Two liberal Democrats from Massachusetts moved to Florida.
The headline sounds like the premise for a TV sitcom.
I learned about fish-out-of-water comedy when watching The Beverly Hillbillies on TV. Two people about my age moved from a Boston suburb to Palm Beach County, Florida. They like the weather, but they aren't seeing the humor in the culture clash as regards politics.
In fact, they insist on being anonymous in this Up Close Guest Post. The guest post author's wife does the political canvassing. Not the husband. He realizes he is extreme in his partisanship.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who votes R is morally arrested and soulless. Period. Exclamation point. If anyone starts a political conversation, I just stop it: "That's between you and the voting booth. I don't talk politics.
This blog takes a different approach from the Guest Post author to political discourse. I keep trying to understand why Republican voters moved from the party of Bush, McCain, and Romney to a party that would excuse--and assist--an attempt to overthrow an election to keep Donald Trump in office. The guest post author isn't curious about Republicans. He is angry with them.
Guest Post: Dispatch from Florida
My wife and I became legal residents of Florida in 2008 with the hope that our two Blue votes would be part of what seemed at the time to be a slow but seemingly steady movement from Red toward Purple and then Blue. We reasoned that our votes were superfluous in deep Blue Massachusetts anyway, why not let them be meaningful in the Sunshine State.
My wife canvassed door to door in the wearying Florida high heat and humidity of October for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for Hillary Clinton in 2016. We were certainly buoyed up when Obama took Florida over McCain healthily in 2008 and narrowly over Romney in 2012, but Trump’s win over Clinton by more than 100,000 votes in 2016 and his margin of more than 370,000 votes over Joe Biden in 2020 tells the sorry tale of a state smashing right through Purple into clear Redness.My very informal perception of what the holy heck Floridians like about Trump or DeSantis is that they dislike Democratic liberalism so much that they tolerate Trump and DeSantis. We heard repeatedly, "yeah he's flawed but the other side is worse."
We learned that Trump and Fox closed the deal on the idea of Obama as "other." We heard people say Obama was "a Muslim prick." "Obama isn't an American." It wasn't just an epithet. They believed it.Hillary got accusations of wild conspiracy theories. Two Haitians told us Hillary had agents threatening their families in Haiti. A bicycle rider stopped us on the street to tell us that Hillary had vans cruising the neighborhood to kidnap Republican voters and imprison them until after Election Day. They believed this.One nice moment came from a younger woman who invited her in, then told her she wanted to vote for Obama but wasn't "allowed to" because she was a registered Republican. My wife patiently explained that her Republican registration meant she could only vote in the Republican primary but had no bearing on the general election in November and she could indeed vote. The canvassing did some good.The governorship here is even more distressing. In 2018 Ron DeSantis defeated the Democratic Party candidate Andrew Gallum by fewer than 33,000 votes out of more than 8.2 million votes cast. This razor-thin margin gave us hope that our Blue votes here remained meaningful. Those hopes were dashed in the 2022 gubernatorial election: DeSantis defeated challenger and former Florida governor Charlie Crist by more than 1.5 million votes. Sadly, this victory propelled onto the national stage the smug Trump-like hateful self-appointed megalomaniac guardian of the good ol’ white USA. Those who identify as ethnic and racial minorities, gay, trans, immigrant, vaccine-aware, woke and interested in the facts of American history are out of luck in Florida. And his eyes are on the presidency.
DeSantis can speak in coherent sentences. There’ll be no cofefe from him. Trump is often linguistically tongue-tied and voices truly imbecilic, utterly ignorant ideas (“inject bleach”) not to mention the 30,000+ lies he got off.
DeSantis is strident and grim when expressing his evil, racist, craven positions. Trump does that with colorful flamboyance and showmanship that somehow garners him appeal despite the underlying awfulness. DeSantis is introverted and quick to be nasty and dismissive to opponents. He isn't likable and I'm not sure he can take a punch. Trump is extroverted and people who lean toward his point of view are drawn to him.
I don't think DeSantis's personality will play well on the national stage, though I imagine his handlers will try to clean up his act. Still, he won't be able to change who he truly is.
Both DeSantis and Trump are a clear and present danger. We’ve all seen the damage Trump can do. DeSantis won’t be flying under the national radar for too much longer. I have a good friend who’s a teacher in a K-5 elementary school. He can verify that in the face of the state’s crackdown on curriculum content that might make any young student uncomfortable about American history, or gender orientation, or racism (to name just a few DeSantis targets), teachers of English and social studies, together with librarians who now fear for their employment, and have begun to place books that might not meet the DeSantis censorship standards out of sight or off the shelves.
