Trump, DeSantis, and the Proper Scope of Liberalism

Should a liberal care only about rights?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis waves as he speaks to police officers about protecting law and order on February 20, 2023 in the Staten Island borough of New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

This is the second post I’ve written in response to the reactions stirred up by my recent New York Times op-ed. It should be my last. But next week, I hope to build on these responses to delve deeper into the question of the kind of politics Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would pursue as president. I agree with those who say he’s likely to follow the example of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, though I disagree with those who describe Orbán as a fascist. But if Orbán isn’t a fascist, what is he? And what would DeSantis be? A first stab at answering that question will hopefully be ready for publication on Monday. In the meantime, the paywall is down again on today’s post. Only the audio version and link to comments at the bottom of the post have been blocked from non-paying subscribers.

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I want to start out this post noting that things improved for me somewhat on Twitter starting on Tuesday afternoon. After about 36 hours of nonstop vituperation from people who appeared not to read the op-ed before launching into denunciations—that was a high percentage of people tweeting about the piece—things began to calm down, no doubt in part because I began blocking accounts that engaged in personal insults.

Confidence Levels

But that’s also around the time that journalist Michael Cohen weighed in with more thoughtful criticism, which Jonathan Chait of New York magazine echoed and developed further on Wednesday morning. (For a thorough summary of my exchange with Chait with lots of quotes and links, see Thursday’s “Morning Shots” post by Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark.) Their objection? That I displayed too much certainty in my op-ed about how bad Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would be as president relative to Donald Trump. How can I know Trump would be worse?

Cohen and Chait have a point: I can’t really know this. It’s true that DeSantis could go full Greg Stillson once he wins the White House, firing nukes at Russia and China, opening death camps for minority groups he doesn’t like, canceling the 2028 elections, or any number of other terrible things. I can’t know for certain that these outlier possibilities won’t happen, or even ones slightly less outlandish. On the other hand, I think we know enough about Trump to surmise that he would be at least as malicious, impulsive, and capricious as he was the last time he was in the Oval Office. In sum, DeSantis might do terrible things. But Trump will act like a madman. That’s enough for me to consider a second Trump presidency more dangerous than a first DeSantis one.  

Let me put it another way: Trump sometimes acts like he’s insane. We have no reason to think DeSantis is insane. If those two presumptions are accurate, Trump is a bigger risk, even if, on policy, the two men are equally terrible. (I think we have reason to think they are. DeSantis now wants to fire civil servants and replace them with partisan hacks, which is something the Trump administration first proposed doing in its final months, and Trump is now trying to one-up DeSantis in persecuting transgender people. These two are in a race to an ever-receding bottom.)

But Cohen and Chait still have a point. Maybe I should have put a line in the op-ed admitting, like the Department of Energy did with its analysis of the lab-leak hypothesis about the origins of COVID-19, that my argument was advanced with a relatively low level of confidence.

I hope you will take this suggestion seriously and not literally.

Trump as Chaos Agent

On Wednesday morning, my close friend and fellow Substacker Noah Millman jumped in to my back-and-forth tweeting with Chait to explore a different line of inquiry about my piece. Please read the whole thread for yourself. But I’m especially interested in one tweet in particular—one in which Millman gestures toward the way I conceive of the distinctive dangers posed by each of the Republican frontrunners:

Noah Millman @BloggerGideon

@DamonLinker @jonathanchait @SykesCharlie If your deepest fear is of constitutional collapse or incipient civil war -- regardless of the true likelihood thereof -- then it makes sense to be uniquely horrified by the prospect of a second Trump term.

I like this because it points to assumptions underlying my op-ed—assumptions that raise questions not just about its argument, but also about my self-description as a liberal in that essay and in this newsletter.

I worried quite a bit about constitutional breakdown and civil unrest trending in the direction of outright war when Trump was president. I assume this will be the case again if he manages to make it back to the White House—and that I won’t fear this as much if DeSantis wins the 2024 election instead.

Is it this kind of consideration that drove me to write my op-ed? Partly. But it was also the more generalized worry about the chaos Trump brings with him everywhere he goes. Presidents run the executive branch, giving them enormous power, and they help to set their party’s agenda in Congress. On those fronts, Trump and DeSantis would likely be similarly bad. But presidents also respond to international and domestic emergencies—and they do a lot to set the national tone of our public life. It’s in these latter respects that I think a second Trump administration would likely be significantly worse than a first DeSantis one.

What this shows, I think, is that a certain baseline of social order and competent functioning of government matters a lot to me—because I think it’s important to the country, even if most of my liberal critics are far more concerned about other things—above all, the fate of various rights: free speech rights, academic freedom, voting rights, LGBT rights. Those matter to me, too. But I also care about the power of the presidency being in the hands of lunatic who’s shown himself to be an ignorant, malicious moron who couldn’t care less about the rule of law. And I think it’s unfortunate that the justified emphasis on infringements of rights has led significant numbers of very-online liberals to slight the importance of these additional considerations.

Liberalism in Full

But does this follow from their liberalism? And is my own concern with social order and baseline government functioning evidence that I’m not a liberal and maybe even (oh no!) a not-very-convincingly-closeted conservative instead?

I really don’t think so.

Rights matter in liberalism. But so does the competition between parties to win majorities or pluralities in free and fair elections. And for that system to function and its outcomes to be deemed legitimate by all participants, a certain baseline of order and competence on the part of elected officials is required. The fact that at the moment many very-online liberals are so anxious about a future DeSantis administration that they appear unconcerned with the prospect of a breakdown of that baseline order and competence doesn’t mean this lack of concern necessarily follows from their liberalism. On the contrary, it might be a sign that these liberals are succumbing to panic and, as a result, losing sight of the bigger picture.

Order and competence matter, too. In fact, they are in some sense more fundamental than rights because a disordered polity with an incompetent government will be less likely to recognize and protect them consistently.

To be a liberal in full is to recognize the importance and necessity of all these elements—rights, order, competence, legitimacy—for a healthy politics in a free society. I therefore also think it’s a mistake for liberals (and a sign of a constriction in their political understanding) to downplay the unique threat that Donald Trump poses to each.

I was moved to write my op-ed, in part, by concern about this trend among liberals, just as my ambition to rehabilitate a more capacious understanding of liberalism on this Substack is partly motivating the changes that will be coming here over the next week or so.