What’s Wrong With Bad Seed Ron DeSantis?

Ever since Bill Clinton said he was going to “build a bridge to the 21st century”, I have tried to understand how different types of people model the world in their brains. Each way of viewing the world is a summary or simplification. The different ways of summarizing the world lead to different shortcomings and errors. The are two standard ways people view the world, that lead to being on the political left and right.

Liberals basically have a logical association of symbols, but with feelings attached to the symbols. You might say something like “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth”. If we assume Hell is a place, then it has a fixed amount of space, and will overflow. Logically it makes sense, but it is not connected to any physical reality.

The feelings come into play with things like abortion or sex change. If somebody feels like he is a girl, then we just change the properties of the symbol, X equals girl, as easily as saying Hell is a three-dimensional space adjacent to Earth. A conservative says that guy does not have a uterus, and therefore is not a girl. Hell is not physically contiguous with Earth. The words liberals say make sense, and are validated by feelings, but they don’t work in the real world.

A conservative says an unborn baby is alive. It has a heartbeat, so killing it violates the right to life. A liberal knows how a young girl feels who is pregnant and it conflicts with her life plans. The baby doesn’t have any thoughts, so it doesn’t matter. Except the Democrat knows how the baby will feel when it grows up in poverty, instead of the fairy tale life the girl would rather have a baby in.

Even where there seem to be shared values, the reasons are different. Both Democrats and Republicans agree, a baker who tries and succeeds in baking bread that is both delicious and beautiful, is a good thing. But Democrats will relate to this as a story of overcoming people who were mean to you and your own failings. They know how it feels for an ugly person to become beautiful by making something beautiful.

Republicans think a baker who bakes delicious bread is a good thing, not because the baker becomes happy and loved, but because bread keeps people alive. Republicans know there are bad people in the world, as a matter of history and statistics. Democrats know if you upload a video of killing something on Youtube, it will get more clicks than any other video. Democrats know people are evil because they can sense the impulses of people they come in contact with.

This leads us to the bizarre case of the strange parrot Ron DeSantis. DeSantis graduated from two Ivy League schools, and seems to think more like a liberal. He has an abstract model of the world that seems slightly off and wrong all the time. The simplest example is when DeSantis said Anthony Fauci should not have accepted an invitation to throw out the first pitch, because he is a bad pitcher. Fauci should know his limitations. But being invited to throw out the first pitch, and accepting, has nothing to do with whether you can pitch.

DeSantis seems to be a bizarre hybrid, where his worldview is a set of word associations like a liberal. Except he has constructed it out of the feelings and beliefs of the political right, instead of the political left. So rather than saying dolphins and trees are good, DeSantis says cops and veterans are good. And rather than saying businessmen are bad, he says vaccines are bad. And like a liberal, DeSantis maps all these ideas and beliefs into a simple table of words. If Harvard had a class on Republican thought, DeSantis might score 100%.

I had been looking for an ideal example of DeSantis’s thought, without buying his book “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” which is a mapping of words onto Harvard Obama’s “Dreams from My Father”. Speaking at the National Conservatism conference recently, DeSantis said “The lesson for people on the right is, I think there was a generation of people, that kind of the muscle memory was just if it’s private, just defer to it. If it’s a corporate and let them do kind of what they want to do.”

So you can see, DeSantis is trying to build simple summaries of rules and word associations, the hallmark of a liberal. This reminds me of the scene in the movie “Fight Club” when the disciple said “I understand. In death a member of project mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.” DeSantis is correct that at the retail level since the time of DeTocqueville, the principles of conservatism produced simple rules and prejudices. But DeSantis is incorrect that conservative thought is nothing but word associations and the “muscle memory” of the mob.

DeSantis went on to say “The United States is a nation that has an economy, not the other way around, and our economy should be geared towards helping our own people.” You might notice this is very close to the title of Yale Bill Clinton and Harvard Al Gore’s 1992 campaign book “Putting People First”. DeSantis explained what he means by this, is the purpose of free enterprise – the government letting bakers bake bread – is only because it feeds people. If we don’t like the outcome – if bakers are not feeding people, or if we simply don’t like what they do with their freedom – then government is right to override the process; not just adjust the process, the rules of the game, but directly control the outcome.

The Constitution, which DeSantis claims to love, specifies processes not outcomes. You have a right to a jury trial and to confront witnesses, but the Constitution does not prohibit false convictions. This is because it is not possible to direct outcomes such as income equality. And any government that achieves the power to direct outcomes will not use it to produce bread and medicine, but votes and nukes. DeSantis says if the process is not good enough – if we don’t like the outcome – then we can override it. I have firsthand experience of this, where DeSantis supports a deputy who used perjury to arrest me in Pinellas County 21-00796-CF. Another example would be Trump’s attempt to stop the 2020 election certification in Congress.

When Bill Clinton said “putting people first”, he meant corporations seeking profits will not provide the newest healthcare innovations to poor people with preexisting conditions. DeSantis has in mind universities that put students in debt they can’t pay off, by teaching them to be liberals, and corporations that only hire liberals from those universities, and then use their wealth to promote their liberal religion. (DeSantis’s values seem to be a product of cold calculation, because corporations tell people not to vote for DeSantis, and opposing their values gets X% of votes.)

Like Bill Clinton, DeSantis does not like the values that are served by the chaotic outcomes of these processes. And like Bill Clinton, DeSantis believes that increased government power can instead direct the processes to achieve outcomes which fit the values that are popular among his constituents. DeSantis would be happy if rich people promoted restrictions on homosexuality instead of guns. And DeSantis believes the government has a role in shaping the sort of national religion, to suit his supporters.

This is not so much classical liberalism or tolerance, versus the collectivist instinct. DeSantis versus liberals is more like Shia versus Sunni muslims. It’s a religious and loyalty test for businesses, enforced by government. DeSantis does not understand the difference between a society ordered by spontaneous processes versus conscious will. Because like many liberals and the mob in general, DeSantis is blind to or does not like the concept of complex inanimate processes that define contemporary society, life without a king. He dislikes competition from the nobility as preceded the Magna Carta, he dislikes everything but direct tribal power.

This is an important issue because it raises the question of, you know, who governs society? Do we govern ourselves through our Constitution and through our elections or do we have these masters of the universe occupying these commanding heights of society?

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

DeSantis throws in the word “Constitution” like putting salt on dog poop and calling it a pretzel.

What we find is that DeSantis actually is a liberal. He believes in collectivism. He believes in discovering some collective consensus, as with a tribe, and then the government controls the institutions and overrides the process to produce that outcome. The only difference is in the specific values to which DeSantis wants to direct the outcomes, preventing children mutilating their genitals, versus preventing false convictions or drunk driving deaths or police shooting suspects or whatever.

It is for this reason that a thought leader like talkshow host Joe Rogan can go from supporting socialist Bernie Sanders in one election, to supporting Ron DeSantis in the next. They are all collectivists who can loosely quote but do not understand the founding principles of the United States.