DeSantis's Ukraine remarks, Republican response and the blurred lines between phoniness and sincerity

 By now, you're aware of what the Florida governor said:

"While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Community Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them," DeSantis said in a statement to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

A territorial dispute. Interesting way to frame it, to say the least.

A number of prominent Republicans seized the opportunity to seize the moral high ground - or something that they hope voters will see as a reasonable facsimile.

Let's start with the reaction of the one Republican addressing this whom we can be confident is driven by principle:

“The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom,” the former lawmaker said in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday. “Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”

Cheney, who was known as a defense hawk during her time in Congress, said the stance by DeSantis showed “weakness.”

“Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon,” Cheney said. “Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”

Nikki Haley, who irreparably damaged her cred with the early 2021 pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and who is now a declared presidential candidate, exudes the vibe of a politician striving to straddle in her response:

“President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him—first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine,” Haley said in a statement. “I have a different style than President Trump, and while I agree with him on most policies, I do not on those.”

In her own response to the Fox News questionnaire, Haley offered an unequivocal “Yes,” when asked if defending Ukraine was in America’s vital interests.

“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory,” Haley said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”

John Cornyn, the Texas Senator who serves as the grownup foil to his colleague with the same position, speaks pretty plainly about it:

“I’m disturbed by it. I think he’s a smart guy,” Cornyn told Politico. “I want to find out more about it, but I hope he feels like he doesn’t need to take that Tucker Carlson line to be competitive in the primary. It’s important for us to continue to support Ukrainians for our own security.”

As sentiment from some in his party has soured on the war, Cornyn has been one of the leading conservative voices in the Senate continuing to voice the need for U.S. support.

“The point that keeps getting lost in this war is that a Ukrainian victory is in our national interest,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor last month. “The most effective way to keep American troops out of the line of fire is to help the Ukrainians stop Putin now, before his conquest moves even further west.”

Marco Rubio rightly zeroed in on the "territorial dispute" characterization.

Thom Tillis emphasized the humanitarian-crisis aspect.  

This dustup will deepen the fissure between MAGA world and, well, pretty much the rest of the country. Everybody who is not eyeball-deep in Kool-Aid can see what the drop-Ukraine-like-a-hot-potato position for what it is. Yes, Ukraine has dealt with corruption issues since the fall of the USSR. Nations are comprised of fallen human beings, and every last one of them has ever-present challenges as a result. But from 1991 to 2014, the world understood the parameters of Ukraine's sovereignty. Putin has acted in utter disregard for that understanding since then. A reliably stable global order is what's at stake here.

Is DeSantis flaming out already?

Probably too early to say decisively, but it's heartening to see the short-term damage it's doing to his national standing. But we surely have many more plot twists to witness before determining whether it is a corrective moment or a fatal one. 

 

 

The thorniness of extricating the nugget of truth from the tangle of other considerations

 This post is about two people I simultaneously find gravely problematic and admirable. They are Rod Dreher and Ron DeSantis.

Dreher is editor of The American Conservative and has a record of penning ringing defenses of that which is inarguably defensible. He distilled his concern about what the marginalization of Christianity was going to mean for practicing believers into an important 2017 book, The Benedict Option.  He wrote the introduction to Carl Trueman's The Rise of the Modern. Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution, an exhaustive analysis of how we got to a point at which transgendered bathrooms were considered as something to which there was a right. 

But he has become enamored of this flimsy notion of a "national conservatism," to the extent of not only expressing admiration for Victor Orban, but moving to Hungary. This move really mars his standing as an articulator of he good, right and true.

Good Rod shows up today in a piece for his magazine in which he properly lauds Florida governor Ron DeSantis for serving notice that that state's educational system will not brook DEI or an African American Studies curriculum driven by the thought of Robin G. Kelly and Keeyanga Yamahtta Taylor. 

Dreher effectively conveys the significance of DeSantis's stance:

I can hardly believe that a leading Republican politician actually has backbone in the fight against wokeness. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the real deal. Fresh news out of the Sunshine State:

Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a series of proposals for Florida’s public universities at the State College of Florida on Tuesday.

One aspect of the proposal would eliminate all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) “bureaucracies” at public universities.

DeSantis said his administration will propose core course requirements that are “focused on giving them the foundation so they can think for themselves” and will be grounded in “actual philosophy that has shaped western civilization.”

