DeSantis Summons the Ghost of Reagan

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 02, 2023

 

Twice in as many days, Florida governor Ron DeSantis invited the wrath of a thousand Washington, D.C.–based social-media influencers by favorably invoking President Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

 

As Dominic Pino convincingly argued, DeSantis’s set-piece speech on his economic policies (many of which were cultural policies that have incidental economic effects) was replete with the heady rhetoric of the culture wars. But there were some green shoots in that speech. One of them involved the governor’s full-throated endorsement of Reagan’s philosophical approach to the misallocation of taxpayer funds.

 

“We need to rein in Congress’s spending habits,” he told the crowd. Toward that end, DeSantis endorsed the aborted 1982 effort to ratify a new amendment to the Constitution that would have required that total federal outlays be no greater than total receipts — the so-called balanced-budget amendment. He continued to promote his own gubernatorial vetoing of what he deemed “excessive spending,” and he promised to do the same as president, just like the Gipper. “We really haven’t had a president since Ronald Reagan who leaned in against Congress overspending,” DeSantis said. “I will be that president.”

 

That promise might frustrate some of the governor’s more populist supporters, many of whom have embraced deficit spending as long as it is dedicated to their priorities. For them, profligacy in pursuit of the popular is no vice. Distancing himself from that right-wing fashion is worthy of credit and praise.

 

In a slightly more veiled nod to the 40th president, DeSantis promotes his economic agenda in a distinctly Reaganite way. He summarizes his philosophy thusly: “We win. They Lose.”

 

That’s how Reagan described his approach to relations with the Soviet Union. “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic,” he said in 1977. “It is this: We win, and they lose.” That was a particularly controversial view, not just among Democrats but Republicans, too, when the American Right was still captive to the logic of détente with Moscow.

 

Indeed, that language is likely to trigger anyone who has internalized moral relativism in their assessment of the United States vis-à-vis its competitors abroad. America, the self-described nationalists insist, is just one power among many, and it’s certainly not a uniquely ethical one. DeSantis’s absolutism and self-assuredness is a welcome departure from the sour, insecure subjectivism that masquerades as enlightenment on the populist right.

 

Maybe these gestures are too few and far between to constitute a deliberate feature of the DeSantis campaign’s “reboot.” They are welcome nonetheless.