The Catharsis Candidacy

I n the middle of his campaign kickoff speech in Iowa, Ron DeSantis was ticking through a seemingly endless list of legislative accomplishments he has had in Florida as governor. But then he suddenly stepped aside from the microphone and invited his wife Casey DeSantis to speak.

The decision to hand over this part of the introduction seemed to have a specific purpose. More easily than her husband, Casey DeSantis summons genuine passion in her political oratory. She was there to talk about the governor’s leadership during Covid and to emphasize that this crisis was a test of political leadership, a test that Ron DeSantis alone passed.

“When you look at Covid, the world descended on Florida,” she said:

You had the corporate media, the Left, the White House, Fauci, Birx, all prognosticating that every bad thing would happen unless the governor followed their dictates, and their politicized, unscientific orthodoxy. But he held the line in defense of the liberties of the people he represented. He never backed down. He took their livelihoods and their happiness above his own.

Notice she included “the White House” in the list. In other words, this campaign isn’t the first time Ron DeSantis went against Donald Trump. His Covid move was the moment that really mattered, she said. The one that “forever impacts the people.”

You can take the path of least resistance. You subcontract your leadership to the medical bureaucracy. You can aim for self-preservation. You can be more interested in your political career. Or you can hold the line. Do you defend the rights of the people? Their ability to earn a living, to be with their loved ones, especially in their final moments. Do you fight for our children to be in school, to breathe without a mask being forced on their face? Do you ensure that people have the choice as to whether or not they want to take an mRNA vaccine and certainly not make it contingent upon their job? At the end of the day, it’s what you do in the moment that matters.

Now, many liberals and some conservatives reading this list will shrug. They were happy to mask their kids for two years. They credit the vaccines with ending the public-health emergency.

But for a huge swath of voters, this issue really did bond them to Governor DeSantis. At the moment that Casey DeSantis mentioned masks on children, the crowd spontaneously started roiling with noises of anger at the pro-mask policies — and approval of the governor, for rolling them back.

Those days three years ago really were the moment that many families started wondering whether they too should join the scores of thousands of other Americans who were moving to Florida during the pandemic. This was the moment that made Ron DeSantis a national figure. These voters credit Florida — and to a lesser degree Georgia and Texas — with normalizing the country after the pandemic. These voters knew what the experts also knew but refused to admit publicly: that they didn’t need the vaccine because they had already contracted Covid and had natural immunity; or that they were young and not vulnerable to severe Covid. They knew, long before the experts admitted, that the Covid vaccine did not stop transmission, and that the logic of mandates was therefore mooted. In their hearts, these voters knew that expert opinion was a kind of guild conspiracy that — when joined with the force of government — directly threatened their livelihood, their family, and the well-being of their children.

And DeSantis took unorthodox steps to protect the social fabric of Florida. He used the emergency powers the public-health crisis granted to him to mandate that schools remain open, and to mandate that schools not impose their own mask mandates on children. Any fool — even Dr. Fauci himself at the start of the pandemic — could figure out that child-sized cloth masks bought at a sunglasses stand were not an effective public-health measure against an airborne virus. But only DeSantis and a handful of other governors ever acted, and acted vigorously, on this obvious truth.

By using his powers in this way, he pioneered a model for how he would begin using constitutional executive power to prevent the ideological contagions of the left from seizing all the institutions of public life.

Later in the event, the governor spoke for himself:

We also pledge to usher in a reckoning for the federal government’s disastrous Covid policies. From lockdowns to mask mandates, to fiscal and monetary measures. The policies eroded freedom and imposed great harms on American society. We desperately need accountability so this never happens to our country again.

This is something that Ron DeSantis offers that no other candidate does — and it will infuse his campaign with critical popular support in the GOP: He is the catharsis candidate. He’s the candidate who is telling millions of Americans that they weren’t crazy, that their informed instincts around the pandemic were sound after all. His election is the closest thing to justice on offer for those millions. They’re going to fight like hell for him.