Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday afternoon, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis articulated his clearest presidential pitch to date in a whirlwind speech arguing that “Florida has defeated Faucism.”
The remarks, which were delivered at the most influential Republican activist gathering in the country, serve as a preview of the major themes DeSantis could run on if he does, indeed, make a widely expected 2024 bid. And the heart of that message was that under his leadership Florida has served as a “citadel of freedom” in what he sees as an authoritarian hellscape that uses the pretext of Covid to brutally repress people.
DeSantis hopes to exploit anti-Covid restriction hysteria to propel himself to greater heights.
Nowhere in DeSantis’ analysis was any reckoning or remorse over his state’s poor record on Covid-related mortality and illness. Nor was there acknowledgment of the fact that Covid restrictions in the U.S., which were measured and largely comparable to or more relaxed than many of our peer countries, are already vanishing. Instead, DeSantis hopes to exploit anti-Covid restriction hysteria to propel himself to greater heights and convince the GOP that he’s the man of the moment.
DeSantis’ speech covered a great deal of ground very quickly, including calling for cracking down on crime harshly, securing borders more aggressively, bigger obstacles to voting in the name of election security, combating “Bidenflation” and decrying “woke” thinking as “the new religion of the left.” DeSantis dutifully ticked all the boxes that any Trumpian right-wing populist needs to tick to excite the base, including attacking the media as “dishonest.” His delivery was a sort of soggy mimicry of Donald Trump, rushed and with a slightly cerebral air that belied his anti-intellectual pandering.
But DeSantis’ message was centered on boasting about how he governed his state during the pandemic. He championed his controversial bans on Covid-related restrictions and mandates (which have included remarkably punitive policies like seeking to strip funding from Democratic counties that bucked his prohibitions on mask requirements in schools) and painted his state’s radically lax Covid policies as a fortress against a “Faucian dystopia where people's freedoms are curtailed and their livelihoods are destroyed” and the tyranny of the “biomedical security state.”
In DeSantis’ view, his state led not just the U.S., but also the world in its commitment to freedom. He at one point read a letter from a fan in Australia who praised Florida’s laissez-faire protocols as preferable to their own country’s.
DeSantis waxed poetic about his perverse pandemic response, in which he identified the horrors of the pandemic as mask-wearing rather than the fact that his state had, at some points in the pandemic, some of the worst containment of the spread of the virus and Covid-related hospitalization and mortality in the country. DeSantis, who has appointed a surgeon general who has likened vaccinations to a misguided religion, depicted scientific experts as the enemy rather than essential guides for ending the pandemic. Ultimately he defined pro-social Covid measures as oppression, and lethal hyper-individualism as liberty.
While Trump has waffled to some extent on what position to take on Covid, DeSantis sees his own systematic denialism of it as central to his brand.
DeSantis’ depiction of Covid totalitarianism was even stranger in light of the fact that the U.S.’s measured and uneven restrictions (because we live in a federalist system) are already swiftly vanishing. Every state except Hawaii has already planned or is planning to drop mask mandates as the omicron variant declines, even though Covid is still killing thousands a day. Major liberal cities are dropping or looking to drop proof-of-vaccine requirements for indoor venues like restaurants and bars. The Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden’s employer vaccination mandate, and corporations are shedding Covid protocols — including mask mandates and vaccination requirements. There are various exceptions to discarded mandates in some states in places like schools and public transportation, but the overall trend is a return to normality.
Yet DeSantis is banking on the idea that he can sell Florida as a utopia in a country that, according to him, has gone to hell. It's possible that he could tap into some Republicans' impatience with the Covid restrictions that remain in place, and he probably hopes to use it to claim a unique edge for himself in any competition with Trump, who’s now been out of office for roughly half of the pandemic and has clashed with some of his base when he tried, briefly, to claim vaccines were a good thing. While Trump has waffled to some extent on what position to take on Covid, DeSantis sees his own systematic denialism of it as central to his brand.
