&c by Jonathan Chait: Ron DeSantis: Rational Actor or Rubio Redux?

Ron DeSantis: Rational Actor or Rubio Redux?

 

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Octavio Jones/Getty Images

 

This week has seen the roughest stretch of the Ron DeSantis proto-campaign. His wildly pro-Russian take on the invasion of Ukraine set off a wave of criticism from Republican officials, something he hasn’t endured before. But why did this happen?

DeSantis normally avoids taking any positions that might divide his supporters. He does this by limiting his media exposure to sources who are sympathetic. You simply won’t see him get pressed on why he opposes Medicaid expansion or whether he still supports repealing Obamacare or privatizing Social Security and Medicare. He uses reporters who are effectively members of his communications team as vehicles to spread messages he curates carefully.

Indeed, DeSantis’s one recent foray into an interview with an independent journalist was a bit of a disaster. DeSantis gave an interview to David Charter, editor of The Times, a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is transparently dedicated to helping DeSantis. When Charter, a traditional reporter, asked him about how he would handle Ukraine, DeSantis merely criticized Joe Biden for being “‘weak on the world stage’ and failing at deterrence.” When Charter asked DeSantis what he would do instead, DeSantis testily replied, “Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I’ve said enough.”

Ukraine is an issue DeSantis would prefer to avoid. It splits his party, with Republicans who don’t see Russian victory as threatening American interests slowly gaining more support within the party over time:

Graphic: Echelon Insights

 

So it’s perfectly obvious that DeSantis would prefer not to specify a position on the war. He was forced to do so anyway because Tucker Carlson asked the candidates to state their position. DeSantis couldn’t ignore him, since Carlson is the most influential pundit in conservative media. He also clearly felt unable to alienate Carlson’s position. Instead, DeSantis thrilled Carlson with a Russophilic analysis that described Russia’s unprovoked invasion as a “territorial dispute” and treated potential aggression by Ukraine, or even by the United States against Russia, as the main threat to peace.

In an important sense, Carlson performed a real journalistic service. He got a powerful figure to state his position on a crucial policy matter on the record. This happened because Carlson — in his own horrifying way — cares about the issue more than he cares about helping DeSantis win.

All that said, I think some of the response to this overstates the damage DeSantis is incurring. Charlie Sykes likens DeSantis’s pandering to the 2016 Marco Rubio campaign, which imploded when Chris Christie humiliated Rubio onstage by pointing out his scripted dialogue (to which Rubio, incredibly, responded by repeating his talking points once again). Sykes argues that if he continues aping Trump’s positions, DeSantis “can expect his own Rubio-moment.”

David Frum argues that DeSantis is optimizing his campaign to win the primary at the expense of the general election, which I find persuasive, but Frum proceeds to treat DeSantis’s chances of winning the general election as near hopeless:

DeSantis is a rational actor and is following what somebody has convinced him is a sound strategy. It looks like this:

1. Woo the Fox audience and win the Republican nomination.

2. ??

3. Become president.

I think DeSantis’s manic focus on avoiding any way for Trump to attack him from the right creates a number of vulnerabilities if he wins the nomination. But I don’t think these are close to insurmountable. Donald Trump very nearly won reelection despite being … Donald Trump. Joe Biden has vulnerabilities of his own. DeSantis’s record of extreme positions is long and growing — it may well soon include a six-week abortion ban — but whether those will hurt him more than Biden’s age, the state of the economy, or whatever else might go wrong over the next year and a half remains very hard to say.

Ben Shapiro did a recent Q&A, where he was asked — in the context of his professions of concern for children — whether he should support free school lunches. Shapiro replied, “School lunches are not going to solve the problem of child hunger at any serious level.”

In addition to its obvious casual cruelty, I think this answer usefully illustrates how profoundly full of shit Shapiro is.

It is certainly true that not every government program succeeds in its mission. Therefore, it would be possible to imagine ways that a program to give meals to poor children might somehow backfire.

But it’s not actually enough to imagine this. You have to test it, through evidence. Shapiro didn’t cite any evidence that free school lunches fail to alleviate child hunger. Instead, Shapiro began summoning hypothetical scenarios out of his mind to define away the demonstrated problem that many American children don’t have enough to eat.

“If there is a problem with children actually starving, that is a child-endangerment scenario, in which CPS needs to be called,” he said. So any problem short of starvation is not worth addressing? If children have inadequate nutrition, there’s no reason to give them a free meal? And somehow if they are starving, then they’re better off being taken away from their parents then getting a hot meal at school?

“The truth is, it does not take that much money to feed a child,” he continued. “I know, I have three of them. You should be feeding a child before you feed yourself. It’s that simple.”

So Shapiro conjured a stylized fact out of thin air: The problem of hungry children can be solved by forcing their parents to go hungry. Is it actually true that hungry children are in situations where their parents have food they refuse to share? Shapiro has no idea. It sounds good, though!

Even assuming this scenario Shapiro dreamed up explains child hunger, it would seem to acknowledge that children are hungry anyway. Shapiro just waves away the problem because the parents should be going hungry. They aren’t, and the kids are going hungry, which would seem to be a good reason to step in and have schools provide a free lunch. Shapiro has already conceded it doesn’t cost much money. But they shouldn’t because, in some world he dreamed up, the parents could solve it, even if they aren’t.

It’s worth watching the clip to see how Shapiro, a wildly successful media entrepreneur, entertains a policy issue he has obviously never given any thought to, and immediately delivers a neat solution in confident tones. You can sort of tell why a certain kind of person watches him speak and considers him smart. Pulling this off does require a form of intelligence, but it’s closer to the kind of thinking employed by a skillful con artist than the work of a genuine intellectual.