Trump's legal woes might bring him down but without those wounds I doubt DeSantis could best him. Maybe there's a skeleton in the DeSantis closet that will come out, and both will go down. Or maybe there's another Reptile out there who will emerge on top.
It's really depressing to be motivated to write a post like this after living much of life truly believing in the essential strengths of our political system and democracy. I am slowly coming to believe that there is actually a chance that the bedrock might turn into quicksand.
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11 comments:
I noticed that women's rights, including reproductive rights, are missing from this guest post.
The main problem I have with so-called wokeness is males who pretend to be females violating the rights of women and girls and stealing opportunities from them. It is an absolute disgrace and outrage. Fortunately, some states, groups and individuals are working to protect the rights of women and girls from this attack.
Drag is a form of misogyny. It ridicules and mocks women in the same way that the old minstrel shows ridiculed and mocked black people. I certainly would never allow my children to attend a drag event of any kind.
Many Americans (including conservatives, independents and liberal-feminist women) object to where the extreme Left wants to take this country.
I would not want to live in Florida either. But I can 100% understand the appeal of DeSantis on these issues.
Edit: In certain places, all males and females now are expected to share public bathrooms. Unreal. Just Say NO
Very well said. It’s a mystery to me how a once-respectable party has become so degenerate, but the very things that anyone sane finds so disgusting about Trump are what draw his fans to him.
In many ways, DeSantis is as just as repellant, with his shameless appeal to White Christian Nationalists, claiming that "on the eighth day, God made a fighter" (him) to protect us against Black history and gays. On the other hand, I haven’t heard him brag about grabbing pussy and how many women he’s screwed, or boast that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave. and not lose any voters. The Republican base may see that as a weakness.
One of the biggest strikes against DeSantis is that he’s a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. That should be enough to give any Trumplican pause and without them, he wouldn’t have a chance.
After reading this guest author’s left-wing rant, I would have to listen to Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson tonight to achieve political balance in my daily media consumption.
He hates those of us who are anti-woke? Fine. I can match his emotional intensity and then some from the other direction. He and I could undoubtedly have an epic flame war; it might be fun, but I doubt it would change either of our minds.
One of the contributions of the Intellectual Dark Web from a few years ago was the concept of “steelmanning.“ It’s the opposite of “strawmanning“. The idea is, when you are in opposition to something it is also incumbent upon you to put in the intellectual work of learning to make and understand the best possible argument for that which you oppose.
It might be an interesting exercise to ask this guest author to steelman what he’s against.
The guest post has no mention of foreign or domestic policy, the economy, or addressing the nation's fiscal challenges.
I would hope that whoever is running for office would go down that path rather than simply raise only social and education issues of the day.
For most of my career, education and skill competency are what I looked at when I was hiring new college grads, warehouse workers, tech support people, and both marketing, marketing, operations, and engineering folks.
I didn't worry about their race, ethnicity, or other social aspects they might have had other than they were required to do a good job and meet the expectations of the work environment. I've had to fire very few.
Future grads do need to be ready for the work and life ahead.
Watch out, M2inFLA, your white privilege is showing, and you are this close to getting canceled. 😱😀
I don’t see the guest post saying anywhere that he “hates those of us who are anti-woke,” but he does sound disgusted by those who promote racism.
The post commented plenty on DeSantis’ domestic policy, which consists primarily of his contributions to the culture wars. As for foreign policy, his record doesn’t offer much evidence that he's questioned any of the Republican Party’s hawkish positions, and it's difficult to find examples where he and Trump disagree sharply on any major policies.
The tone of the guest post dripped with negative emotion directed at all things anti-woke.
The culture war was not started by Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump. It was started by woke activists attempting to impose their far left ideology on everyone in this country. They accuse anyone who opposes them of “racism,” as though there were no valid reason to oppose the racial quotas they seek to impose. Their use of the r-word reminds me of the story of the boy who cried wolf.
Just a reminder:
Wikipedia defines ‘woke’ as an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination," and Webster’s defines it as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially of racial and social injustice.”
Republicans obsess on it because without pandering to their white nationalist base, they’d have a lot of trouble winning elections. To make themselves seem less racist, at least to themselves, they’ve perverted the meaning to include just about anything they don’t like.
Michael T, STEADY, BOY! You get BALANCE from Sean and Tucker? Holy Guacamole!
Michael T, STEADY, BOY! You get BALANCE from Sean and Tucker? Holy Guacamole!
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