by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I’ve pretty much given up discussing politics with my far more conservatives relatives — I mean, what’s the point if the only red line they have is me when ICE kills me under the Pompeo Administration — one of them said something recently that I caught my attention.
“Why do you hate him,” one of them said in reference to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
I’ve found myself mulling this comment a lot lately. Here’s what’s really going on, I think.
I definitely don’t “hate” Ron DeSantis and I think the comment could be translated to mean more something along the lines of, “Why do you hate my politics?”
I can’t help that I fucking hate the MAGA New Right. But that’s not really the issue. If this was 30 years ago, Ron DeSantis would be just your standard ambitious Republican governor. He would probably be someone whose actual politics were more in line with George H.W. Bush than Trump.
But it’s not 30 years ago.
So, here we are. DeSantis knows that he’s extremely close to being the next president of the United States for various reasons. All he has to do is either get past Trump or become Trump’s veep and he’s going to be president sooner rather than later. As such, DeSantis wallows into the tropes and conceits of the MAGA New Right.
The thing I don’t think enough people appreciate is that by definition, to be a Republican is to hate democracy. It is Republican orthodoxy now that the United States is NOT a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic and, as such, fuck you lib. Rather than doing what political parties in the United States have done for generations, which is to review what makes their policies unpopular and then revising them so they win elections again, Republicans want to burn everything to the ground.
They see democracy as simply as a means to an end — to obtain and keep power. Otherwise, fuck you.
In other words, as I keep saying, the United States is careening towards the existential decision of autocracy or civil war in the general 2024 – 2025 time frame. Something pretty big, like, say, a limited nuclear exchange, would have to happen for this not to occur.
So, I don’t “hate” DeSantis, but I’m very cleared eye as to what will happen whenever he — or any other Republican — becomes POTUS.
