He ignores the perfectly good reasons for DeSantis to stay silent on Trump’s dinner with Kanye West.
I regret to inform you that Jonathan Chait is at it again. In his latest column, he uses one of my columns as a lever to assert a syllogism in order to claim that Ron DeSantis is quietly courting the support of white nationalists by . . . doing nothing:
DeSantis weighs in on national political and culture fights routinely. He is not too busy to attack the white-nationalist right. He wants to maintain its support but quietly . . . the reasoning is clear. . . . National Review’s Dan McLaughlin wrote earlier this year that DeSantis had a “character test” which consisted of winning the nomination “in a way that keeps Trump’s most passionate supporters behind him come that November.” Trump’s most passionate supporters include many white nationalists and people who feel solidarity with white nationalists. If DeSantis attacks them, he loses the support of a vital faction within the party.
There are three fundamental flaws with this reasoning, and when you combine the three, you can see how Chait completely fails to explain DeSantis’s incentives or his strategy. The first: Chait simply assumes that Republican politicians have a constant obligation to denounce white supremacists on every possible occasion, while Democratic politicians never have any obligation to denounce anyone — or, at least, anyone they do not already regard as a partisan adversary. Chait is well aware of the dark, illiberal strains growing on the left — to his credit, he has written against them — but Democratic politicians get a complete pass. When was the last time Joe Biden denounced extremism on his own side in anything resembling specific naming-names terms? Chait doesn’t care. This has been a particularly pronounced pattern regarding attacks on the legitimacy of American elections: As I have detailed at length, while Chait treats DeSantis as guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt on this issue even on the slimmest of pretexts, he resolutely refuses to ever mention the Democrats’ long, dolorous history between 2000 and 2022 of undermining the legitimacy of American elections. The only time Chait ever mentions this is when he is endorsing the view that the 2000 election was stolen.
Because Chait treats Republicans as bearing a heavy burden to spend all their time denouncing racists while Democrats (even known associates of actual segregationists and friends of inciters of murderous antisemitic pogroms) have the right to remain silent, he cannot see or convey to his readers why a Republican politician might simply refuse to play this game under these rules. Republican politicians know that they will get zero credit for anything they say, and will just earn themselves more bad headlines by engaging with these demands. The only winning move is not to play. If DeSantis wishes voters to know that he does not associate with Holocaust-denying white nationalists, he can accomplish this simply by not associating with Holocaust-denying white nationalists. He doesn’t have to wear a hair shirt to seek absolution for something he hasn’t done. And ordinary, rank-and-file Republican voters who are themselves weary of being asked to apologize for sins they have not committed, and who recognize a bad-faith argument when they see it, tend to see the refusal to play the games of media liberals on their own terms as a positive. They see it that way not because the party consists of tens of millions of crypto white nationalists, but precisely because they know that it does not, and they therefore resent being asked on a daily basis when they stopped beating their wives. They also know that if the party trots out a figure such as Mitt Romney who is custom-tailored to defuse such attacks, race-baiters such as Joe Biden will still accuse them of wanting to put black people back in chains.
This brings us to the second flaw in Chait’s argument, which Chait at least acknowledges but fails to engage with seriously: In the current controversy over Kanye West and his dinner guest, Donald Trump is making a mistake, and Ron DeSantis is wisely not getting in the way. This is Politics 101: When your foe is harming himself, don’t let him make the story about you. That dynamic is, in fact, precisely why Chait wants this story to be about DeSantis, not about Trump: because doing so would help Trump beat DeSantis. Chait is playing the same game as in 2016, when he openly supported Trump in the Republican primary long after everything needed to understand Trump had become public.
Flaw number three: Chait assumes that the only possible reason not to theatrically renounce white nationalists is that DeSantis wants and even needs their votes — that they are “a vital faction within the party.” As discussed above, assuming that this is the only possible reason requires Chait to ignore the perfectly good reasons for DeSantis to stay silent on Trump’s dinner with Kanye West. But also, Chait assumes without evidence that “many white nationalists and people who feel solidarity with white nationalists” represent a significant and potentially decisive voting bloc in a national Republican primary. He offers zero empirical support for this. Nor is it supportable, unless you jerry-rig a definition of “white nationalists” so at odds with what normal people understand by the term that you’re effectively playing rhetorical Calvinball, such as when Joe Biden says “Ultra-MAGA” means Romney and Paul Ryan. We have seen repeatedly that, when these yahoos hold actual events, their numbers are tiny and pitiful, and that’s before you get to how often they go to the polls and whom they vote for.
DeSantis was just reelected in Florida by a margin of a million and a half votes. He carried Miami-Dade County, which is 68.7 percent Hispanic, by eleven points, majority-Hispanic Hendry County by 45, and majority-Hispanic Osceola County by six. He won three of the four counties in Florida with the highest black populations: He carried Madison County by 34, Hamilton County by 47, and Jefferson County by 21. He won Hillsborough County (whose district attorney he just removed from office) by nine points and Palm Beach County by three points. What does he need with a few hundred white nationalists scattered across the whole country in a primary that is likely to draw well in excess of 30 million voters? There’s no point in courting them. But there is a lot to be gained by refusing to play on the national media’s terms, and by letting Trump self-destruct on his own.