蘑菇视频

Aug 2, 2023 By George F. Will 4 min read

WASHINGTON – Try to imagine President Dwight D. Eisenhower – former five-star general, collaborator with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill – brawling with a brand of beer. Try to envision John F. Kennedy campaigning to succeed Eisenhower by suggesting he might appoint to a sensitive public health position – in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or what is now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – someone who airs the theory that the coronavirus was engineered to be least harmful to Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) recent remarks about Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. included this mind-boggling response when questioned about Kennedy as a possible running mate: “If there’s 70% of the issues that he may be averse to our base on,” that is a problem. So no Vice President Kennedy, not because Kennedy is a lunatic but because the Republican base might agree with only 30% of Kennedy’s lunacy.

For writing about DeSantis, one needs a computer on which a single key stroke produces the phrase “DeSantis later explained …” (e.g., concerning slavery’s benefits for the enslaved). Regarding Kennedy, DeSantis later explained that his idea to “sic him” on the FDA or CDC might mean making Kennedy a kind of ombudsman.

DeSantis has scuttled crabwise away from his Kennedy musings. His tough-guy persona – the big-chested name of the super PAC supporting him is Never Back Down – precludes straightforward apologies.

His peculiar campaign probably will have one constant: He has a low annoyance threshold, along with an incontinent (and unconservative) itch to use government to punish companies whose speech about social issues annoys him. He has threatened to sue Bud Light’s corporate owner, Anheuser-Busch InBev, over a marketing mistake, involving a transgender influencer, if the error injured Florida state funds that own AB InBev stock. Really.

Campaigns are supposed to be stress tests, and this one is multiplying occasions for DeSantis to reveal attributes voters should see before handing him ballistic missile launch codes. The campaign is pitilessly revealing that he is prone to what tennis commentators call “unforced errors.” Do Republicans want such a candidate? Does anyone want such a president?

DeSantis’s pratfalls are, however, useful in illustrating how politics has sunk waist-deep in the quicksand of “the emotive presidency.” In a National Affairs essay with that title, Mikael Good, a Georgetown University political theory student, and Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argue that “Trump’s masterstroke” was to realize that, for his core supporters, his governing is of secondary importance.

Primarily important is his “affect,” his rhetorical carousing that enables supporters to “feel complicit in defying the hated establishment.” An entertainer with the “Seinfeldian cadences” (say Good and Wallach) of a stand-up comedian, Trump is, for his cohort, fun, a word that does not spring to mind when watching the dour DeSantis.

Although portions of Trump’s base have, Good and Wallach say, legitimate grievances that should be articulated, “a great deal of his rhetoric and showmanship merely channeled the emotion behind those grievances. The reward for his followers was catharsis, not better political representation in a process geared toward meeting real challenges.”

Today’s plebiscitary system of selecting presidential nominees, write Good and Wallach, rewards “those who can persuasively channel the people’s most transient and inflammatory passions.” This is the result of “the rapid evolution of media” – principally, social media – that “has changed how presidents interact with people.” And “decades of unfulfilled promises” that have disillusioned Americans regarding the “rhetorical presidency’s self-righteous grandiosity.”

Think, for example, of Trump’s immediate presidential predecessor. Good and Wallach argue that “Trump found a way to reinvent the president’s representational role for an emotive age.” He defined, and is defined by, this age: “Employing cadences borrowed from stand-up comics and radio shock jocks, Trump transformed populist rage into a positive emotion: gleeful shared mockery of the politicians and elites who had betrayed the true Americans. . . . This is the age of offense-taking, not position-taking – let alone policymaking.”

DeSantis, scourge of Disney, understands what Good and Wallach call “news-cycle combat,” which is “all about displaying bravado by throwing punches” because “the point is to help your supporters feel something right now.” DeSantis might be one of those whose talent, say Good and Wallach, “lies in meeting their base’s emotional needs and fueling the news cycle with entertaining spectacles.”

Hence Ronald Reagan’s irrelevance, as trumpeted by the “new right,” many of whose members are attracted by DeSantis’s gloweringly un-Reaganesque affect. A rhetorical president can be a unifier. An emotive president must be divisive.

George F. Will is a columnist for The Washington Post.