A few years ago, a political debate broke out over the origins of COVID-19. The broader context was that Donald Trump, desperately looking to deflect blame from his floundering response to the pandemic, was trying to blame China for his own failures, sometimes using xenophobic overtones. In response, many progressives applied the “Trump is lying” heuristic to an overly broad range of questions, including a purely scientific question about whether the virus originated in a wet market or a lab.

It is now perfectly clear that the progressives and journalists who declared the lab-leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory” and insisted it had been debunked were wrong. That the hypothesis was correct is far from clear. The truth is simply that we don’t know.

Unfortunately, there remains a core of dead-enders on the political left who continue to fight on this issue even though their stance has been discredited. They are no longer defending the original claim that the lab-leak hypothesis was a fake conspiracy theory. Instead, they are attacking the people who pointed out that it wasn’t. Their method is to change the question from whether the lab-leak hypothesis was definitely false to whether it is possibly false. Then, having demonstrated that the hypothesis might be wrong, they argue that those who said it might be correct were wrong.

The illogic of this reasoning is pretty obvious, so it is usually accompanied by a great deal of hand-waving, riling up of tribal grudges, and appeals to authority.

Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale public-health professor and public-health correspondent for The Nation, walks through all the steps in his most recent column.

What set off Gonsalves was new reporting in The Wall Street Journal that found the Department of Energy has changed its view and now sees the lab-leak hypothesis as more likely. “Like lemmings into the sea, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, and others followed the WSJ’s lead and crowed victoriously, once again chiding those who had stuck with the theory that Covid had emerged from animals in the Wuhan market, and not a lab leak,” he complains.

The column proceeds to reiterate Gonsalves’s belief that natural origin remains a more likely hypothesis than a lab leak. This is, of course, beside the point. The point is that there is no scientific consensus. Gonsalves has taken a side in the debate, which is fine — scientists often do that. The problem is the people on his side who politicized the debate, cast advocates of the opposing scientific hypothesis as conspiracy theorists or racists, and got objective news reporters to falsely declare the question settled by science.

Gonsalves bemoans “commentators who have declared themselves authorities in just about every field under the sun, whatever their actual level of knowledge. They’re not so much experts as experts in being experts” — meta-experts, in his phrase. He bemoans “this denigration of scientists by arrogant pundits with no scientific training.”

It is true that I haven’t got the scientific expertise to evaluate the strength of one scientific hypothesis over another. I do, however, possess the basic reading-comprehension skills necessary to conclude that there is a difference between a false scientific claim and an unsettled one. The uncomfortable fact is that, while Silver and I may be meta-experts, or whatever other insult Gonsalves wishes to hurl at us, we were right about this, and his political allies were wrong.

Gonsalves concludes his column with a rousing paean to scientific authority, which is being besmirched by nonscientists. But all authority, including the most legitimate forms, is subject to abuse. Which is to say that the authority of science must not only be defended but also upheld from within. The temptation by scientists to use their authority to intervene in political debates is itself a threat to science. What Gonsalves mistakes as the problem — critics who pointed out abuses of scientific authority — should instead be seen as pointing toward a solution.

Last month, I wrote about Michael Lind as the archetype of a certain kind of intellectual who “inhabit[s] a dreamworld of pure ideas, having lost all contact with the concrete political choices in the offline world.” Lind has now written another essay that appears to have misinterpreted this criticism as a how-to guide.

The purpose of the new Lind piece, like most of his work, is to advocate for a neo–New Deal agenda, which combines strong support for labor unions, a nationalistic trade agenda employing direct support for domestic manufacturing and onshoring of supply chains, and a sturdy welfare state financed by progressive taxation.

Wait, you might be saying. That’s Joe Biden’s agenda! And it certainly is.

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Now, I suppose Lind might want to advance some idiosyncratic argument that people only think Biden has supported these agendas, but a closer look shows that everybody is wrong. But Lind does not do that. What he does, instead, is build an essay around the desperate need to build support for Biden’s agenda, while refusing to acknowledge Biden’s support for it.

The word “Biden” does not appear anywhere in the piece. A reader might actually wonder if Lind is even aware of Biden’s existence, or if he instead decided to stop following the news sometime before 2021.

Here is a passage where Lind is telling the history of how pro-union, pro-safety-net, pro-manufacturing politics disappeared. Pay attention to the phrase I put in boldface:

To explain these populist revolts in a way that exonerated neoliberal globalist offshoring and cheap-labor immigration and anti-union policies, the neoliberal establishment revived the playbook of McCarthyism from the 1950s: The Russians were to blame! The election of Trump in 2016 and various populists in Western Europe, along with Brexit, were defined by the West’s neoliberal national establishments as fascist plots against “liberal democracy,” symbolized by Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Opposition to Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats was attributed by the neoliberal media to the diabolical machinations of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, an evil genius who, it was claimed, had the power to subliminally brainwash ignorant Western voters by way of “disinformation” and internet memes, in the same way that the Joker in a Batman comic book might seize control of TV networks in Gotham City and hypnotize the citizens.

This brings us to the present, and the two related challenges of replacing the neoliberal consensus and restoring the political power of socially moderate, economically interventionist voters in the United States. There is a right way to pursue these goals and a wrong way.

It does not, in fact, bring us to the present. I know this because Lind’s account goes to 2016, and my sources (a calendar, various newspapers) inform me that date was seven years ago.

I am aware of the danger of disparaging another writer’s argument because he ignores one’s particular hobbyhorse. But the fact I am insisting he acknowledge and grapple with is not some idiosyncratic obscurity. It’s the sitting president of the United States!