Pamela Paul is a relative newcomer as a NY Times columnist. She used to be the editor of The New York Times Book Review but switched to writing columns last year. From what I can tell, Paul is fairly progressive on some issues but she also seems to be the kind of progressive who isn’t terribly fond of the wokeism and cancel culture that is gradually dominating left-wing spaces. Last month she wrote a really interesting take on the cancelation of American Dirt, the controversial novel which seemed to mark a turning point in the censorious left’s ability to dominate the discussion.

Today she has another piece which, while in no way an endorsement of Ron DeSantis, nevertheless argues that progressives shouldn’t write him off as the next Trump because that’s not what he is.

As the Democratic political strategist Lis Smith has remarked, the left’s reaction to DeSantis looks just like its reaction to Trump: “He’s picking these fights. He’s saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters — whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is — have the same freakout.”

Let’s pay closer attention this time.

First, we shouldn’t underestimate DeSantis. He may resemble Trump in his politics — but not in his intellect or resolve. Compare their respective backgrounds: Whereas Trump’s acceptance into the University of Pennsylvania, after an academic record notable only for its mediocrity, was an egregious example of leveraging personal connections to get into a prestigious university, DeSantis, the son of a TV ratings box installer and a nurse, actually earned his way into the Ivy League. People bent over backward to ascribe some accidental form of grifter street smarts to Trump. But DeSantis is demonstrably intelligent and industrious. He worked his way through Yale while playing baseball and graduated magna cum laude.

Whereas Trump skirted military service with a convenient discovery of bone spurs, DeSantis was a commissioned officer in the Navy. He graduated from Harvard Law School. He may share Trump’s taste for bluster, but this is not someone who bumbled his way into public office. As Dexter Filkins observed last year in a New Yorker profile, “DeSantis has an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence and a granular understanding of policy.”

Paul’s position in this piece is basically that of someone trying to perform and intervention with progressives nationwide who are probably being too quick to deny DeSantis’ actual appeal. For instance, his decision to send 48 migrants to to Martha’s Vineyard was universally denounced by the left and the media but Paul reminds her readers that’s not how it actually went over in large parts of the country. The same was true for the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Lest we forget, Hispanic voters in Florida preferred DeSantis to his Democratic opponent in last year’s election for governor; they also supported his Martha’s Vineyard escapade, according to a Telemundo/LX News poll…

As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school. Democratic leadership should worry, too. Keeping quiet or pretending those concerns aren’t real won’t make them go away…

It should be cause for alarm that recent polls show Republicans holding an advantage on educational issues. Rather than dismiss parents’ concerns as somehow unfounded or wrongheaded, we should be listening to them and finding better solutions to their grievances. Telling parents they’re bigots or are unenlightened for not embracing the latest faddish orthodoxy is not a winning message.

Paul doesn’t mention the progressive panic that happened over the past couple years as angry parents showed up at school board meetings. There were arrests and concerned articles. The National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Biden suggesting that parents were becoming such a threat to school boards that the FBI needed to get involved. And within days the DOJ wrote back promising to look into it. All of the mechanisms seemed to be responding instantly to progressive outrage.

But don’t forget how those stories turned out. A Republican became governor of Virginia, partly based on this issue. One of the parents who was arrested in Virginia turned out to be a father whose daughter had been assaulted. The Superintendent in that district was fired and then indicted. In San Francisco, three woke members of the school board were recalled.

The point of all of this is that progressives who are still certain that sending migrants to other states was absolutely wrong and that parents who complained to school boards were crazy are setting themselves up for a shock. Yelling bigot at everyone you disagree with may work on Twitter pretty well but it’s not going to be enough to silence people where their own children are involved. For those on the left that haven’t figured that out yet, I think Pamela Paul has given them a sensible warning.