to spawn a backlash that ends up empowering the very cultural forces they aim to combat. (There’s a reason woke trends took off with unprecedented intensity while Trump was president.)

The second of those considerations is a judgment based on my analysis of the facts. But the first is a narrower judgment of proportion: I just don’t think wokeness is anywhere close to the most important problem facing the country—one that should decisively determine how I vote. Again, if I had been personally (psychologically, financially, professionally) harmed by wokeness, I might be inspired to take a different position (I’m not certain). But I haven’t been harmed by it. In fact, I’ve written critically about it many times, and I frequently criticize it on social media, and yet I’ve never experienced anything harsher than a few hundred ranting ad hominem attacks from left-leaning accounts on Twitter. I wouldn’t describe that as pleasant, but it’s never come close to resembling a trauma.

The Judgments I Make

Here, meanwhile, are some of the things I consider to be significantly more important than the president and party I vote for coming down against wokeness:

• Will the president and party abide by the rule of law, including the peaceful and orderly transfer of power based on the lawful and accurate counting of ballots?

• Will the president and party treat mendacity like a virtue, knowingly spreading lies in order to discredit ideological opponents, undermine trust in federal law enforcement, and whip up insurrectionary rage in the hopes of using it to overturn constitutional checks on power?
  

• Will the president and party fight to preserve government programs on which tens of millions of Americans rely? Or will they act, instead, to fulfill the wishes of plutocratic donors who care most of all about cutting their own taxes?

• Will the president and party make wise, level-headed decisions in foreign policy? Or will they react on the basis of personal pique and very narrowly defined notions of national interest (and even on the basis of the president’s pursuit of self-enrichment and the party’s desire to score cheap political points)?

• If the president and party do make a move against wokeness, will they do so in a way that’s compatible with individual freedom? Or will the goal be achieved by enhancing government power and curtailing various rights, including the freedom of association?

Some of these considerations grow out of my experience of observing Trump in office and his party’s behavior over the intervening two years. Would DeSantis be equally dangerous? I doubt it, but on some pretty big issues (economic and foreign policy), he could be pretty awful. The truth is we just don’t know how he would govern in lots of areas. That, combined with the illiberal character of his most sweeping moves to combat wokeness, gives me more than enough reason to treat the Florida governor as unacceptable.

My Sense of Proportion

Maybe you disagree with me on this judgment. That’s fine. But it’s important that the dispute is understood in the right way—as flowing from a disagreement over how we judge the world around us and the options that present themselves to us within it. Even if DeSantis could be trusted to combat woke trends in a responsible and ultimately liberal way, I wouldn’t want to contribute to elevating him on that basis when I’m suspicious of what he would do on other issues with much higher stakes for the country and the world.

That’s what I mean by a sense of proportion. I think certain things matter more than others, and that judgment plays a big role in determining where I come down politically—just as it also played a big part in my decision to launch a Substack newsletter about the right rather than about the woke-progressive left. (Though as regular readers will soon see, that emphasis in my writing for Substack is going to shift somewhat over the coming weeks. Stay tuned to learn more about that.)