The DeSantis Test
Will the Great Alternative to Trump recognize any enemies to the right?
Nate Hochman, whose National Review piece on conservatism and fascism inspired my Wednesday post, published a response to me later that same day. But it was written before I’d gotten a chance to reply to his request for a copy of the full essay. So he responded only to what I’d written up to the paywall and not the essay as a whole.
The result is about what you’d expect: The short piece makes an arguable point about the mix of (by my definitions) conservative and reactionary sensibilities at NR down through the decades, but it completely misses the broader point of the post. The end result is a piece that is very much the kind of hand-waving exercise in denial of the reality of a dangerously radicalizing right that I discussed in the paywall-hidden final paragraph of my original post.
Seeing that hand-waving in action yet again led me to ponder how else I might try to break through the denial and defensiveness. Thankfully, I came across a couple of tweets that showed me one possible way.
Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who was recently reinstated on Twitter after a years-long ban and who likes to be associated with the likes of Alex Jones, Kanye, and Nick Fuentes, fired a shot at the looming presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
This prompted conservative National Review contributor Jeff Blehar to respond:
That’s an interesting supposition and well worth unpacking.
“No Enemies to the Left”
Through the middle decades of the 20th century, conservatives liked to chide liberals for having “no enemies to the left.” The phrase had roots in Bolshevik tactics during the Russian Revolution, but it was revived as an epithet during the McCarthy era, when some liberals hesitated to denounce communists and communist-sympathizers with what conservatives considered sufficient gusto. The liberals justified their hesitation in terms of defending civil liberties against a demagogic thug ruining careers and reputations from the chambers of the U.S. Senate.
But conservatives responded by claiming that liberals thought of communists as well-meaning compatriots in the fight for justice who foolishly demonstrated impatience. They were merely “liberals in a hurry,” in other words. Most liberals denied this, and many of the left-wing radicals of the 1930s who by the early 1950s had become the “New York intellectuals” (Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling, and others) sought to put meat on the denial by formulating a robust defense of liberalism while also drawing bright lines between themselves and those on the leftward fringes.
I like Blehar’s tweet because it posits that DeSantis will want enemies to his right—people like Loomer, and by extension, Jones, Kanye, and Fuentes, and anyone who admires them and what they say and do in politics.
That’s actually a refreshing and reassuring suggestion, given that one of the distinctive marks of Donald Trump’s political style has been a studied refusal to do much of anything to distance himself from the most execrable figures and ideas on the rightward fringes. We saw this in his hesitation to denounce David Duke during his 2016 presidential campaign; in his reference to “good people” marching by torchlight in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017; in his refusal during the 2020 campaign to say anything negative about far-right supporters in the militia and paramilitary movements (who later played a leading role in the insurrectionary events of January 6); and, most recently, in his promotion of QAnon memes and accounts at Truth Social, and in his decision to sit down to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with (and subsequent refusal to say a negative word about) Kanye, Fuentes, and Milo Yiannopoulos.
Trump clearly practices a politics of “no enemies to the right.”
The Mystery Man from Tallahassee
But what about DeSantis?
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