Big Government vs. Different Government

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

 

The rare conservative who takes ideological cues from CNN was perhaps delighted on Sunday by the outlet’s apprehension over the notion that Florida governor Ron DeSantis might finally and irrevocably transform the party into a vehicle for big government:

 

Among GOP donors, leading conservative voices and even some supporters, there is a growing concern that DeSantis has overstepped in his fight against “wokeness” as he seeks to shore up conservative support ahead of a highly anticipated 2024 campaign for president. Several potential rivals for the GOP nomination have seized on DeSantis’ brash approach and top-heavy governing style to draw sharp contrasts with the popular Republican.

 

The article cites two of DeSantis’s potential 2024 rivals, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu and former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, who are trying to carve out a position to DeSantis’s right on the culture wars. It adds that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem has critiqued Florida’s governor for briefly shuttering some of his state’s private and public venues at the outset of the pandemic, which serves primarily to burnish her own rejection of quasi-lockdown policies.

 

Savvy readers will recognize this for what it is: politics. It is, however, interesting that these governors are positioning themselves as more doctrinaire conservatives relative to DeSantis. It would be a welcome development if the 2024 race continued along this trajectory. The risk of lapsing into a category error is, however, pronounced given the degree to which neither DeSantis’s critics in the GOP nor CNN’s chroniclers of conservative thought distinguish big government from different government.

 

There is much to criticize in some of the culture wars DeSantis has chosen to litigate; foremost among the criticisms is that they are a waste of time and an abuse of conservatives’ trust.

 

Conservatives who perhaps wanted to see Donald Trump’s Twitter account restored were misled by those in the Florida legislature who acted as though that could be achieved via state-level legislation. Center-right voters who wanted protection from the mobs that descended on every major city in 2020 were led astray by the “Combatting Public Disorder Act,” which abridged the First Amendment’s protections. Those on the right who hoped to see Disney not merely chastened but punished didn’t back DeSantis’s effort to strip the Reedy Creek Improvement District of its autonomy merely because they hoped to prevent the children’s entertainment giant from building a nuclear reactor. Much as we might like to, it’s never going to be legal to run over pedestrians, and Mickey Mouse is many happy years away from developing a fissionable device.

 

And yet, the substance of these maneuvers doesn’t seem to concern DeSantis’s critics on the conservative right. At least, his detractors don’t dwell on the inefficacy of these gestures. The optics concern them more. “It can be portrayed or feel or look like retaliation,” billionaire GOP donor Ken Griffin confessed. Of greater concern to the conservatives CNN highlights are the ways in which Tallahassee has sought to restore what DeSantis defines as the status quo ante.

 

If DeSantis had engineered into existence new, taxpayer-funded levers of state power or intervened in affairs that were previously the exclusive domain of private actors, his conservative critics would have a point. But what CNN insists is a contravention of “free-market” principles consists of using the existing powers of the state in ways they — and, coincidentally, many of DeSantis’s left-wing critics — simply don’t like.

 

It was the CDC that overstepped its remit when a court found that it had no authority to impose discriminatory mandates on passengers that restricted families from accessing their services. The governor’s restructuring of the New College of Florida’s leadership did not require him to assume new powers previously undelegated to Florida’s chief executive. DeSantis’s fight with the College Board over the curricula that are taught in public universities doesn’t overstep any philosophical bounds. Indeed, as an authority with the imprimatur of two statewide election victories, his intervention into an opaque process conducted by institutions that are insulated from the voters’ verdicts isn’t an imperious rejection of democratic norms. Precisely the opposite.

 

The Club for Growth’s Frayda Levin laments DeSantis’s willingness to use “the power of his state” to advance “his socially conservative views.” It’s fair to say that, on cultural fronts, DeSantis is not limiting government’s reach. But neither is he expanding it. What’s more, CNN’s opportunistic commandeering of conservative rhetoric to advance a parochial political objective could not be more transparent.