Republicans Need a New Leader. They're Looking to Florida. edited
'Two weeks ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appeared with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham for a town hall that lasted the full hour of her prime-time show. That kind of airtime tends to be reserved only for Donald Trump, but Mr. DeSantis has had a meteoric rise. He’s far and away the most popular potential 2024 presidential candidate among Republicans after Mr. Trump.
Even if you would never consider voting for him, it’s important to understand the sources of his appeal and the direction of his politics, because one way or the other — whether he ever runs for president or not — Ron DeSantis is the new Republican Party.
Governor DeSantis’s combativeness on hot-button social issues reflects Mr. Trump’s influence, but he’s gone even further and used government power as an instrument in the culture war — something Mr. Trump talked about but never really did. If any of Mr. DeSantis’s Republican admirers are hoping he will chart a path back to the pre-2016 party, they’ll probably be disappointed. Instead, the governor is a leader in a new, Trump-inflected party, but without the character flaws and baggage of the former president.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/opinion/ron-desantis-conservatism.html
EDIT: 'The key, I think, is that for many people on the right, a libertarian-oriented politics was largely a way to register opposition to the mandarins who have an outsized influence on our public life. And it turns out that populism is an even more pungent way to register this opposition. Progressive domination of elite culture has now grown to include formerly neutral institutions like corporations and sports leagues. More conservatives are beginning to believe that the only countervailing institutional force is democratic political power as reflected in governor’s mansions, state legislatures and — likely beginning next year — Congress.
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York once wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”'>>>
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