“We don’t want students to go through, at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in zombie studies,” he said. “And so this is gonna make a difference.”

Watch the video of his announcement here.

It's happening. It's actually happening. The Bad Guys are going to scream bloody murder, but finally -- finally -- we have a political leader who is taking a hard stand against these woke commissars. DEI bureaucracies at American universities have exploded in recent years, in part because the woke cartel has intimidated state legislators and others by calling them bigots who don't care about "marginalized" students if they resist. Are these bureaucracies actually making campuses better, or are they making schools more conformist by instituting programs and policies that reinforce a sense of grievance, and intimidate dissenters into silence? Would the ton of money spent on these apparatchiks' salaries be better spent hiring more teachers, or raising the salaries of professors? Finally, DeSantis's move is going to force these militants to justify their existence. 

He offers a taste of the screaming of bloody murder to which he alludes:

Expect more garbage like this New York Times op-ed slandering DeSantis's ban on the AP African American History course. The author fumes:

An unrelenting assault on truth and freedom of expression in the form of laws that censor and suppress the viewpoints, histories and experiences of historically marginalized groups, especially Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities, is underway throughout the country, most clearly in Florida. The state’s Department of Education recently rejected a pilot Advanced Placement African American studies course from being offered in Florida’s public high schools.

Under Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law — which would limit students and teachers from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender — Florida is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign to silence Black voices and erase the full and accurate history and contemporary experiences of Black people.

Bullsh*t. I'll tell you why in a second. One more quote from the essay:

It’s no coincidence that these attacks are targeting not just historically marginalized people but also our very experiences of intersectionality. Mr. DeSantis recently rubbished the inclusion of “queer theory” in the A.P. African American studies course that was rejected, seeming to deny the need for future generations to learn about the contributions of queer Black American icons like Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. Florida’s H.B. 1557, more widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, also limits conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms and, like “Stop WOKE,” makes clear that the State of Florida seeks to suppress and target people’s identities.

Why is it BS? Because DeSantis clearly said the other day, when he announced his ban on the course, that he is not going to allow the AP course to propagandize Florida students for tendentious, highly ideological reads on black history, under the guise of teaching about black history (which he fully supports). The lie here is that if you don't give these ideological culture warriors everything they want, then you must be a BIGOT. In fact, DeSantis is doing his job: making sure that the public school students of Florida aren't forced to read neo-Marxist propaganda as history. 

He ends by sharing this encouraging development:

UPDATE: Well now!:

One of Governor Ron DeSantis’ most vocal critics supports the state’s decision to reject the College Board’s AP African American Studies course for high schoolers. When asked his thoughts on the recent controversy, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor [who is black -- RD] blasted the course as “trash,” according to Tallahassee Reports.

“There is grave concern about the tone and the tenor of leadership’s voice from the highest spaces in our state being hostile to teaching of African American history. Well frankly I’m against the College Board’s curriculum,” Proctor said.

“I think it’s trash. It’s not African American history. It is ideology,” he continued. “I’ve taught African American history, I’ve structured syllabuses for African American history. I am African American history. And talking about ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ and all of that for the struggle for freedom and equality and justice has not been no tension with queerness and feminist thought at all.”

We're seeing a display of Good Ron as well as Good Rod.

But there's the governor's other side as well. He intends to eke out his political future within the framework of what the Republican Party has become. This was most evident last fall when he campaigned for Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake and Blake Masters. 

This kind of drag-our-brand-over-the-finish-line politicking muddies the waters to a disturbing degree. Increasingly, the general public conflates MAGA yay-hoo-ism with actual conservative principles because that's just about the only arena in which one sees those principles being defended.

Many of those who have undertaken the self-appointed task of upholding an alternative - that is to say, rooted in an embrace of heritage - vision of conservatism are apparently uninterested in this whole area of our national life. You won't find an essay like this in The Bulwark. It doesn't appear to be on the Principles First radar. Adam Kinzinger is now a private citizen, It would be nice to see him weigh in. 

I'm afraid that the reason for reticence on the part of these people and outlets is that they don't want to endanger the big-tent premise on which they're inviting people to gravitate toward their project. Culture-war issues strike them as too icky to address.

