Ron DeSantis - The Courage to Be Free

To Madison, Mason, and Mamie

Remember to always listen to your mother.

Contents

M ost Americans instinctively know that something has gone wrong with our country over the past generation.

During times of turmoil, people want leaders who are willing to speak the truth, stand for what is right, and demonstrate the courage necessary to lead.

This is particularly true when it comes to serving as a governor.

Legislators play an important role in our system, but they are not really required to leadthey cast votes that reflect their philosophies, but the buck does not stop with them. A governor must have a strong sense of true north to guide him, but that sense must be coupled with the ability and willingness to lead with conviction. A governor who is right on the issues, but who lacks the courage to lead, will be an inadequate chief executive.

Part of the reason that Florida has stood out during my term as governor is because we have been willing to take bold stands when it wasnt easy: fighting partisan media and entrenched bureaucrats by keeping Florida free during the coronavirus pandemic, battling Disney to protect young children in Florida, and standing against powerful interests to safeguard the states natural resources.

The people will support a leader who displays courage under fire and resolutely stands firm for the truth because it is so rare among elected officials. When a governor demonstrates to the people that he is willing to fight for them under difficult circumstances, the people will have that leaders back and then some.

After a couple of years as governor, the number one thing people would say when they came up to me was, simply, Thank you. Some were thankful for keeping Florida open during the coronavirus pandemic. Others were thankful for keeping their kids in school. Still others thanked me for everything from protecting jobs to defending state and local law enforcement.

It wasnt just Floridians who were appreciative; people throughout our country and across the globe looked to Florida as a citadel of freedom in a world gone mad. Some sent messages to my office to thank me for leading the way on behalf of the free world.

At the height of Australias draconian lockdowns, a man from Sydney wrote to my office, There isnt much hope right now here and many of us are fearful of what our leaders have in store for us. I look to you and your great state of Florida for hope during this dark time. Thank you for standing up for us.

As we entered 2021, a cottage industry of merchandise and apparel appeared with the slogan Make America Florida. This was a way for many Floridians to express pride in our state and for others to trumpet the Sunshine State as the model for other states and for the nation.

People have clearly responded to our leadership in Florida. We see this in the character of the historic in-migration the state has experienced since I became governor.

As noteworthy as Floridas nation-leading net migration over the past few years has been, the political composition of that migration has been perhaps even more remarkable. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, each and every one of the forty-nine other states has had more Republicans move to Florida than Democrats.

When I got elected in 2018, there were nearly 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the State of Florida. Before I became governor, Florida had never had more registered Republicans than Democrats. By October 2022, Florida had more than 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democratsa registration shift toward Republicans that is unprecedented in modern political history.

We witnessed a great American exoduswith Americans fleeing states dominated by leftist governments and Florida serving as the promised land.

This is not some general validation of the Republican Party, much less of the Republican establishment. There are folks who largely feel unrepresented by GOP leaders in DC and have gravitated to Florida largely because we have led with an agenda that represents the values of people like them. Indeed, I think the character of the Florida migration is more emblematic of people wanting to see policies that reflect both the American tradition and basic common sense. This is especially true as the Democratic Party has transformed into what can only be described as a woke dumpster fire.

What Florida has done is establish a blueprint for governance that has produced tangible results while serving as a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground. Florida is proof positive that we the people are not powerless in the face of these elites.

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W hom, exactly, are these elites? In an essay in the American Spectator in 2010, Angelo Codevilla identified the source of Americas political divisions and policy failures as the ideological, incompetent, and self-interested ruling class that has consolidated power over American society in the past fifty years.

These elites control the federal bureaucracy, lobby shops on K Street, big business, corporate media, Big Tech companies, and universities. Its members are products of Americas ideological higher education system and, consequently, are united by a common set of ideas and remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. This ideological uniformity transcends divisions based on geography, ethnicity, and traditional religion; indeed, the ideology is the elites de facto religion.

These elites are progressives who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive cadre of experts who wield authority through an unaccountable and massive administrative state. They tend to view average Americans with contempt, believe in the need for wholesale social engineering of American society, and consider themselves entitled to wield power over others.

While they are elites, in this context, the word elite does not signify someone of tremendous aptitude, great wealth, or major achievement. Instead, it signifies someone who shares the ideology and outlook of the ruling class, which one can demonstrate by virtue signaling (i.e., speaking the in language) and by seeing Americans as subjects to be ruled over, not as citizens to be represented.

These elites do not include some individuals who reach the commanding heights of society. A major figure in our government like US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a graduate of Yale Law School, is not a part of this group because he rejects the groups ideology, tastes, and attitudes. Some who acquire great wealth, be it an oilman from Texas or an automobile dealer from Florida, are also part of the outs because they do not subscribe to the prevailing outlook and philosophical preferences of the ruling class.

The great Thomas Sowell saw all this more than twenty-five years ago. In his remarkable book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy , Dr. Sowell explains how a political outlook becomes a quasi-religious special state of grace for those who believe, where those who dissent from the vision are not just wrong but... sinful. The crucial attribute of the vision lies in its resistance to evidence. If a preferred policy fails to achieve its stated aims, then new criteria can be formulated to rationalize the initial failureand, as Sowell points out, this insulation from evidence virtually guarantees a never-ending supply of policies and practices fatally independent of reality. The anointed are concerned with narrative, not facts or results.

The reason why this class has been the source of major divisions in American society is because it is fundamentally unrepresentative of the people they feel entitled to rule over. Their natural home is in the Democratic Party, but they do not even represent all Democratic voters.