The coronation of Ron DeSantis

Earlier in the week, I’d seen DeSantis speak at the National Conservatism conference in Aventura, Florida. “NatCon”, as it’s known, is a yearly gathering of nationalist politicians, activists, and journalists organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation and loosely aligned with what has come to be known as the “New Right”. DeSantis gave a nearly hour-long speech at the conference’s opening dinner, rattling off his achievements — banning vaccine passports and mask mandates, keeping Florida open during the pandemic, taking on the liberal media and Disney — in front of a sympathetic crowd. “It was the best speech I’ve ever heard by an American politician”, one British guest gushed.

The whole conference was something of a coronation for DeSantis among the New Right intellectual crowd. …

If DeSantis heard what Thiel had to say, he didn’t give any indication. A few hours later, the brash and confident governor railed against the “biomedical security state”, the “woke mind virus”, the depredations of “Brandon”, the states that kept their schools closed. He proclaimed, in the title of his talk, that “Florida is a model for America.” He closed with that classic staple of Republican rhetoric: a salute to the troops buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

For now, DeSantis remains a cipher — he is all things to all elite factions of the party, even as much of the base remains loyal to Trump. Both the establishment and the populists can read into him a vessel for their vision of the country, and thus far, DeSantis has had to commit to neither. But as a former GOP staffer told me after the conference, remarking on the conference’s embrace of both DeSantis and religious rhetoric, “I fear the NatCons are becoming cheap dates and have fantasies of being more.”