And then there's the fact that DeSantis, should he jump into the presidential race, is going to be increasingly drawn into a nasty standoff with the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump. I'm not sure I can see DeSantis having the chops to remain elevated above Trump's style of political combat. 

Truth won't cease being truth, no matter what happens. But its ability to get an airing continues to diminish  as we move further into the age in which nihilism reigns. 

 

What most accounts of DeSantis's rejection of an AP pilot course aren't telling you

 If stories about this that are showing up in your social media feed, email or news digest of choice merely let you know that the Florida governor has put the nix on a pilot Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in his state's higher-learning insitutions, you're getting incomplete information.

Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (whose book Radical in Chief opened my eyes to Barack Obama's background - not just Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, but a host of people and organizations I'd not previously heard of, such as the Midwest Academy and the Annenberg Challenge, and Heather Booth, Robert Creamer and Greg Galluzzo) presents the complete picture of the situation at National Review:

The debate over APAAS has been complicated by the College Board’s secrecy. The College Board has steadfastly refused to release the APAAS curriculum framework or associated materials. Nonetheless, I obtained a copy of the APAAS curriculum and wrote about it in September, laying out its socialist agenda and its promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Unfortunately, no one could judge the accuracy of my characterization because the curriculum remained secret. I confined myself at the time to a “fair use” discussion of the framework, declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s insistence that it was a “trade secret.” In the wake of the controversy, however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of the pilot APAAS curriculumand made it public.

In another new development, I have now obtained a copy of a second document, the “APAAS Pilot Course Guide,” a manual designed for use by teachers. Taken together, the curriculum framework and the teacher’s guide expand our understanding of the course in a way that confirms the wisdom of DeSantis’s decision.

The most serious problems in APAAS are in the final quarter of the class (“Unit 4: Movements and Debates”). This is where the course grapples with contemporary political and cultural controversies. Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes. Now let’s get down to cases.

The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of M4BL’s extensive policy menu as a mere attempt to influence the platform of the Democratic Party. As explained by Marxist activist Robin D. G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.

Kelley also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.” According to Kelley, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words, M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race Theory.

The APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.

One of two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary socialist transformation of the United States. While Taylor rejects Stalin’s authoritarianism, she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the capitalist system. (This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s curriculum by law.)

Far from BLM fulfilling American ideals, as Taylor sees it, “when the Black movement goes into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States,” exposing “the foundational lie of the United States as a free and democratic society.” Taylor ends her book with a quote from the Marxist intellectual and “revolutionary,” C. L. R. James: “The hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among [Blacks] to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.”

Virtually all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight group of far-left activists. Taylor’s book carries an enthusiastic blurb from Barbara Ransby, the author of the other book assigned for this topic; another blurb from Robin D. G. Kelley, the Marxist radical whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic; and a blurb from Michelle Alexander, whose work is the subject of a previous APAAS topic. In general, readings by authors assigned in the final quarter of APAAS endorse, are endorsed by, and overlap with, other APAAS readings. When it comes to APAAS’s treatment of contemporary policy debates, conventional American liberals and conservatives need not apply.

The APAAS topic immediately prior to the topic on “The Movement for Black Lives” covers “The Reparations Movement.” We’ve just seen that the most controversial demand of M4BL is reparations, expansively defined to include even mandated school curricula. So why does APAAS include yet another topic on reparations? It may not add up as an educational strategy, but it is an effective political recruiting tool.

The three suggested items for study in the reparations topic are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations,” a button that the teacher’s guide says serves to “promote” reparations for the Tulsa race massacre, and the copy of H.R. 40, a federal bill that sets up a commission to develop proposals for reparations. It’s clear from these assignments that APAAS itself is promoting reparations. No article criticizing this highly controversial policy is assigned. In effect, APAAS is pushing students to lobby for legislation. And by the way, M4BL also endorses H.R. 40, so students will find the same de facto call to legislative lobbying waiting for them in two successive topics.

The teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By “debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded. There is no disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and simple.

