The plain story of Ron DeSantis’s marketing campaign announcement on Twitter was the collection of embarrassing technical failures that marred the occasion. However what DeSantis really mentioned — no less than, after I might hear him — revealed a probably larger long-term drawback for his marketing campaign: He’s obsessive about all of the incorrect issues.
All through the occasion, DeSantis and Elon Musk talked endlessly about wokeness and its varied purported evils — typically in language that might be completely alien to anybody who isn’t saturated within the cultural obsessions of the web proper. The phrase “woke” handed DeSantis’s lips extra occasions than I might depend. He relitigated the main points of YouTube’s selections on content material administration throughout Covid, claimed Disney “clearly supported” injecting gender ideology in elementary faculty,” and warned of a (seemingly fictitious) Biden administration plot to “regulate [Bitcoin] out of existence.”
A complete query was dedicated to ESG — shorthand for socially aware investing that considers environmental, social, and governance components, an strategy that has turn out to be reviled in sure corners of the proper. However most People have barely heard of ESG and don’t actually care about it. In his reply, DeSantis by no means even bothered to say what the acronym stood for.
This isn’t a one-off drawback for DeSantis. Final month, the Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a former Republican operative, analyzed DeSantis’s public pronouncements and observed all the identical issues — proper right down to the yammering on about ESG with out telling the viewers what it was. This led Miller to check DeSantis’s marketing campaign to Elizabeth Warren’s in 2020: an enormous hit with the educated elites on their facet of the aisle, however one which has hassle talking in a register that connects with the normie voters who resolve elections.
As if to show the purpose, DeSantis fell into the very same lure in a Fox Information interview instantly following the Twitter occasion. “The woke thoughts virus is mainly a type of cultural Marxism. On the finish of the day it’s an assault on the reality. And since it’s a conflict on reality, I feel we’ve no selection however to wage a conflict on woke,” he instructed host Trey Gowdy.
What was on show within the DeSantis launch was a candidate so gripped by the proper’s imaginative and prescient of apocalyptic tradition conflict that he might have strayed too removed from the atypical voter’s actuality. Name it “woke derangement syndrome” — a situation that might doom DeSantis’s candidacy earlier than it actually will get began.
Woke derangement syndrome is actual, and Ron DeSantis has a nasty case
“Woke derangement syndrome” will not be the identical as being generically “anti-woke.” There are many pundits and teachers who’ve introduced cogent and affordable criticisms of the dominant approaches to id politics on the modern left — starting from Adolph Reed Jr. on the socialist left to my former colleague Matt Yglesias on the middle left to Glenn Loury on the middle proper. Their concepts benefit critical engagement moderately than dismissal.
Fairly, woke derangement syndrome is an obsessive deal with the evils of wokeness that warps one’s worldview. The stricken’s participation within the tradition conflict has, in a single form or one other, distorted their judgment and weakened their maintain on actuality.
Elon Musk is an particularly vivid instance. He was as soon as primarily referred to as a visionary tech founder who helped pioneer industrial electrical automobiles; now his public fixation with “the woke thoughts virus” has outlined his public persona and just about blotted out each different difficulty for him. The obsession has curdled into an more and more conspiratorial worldview and a flirtation with outright bigotry.
DeSantis’s governance of Florida has proven an analogous tendency to see the whole lot by way of the woke lens. Whether or not it’s his try to rework a small public faculty right into a right-wing academy, his seemingly unconstitutional effort to punish social media corporations for content material regulation, or the “Don’t Say Homosexual” legislation proscribing schooling on LGBTQ subjects in main faculty, the tradition conflict has dominated DeSantis’s agenda.
Nowhere is that this clearer, or seemingly extra counterproductive, than his unending conflict with Disney. After the mega-corporation put out a light assertion criticizing the Don’t Say Homosexual legislation, DeSantis went nuclear — stripping a number of the firm’s particular tax privileges and resulting in an escalating combat that performed a job in Disney’s resolution to scrap a $1 billion new workplace growth within the state (a lack of about 2,000 Floridian jobs).
Polling numbers counsel this won’t even repay politically. A current Yahoo/YouGov ballot discovered that two-thirds of People had not heard a lot concerning the DeSantis-Disney combat, and people who had paid consideration have been more likely to be liberal MSNBC viewers than conservative Fox watchers.
Within the lengthy arc of his political profession, DeSantis has displayed a reasonably spectacular means to morph his id in a fashion that matches the second. At varied factors, as my colleague Andrew Prokop exhibits, he has been a Tea Occasion libertarian, a fawning Trump supporter, a quietly pragmatic purple state governor, and a hardline opponent of Covid lockdowns and faculty closures. The throughline is his ambition and flexibility: DeSantis figures out what sort of Republican the political second requires and turns into it.
Proper now, he perceives the second requires DeSantis, the anti-woke warrior. There’s some proof supporting him: The Yahoo/YouGov ballot discovered that 71 p.c of Republicans consider “wokeness” is a serious drawback for the nation, a discovering per political science analysis that the tradition conflict actually is on the coronary heart of America’s political divide.
However it’s one factor to care deeply about cultural points like race, immigration, and gender — and one other factor altogether to speak about it within the bizarrely particular means that DeSantis does. He has turn out to be so conversant within the on-line proper’s lingo, so within the weeds on the varied totally different obsessions of the anti-woke world, that he dangers abandoning a big swath of the voting public. The very resolution to announce on Twitter, a platform affected by technical points and utilized by comparatively few People, underscores the issue.
Distinction DeSantis’s strategy to tradition conflict with Trump’s visceral, indignant, populist assaults on the elites. Nattering on about ESG and DEI could be very totally different from saying “construct the wall” or “lock her up.” DeSantis speaks to the tradition conflict’s generals; Trump is talking to its foot troopers.
To be truthful, Trump lapses into his personal conspiratorial world with its share of characters and plots that solely the diehards can comply with. However that’s maybe the weakest a part of his public persona, one which DeSantis might theoretically reap the benefits of through the main — if he weren’t affected by an analogous drawback.
Whether or not DeSantis actually believes what he’s saying is nearly immaterial; what’s clear is that his countless participation within the tradition conflict has satisfied him that performing an arcane model of Trump’s shtick conveys competence moderately than weirdness. That is the issue with woke derangement syndrome in a nutshell: It twists folks’s genuine judgment. They turn out to be so obsessive about the alleged evils of “the woke” that they can’t inform true from false, useful from hurtful, proportionate from disproportionate. DeSantis might not even consider that he wants to alter the best way he acts and talks to beat Trump.
DeSantis nonetheless has time to return to actuality. But when he actually has been stricken with the identical form of mind worms as Elon Musk — and his resolution to announce alongside the Twitter proprietor very a lot suggests he has — then he’s in even deeper hassle than his crashing ballot numbers counsel.
