No sane person ever expected Charlie Crist to beat Ron DeSantis for governor.

But I am pretty sure Crist himself thought he could beat the phenomenal Florida governor.

DeSantis is everything that Crist is not, and Charlie simply can’t understand why anybody but the worst kind of Florida Man would vote for him. Surely the voters of Florida would realize that Crist embodies all that is right and good and true and beautiful and reject this flamboyant flamethrower of a governor.

I’ve been watching this race with a sort of grisly fascination, because it represents something deeper than the typical gubernatorial campaign. It is a microcosm of a larger shift in American politics: the desperation and death of an omni-partisan Establishment™ that the immune system of America is rejecting. Left, Right, or Centrist, Americans are done done done with the current Establishment™.

No politician so perfectly represents that Establishment™ than Charlie Crist. He embodies the thirst for power, the ideological vacuousness, the finger in the wind, the lust for money, and the greasy rhetorical slipperiness that characterized politics for several decades. Republican or Democrat, this type of politician existed to accumulate power, vacuum up money, and climb the ladder with their buddies.

In public they were all about you; in private they were all about each other. And we are literally sick of them.

Crist’s career is a perfect portrait of the type. A Republican who became an Independent who became a Democrat as his fortunes shifted and electoral opportunities dictated. His rise was nearly meteoric as a Republican, and at one point he was described as a potential new face for the Republican Party. He aspired to be precisely that, in fact, and lobbied for the job metaphorically.

He was elected to the Florida Senate, then the Education Commissioner (then elected), Attorney General, then as Governor. It was a stunning rise. He was an important surrogate and supporter of John McCain in the 2008 election, and in 2010 he announced that he would not seek a second term as Governor and set his sights on the US Senate.

But 2010 was the year of the Tea Party, and the public wanted something other than yet another careerist politician who was playing the game with the Obama Administration to get more of those sweet federal dollars floating around. Marco Rubio surged, and Crist split the Party to run and get crushed as an Independent. The die was cast–Charlie had discovered that Republicans were evil, racist, extremist losers and he embraced the Democrats.

If the Republicans wouldn’t embrace him, he would reject them as awful people. And that is what he did.

Crist did a stint outside politics, and described his time there thusly:

Friends had warned that I might have a tough time adjusting to life as a private citizen. … But I have to say that living on the outside wasn’t all that bad. … Just because I was out of office didn’t mean I had stopped caring about Florida. But day to day, I was enjoying the rest of my life. Morgan & Morgan turned out to be a great fit for me. I settled in comfortably at the law firm. … I had been ‘the people’s governor.’ They were ‘for the people.’ That was even their website name.

Yep. When I think of personal injury law firms, I think “for the people,” not “for the bucks.”

No one serving in public office in Florida has a record like Crist’s: On the ballot in 16 elections over 34 years, receiving more than 16.5 million votes and elected to five different positions, as state senator, education commissioner, attorney general, governor and congressman.

There’s one reason he keeps doing it, those who know him say: He genuinely likes running for office and being in office.

Crist haș been serving in Congress while waiting for his chance to run for governor again (he ran in 2014 for governor and lost, so switched to Congress and won), and he has resigned to focus on defeating DeSantis. He clearly must have thought he could win, because the man defines himself by his ambition for office. Yet his campaign has been a total joke.

Crist isn’t underfinanced. So far he has spent $16 million or more running for office. It’s just that the only thing he stands for is abortion (it polls well with Democrats) and defeating Ron DeSantis because he is a fascist. He literally has no other message.

We’re up against the biggest and most dangerous threat to our democracy this November: Ron DeSantis.

The time to stand up & fight is now. Can you help us build our grassroots power by getting 50K RTs on this so we can take him down in 22 days?

— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) October 17, 2022

His Twitter feed–which I follow out of a fascination with the internal workings of an insane mind, is littered with inanities. On the whole voters don’t read Twitter because they have real lives, but Crist’s messages to those who do reflect the mindset of an Establishment™ hack who sees the Establishment™ crashing down and becoming irrelevant. They view themselves as the literal embodiment of what America is, and they see America slipping away from their grip. They misinterpret that as the rise of fascism–at least the new Republican version of it.

In case you haven’t heard: Ron DeSantis is a spineless, wannabe dictator who is going to lose in 16 days.

— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) October 24, 2022

These are cries of despair, not calls to vote for a change in policies. Crist is raging at the gods, more a King Lear figure than a standard pol seeking office. This is clearly not how he expected things to go, despite the fact that it is precisely how everyone else expected it.

It’s not that Florida is, or at least was solidly Republican. Ron DeSantis may have solidified that status, but until he rose to power and fame it was famously competitive, with close races for governor. But Floridians are enjoying their liberation from the Establishment™ and reveling in living in the Free State of Florida. DeSantis embodies that shift.

This race is about more than just saving Florida — it’s about saving our country by putting an end to DeSantis’s 2024 presidential run.

— Charlie Crist (@CharlieCrist) October 23, 2022

The anti-DeSantis hysteria Crist shares with other major figures in Florida and US politics is not so much about the rise of the new generation of Republicans. Democrats have been struggling with insurgents in their own party and have been desperately trying to retain their grip on power. The persistence of the Bernie Sanders wing and the rise of the Squad scares them as much as the populist Republicans, and they have been trying to win their support by moving Left while staying in power.

Does anybody believe that the old guard is genuinely committed to mutilating children and defunding the police? Their dedication to these issues has everything to do with maintaining their grip on power within the party, and nothing to do with passions for the policies. They are willing to destroy the lives of children and the vulnerable as long as they can keep the gravy train going.

It won’t work.

We are witnessing the self-immolation of our overlords as they desperately cling to power. The Left-establishment is so committed to maintaining that power that they have resorted to ever greater assaults on our freedom, while the Right-establishment is essentially dead. We shall see whether the censorship, increasing deployment of the FBI, MSM propaganda, and expenditure of vast sums of money can save the power of the elite. I fear it might.

But there is hope that at least in Red and some purple states the counter-movement is gaining steam, and the Establishment™ will lose its grip. The death of Crist’s political hopes is a sign of that. At the least we can expect the development of two Americas, at least for a while, and can anticipate a struggle for power between the forces of freedom and the devotees of force.