The topics on reparations and M4BL are part of a special section of the course. That section presents four different topics touching on “Contemporary Issues and Debates.” This special set of four optional topics allows teachers to instruct students to focus in-depth on only one of the topics in question. The selection of a single topic out of the four options can be done by a whole class, by small groups of students, or by each individual student. In addition to reparations and M4BL, students can focus either on “Incarceration, Abolition, and the New Jim Crow,” or on injustices and activism regarding “Medicine, Technology, and the Environment.” Because students choose only one of the four topics to explore in-depth, all four topics are omitted from the final AP Exam. Students, the guide says, cannot be held responsible on the test for the topics they didn’t choose to focus on.

Sorry about excerpting at such length, but this is important stuff. 

This is not some kind of overall endorsement of DeSantis in whatever his political career plans may be. The guy can be a performative jackass. He bases too many of his actions on tactical political calculations (like campaigning for Kari Lake). But he's spot on here.

While the substantiation that Kurtz provides is indispensable, I'd offer a bit of shorthand advice to any high school or college student, parent, school board member or college trustee: run, don't walk, in the opposite direction from any "academic discipline" with the word "studies" in the name. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The obligatory post-election post

 No, I didn't vote.

You didn't think I was going to change my mind when the day arrived, did you? The choices before me were a little like those before Poland in late summer 1939: would you rather be occupied by Germany or the Soviet Union?

As I've mentioned before, a number of people in my own city had implored me to at least weigh in at the polling place on some local races, particularly for school board. And, indeed, those races, as was the case with school board races around the country, were ground zero for some key culture-war issues. And in our city, the not-with-my-kid's-noggin-you-don't folks lost to the progs. Not surprising. It's very much a flyover community: a manufacturing-based economy, high population of people whose families have been in the area since the nineteenth century, a tendency to vote Republican generally speaking. But it is also the world headquarters of a Fortune 200 company that is, as they all are, ate up with DEI and climate alarmism. Mainline Protestant churches, whose own congregations are bleeding membership to the point that one has closed its doors, have an outsized presence in civic affairs. So, count me dismayed but not surprised.

But let's broaden our scope to the national level. 

I'm not going to try to cover the angle so excellently dealt with this morning by John Podhoretz at the New York Post. I shall defer to him regarding the impact of the Very Stable Genius:

What Tuesday night’s results suggest is that Trump is perhaps the most profound vote-repellant in modern American history.

The surest way to lose in these midterms was to be a politician endorsed by Trump.

This is not hyperbole.

Except for deep red states where a Republican corpse would have beaten a Democrat, voters choosing in actually competitive races — who everyone expected would behave like midterm voters usually do and lean toward the out party — took one look at Trump’s hand-picked acolytes and gagged.

Okay, that handles that factor.

Why are the results still so messy two days out? Why hasn't the Arizona governor's race been decided yet? Why is a runoff for the Senate race in Georgia going to be necessary? Why was the Senate race in Wisconsin such a squeaker?

It's a reflection of our national disunity. The United States is a big, messy complex country that no longer has a common culture to bind it. Nothing rallies us around the flagpole anymore. 

DeSantis, of course, has proved himself to be the most successful Republican governor who has aspirations beyond his present position. He won handily. 

I would advise him to now focus on the more mundane victories he's racked up in Florida so far, such as property insurance reform. Yes, voters have indeed been on his side on the culture-war stuff, such as education, and even his dustup with Disney. But as he maneuvers onto the national stage, he's going to encounter the Left's vitriol big-time if he puts those issues front and center. 

Would I vote for him in 2024? That probably depends on how he handles himself over the next year-plus, both as Florida governor (he handled Hurricane Ian well and got right on this current storm as well) and as a presidential candidate, should he choose to be one. (Will he have what it takes to deal with what the VSG would certainly dish out?) If he comports himself well, I might be willing to overlook his endorsement of some of this cycle's losers.

Now, let's cross the border to the north and look at the state of Georgia. Georgia, it seems to me, reflects the national messiness I alluded to earlier. Brian Kemp has been a solid governor (albeit with a little of that gotta-be-on-my-party's-bandwagon mentality that I loathe). Brad Raffensperger has been likewise an exemplary secretary of state. He handled that hour-long-call with the VSG on January 2, 2021 superbly. But what is up with Marjorie Taylor Greene's district? There's clearly still a concentration of people in at least one place who didn't, to use Podhoretz's term, gag. But given the rest of the state's fairly level-headed voting behavior on Tuesday, I suppose it's to be expected that Warnock and Walker, both of whom are, shall we say, unpalatable to all except the ate up on the Left and Right, would be neck and neck.

So the whole thing gives us a pretty accurate snapshot of post-America in the present moment.

I'm just glad the eternal record book shows I didn't contribute to either kind of damage to our beleaguered land. 

 

Is DeSantis a viable alternative for conservatives who want to stay Republicans but can't stand Trump?

 It's a question getting kicked around a lot right now on Twitter. 

There aren't a lot of choices if one believes that the Republican Party has a future. Pence comes in third in polls about who Pubs want to see as the presidential nominee in 2024, but what, exactly, is his lane? If it comes down to a juxtaposition of him and DeSantis, he is easily framed as the straddler, oh so careful not to commit himself on hard cultural-issue questions, whereas DeSantis seems to like to face them squarely.

But, conversely, that's a big DeSantis problem. He seems willing to use the power of the state to counter forces that no conservative is pleased with. And courts are striking him down on it. Woke corporations are a disturbing feature of 2022 American life, but it's not government's purview to deal with it.

Two figures I consider indispensable voices of sound reasoning have both said that there's no reason to go running toward DeSantis at this early date:

"I think that Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) told the New York Times. If DeSantis was nominated, she “would find it very difficult” to support him.

“A number of Republicans would be far, far better for the country and the GOP,” Never Trump commentator David French wrote in a Twitter thread on the “DeSantis discourse.” “So hopping on the DeSantis train simply to block Trump is *way* premature.”

But all of these considerations only matter of one feels certain that the GOP can get the Trumpist infection out of its veins over the next two or three election cycles. 

I don't. Consider DeSantis himself, for instance. He's been out campaigning for Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.  Instant disqualifier. Negates any compelling aspects of his resume.

Pence likewise loses the Never-Trumper-who's-determined-to-stay-Republican with this kind of spinelessness:

Pence prostituted his reputation for Christian piety to the most vile figure in the history of American presidential politics, a man who modeled the opposite of every virtue taught in Sunday school. Pence lent his credibility as a religious man to a villain, and gave permission to millions of self-styled Christians to vote for him. Pence’s pious conscience was remarkably quiescent when Trump encouraged his followers to rough up hecklers; when he bore false witness against Muslim Americans (falsely claiming that he saw them celebrating after 9/11); when he attempted to extort the president of Ukraine to lie about Joe Biden; when he separated asylum-seeking parents from their children; when he refused to condemn the tiki-torch Nazi wannabes in Charlottesville; when he elevated a series of kooks and conspiracists to high office; and when he insisted that the election had been stolen.

Pence was fine with all of it.

. . .  Worse than simply remaining silent, he played the toady with seemingly endless reserves of self-mortification, uttering cringeworthy encomia to Trump’s “broad-shouldered leadership” (a phrase he repeated at least 17 times), and audacious lies about matters big and small.

There was no bottom to Pence’s fawning. To please Trump, he called Joe Arpaio, a convicted criminal (pardoned by Trump) and thuggish abuser of power, a “tireless champion of the rule of law” and said he was “honored” by Arpaio’s presence at his speech. He claimed, preposterously, that Trump had performed magnificently in the face of the COVID pandemic: “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.”

When Pence traveled to Ireland on an official visit, he didn’t stay in Dublin, but traipsed140 miles west to stay at the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, necessitating a 40 minute flight and hour-long drive each way. Must have been inconvenient, but then, if Trump had asked Pence to crawl both ways, he would doubtless have obliged.

Nikki Haley? Loved her as ambassador to the UN. But she was one of the first post-January 6  to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Instant disqualifier.

But here's the thing: It doesn't matter to the GOP what any Never-Trumper thinks anyway. Not the keep-the-party-together types or those like me who deem it hopeless. Republicans don't need us. 

The party chews up and spits out anyone who acts on principle, even those who tried as long as possible to allow for Trump's dominance of its direction, and maneuver within that framework. 

So is DeSantis a viable alternative?

Because of where I stand on the Republican Party's moral rot, I really don't find it a very interesting question.

In 2024, the GOP will put up somebody who is either a coward, a nut, or a sycophant, of some combination of the three. 

Doesn't bode any better for the country than whatever hot mess the Democrats come up with. 

Can't see that I have a horse in this race.

There's no place for principle, character or spine in the 2022 Republican Party

 Last month, at Precipice, I summarized the challenge that I've had as a cultural observer since the insertion of a new force in our nation's politics since 2015:

When I started opining on culture, politics, economics and world affairs online, and in a column I wrote for several years for our local newspaper, the lines of demarcation were more clear-cut. There was right, and there was left. I expended a great many keyboard strokes trying to get people to see that Barack Obama was a lurch leftward beyond any that had come before for the Democrats. Frank Marshall Davis, Rashid Khalidi, the Midwest Academy, Bill Ayers and all that. The task before conservatives (back when that term stood for something recognizable) was straightforward: explain and defend our glorious lineage, from Edmund Burke through Frederic Bastiat, Richard M. Weaver, Russell Kirk, National Review and on up to Reaganite fusionism, and point out the dark nature of the lineage on the other side.

It’s all quite different now, isn’t it? Yes, the Left has grown increasingly grotesque, but an entirely new element has upended everyone’s previous assumptions . . .

That’s why any pundit, let alone fundraiser or political candidate who focuses solely on the very real grotesqueness of the Democrats - “We’ll defeat these leftists and then everything will be alright” - must be viewed with suspicion. Such a figure wants you to ignore the at least equally monstrous malignancy on the Right.

Now, the governor of Florida has illustrated exactly that kind of smokescreening maneuver:

"Liz Cheney is just totally off the rails with her nonsense," DeSantis said during an interview Monday with Fox News Digital. "And I think she's not really a Republican in terms of terms of what she's doing. We want people that are going to fight the left, and that's what we need to do in this country. That's what we're doing in Florida, standing up for people's freedoms. We're opposing wokeness. We're opposing all these things." 

A tactic closely akin to the the-Left-is-all-we-have-to-oppose ploy is whataboutism taking the form of "but there was urban violence in 2020." That's how Elise Stefanik, who assumed Liz Cheney's number three position in House Republican leadership, even thou her voting record has been far less consistently conservative that Cheney's, has chosen to obscure the 800-pound gorilla in the room:

“House Democrats did not condemn the violence that happened all of 2020,” she said in reference to riots in some cities following the murder of George Floyd in police custody. “And we believe the January 6 commission is political theater.” 

Sorry, Madame Conference Chair, but that's a non-sequitur. It's not the subject at hand. 

Then there's the dragging-our-brand-across-the-finish-line-is-far-and-away-our-primary-mission approach, as exemplified by Nikki Haley in response to a question from Bret Baier on FNC's Special Report:

“Mike Pence is a good man,” Haley said. “He’s an honest man. I think he did what he thought was right on that day. But I will always say, I’m not a fan of Republicans going against Republicans.”

Donald Trump has, of course, been breaking people who once prided themselves on being animated by principle since he entered the political fray. What a lifetime ago it seems when 

Lindsey Graham characterized the Very Stable Genius thusly:

"If Donald Trump carries the banner of my party," Graham said, "I think it taints conservatism for generations to come. I think his campaign is opportunistic, race-baiting, religious bigotry, xenophobia. Other than that, he’d be a good nominee."

and Rick Perry put it like this:

"Let no one be mistaken Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded," Perry said during a speech in Washington, D.C. "It cannot be pacified or ignored for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world and that is the cause of conservatism."

and Ted Cruz, full of righteous indignation, said this:

“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth,” Cruz told reporters in Evansville, Indiana.

The Hoosier State primary is crucial for Cruz’s goal of preventing Trump from gaining enough delegates to secure the GOP presiential nomination. Most polls show Trump with a lead in the state, and Cruz’s attacks against his rival on Tuesday went into his personal life in a way Trump’s opponents have largely avoided until now.

“Donald Trump is a serial philanderer and he boasts about it,” Cruz said. “This is not a secret, he is proud of being a serial philanderer." 

The only people left in the Republican Party interested in having any personal honor almost certainly have no future in it. They don't even respect each other. They each and all know that they opted to be motivated by fear of a four-year-old in a 76-year-old man's body. 

They claim to be so concerned about the impact of progressive aggression on the foundations of the American way of life, but deep inside they know they've chosen a path that is utterly ineffective in addressing it.

The entire party, save for the handful of outliers with no voice in it, is in the throes of a delusion borne of cowardice.