03/22/2023: Historical Shade and political anti-intellectualism

Governor Ron DeSantis gave this response to Donald Trump’s nickname “Ron Sanctimonious” in a recent interview: “I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine.”

The nickname thing is ridiculous, of course, and we should all pay attention to the more substantive and interesting issues related to the debate over national interest going on in the GOP, but DeSantis (who attended Yale and Harvard)(*) running to Trump’s left as an anti-intellectual tells you something about how he views the GOP audience and has a deep tradition in American politics.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Richard Hofstadter could say it well. In this book he refers to presidents Hayes and Benjamin Harrison as “innocent of distinction.”

Here’s the thing though about the point DeSantis is making: It’s an intellectual one. He’s said in the interview, don’t pay attention the name calling, pay attention to the kind of team a leader builds and their capacity for execution. Pay attention to what the job requires, not the way a leader makes you feel with his barbs. As a person who wrote a book arguing a version of this about the presidential selection process I recognize the pitch!

As I think about DeSantis’ remark, I can’t really produce in the noggin a modern conservative elitist boogeyman of the kind of role that Willilam F. Buckley played. Kevin Phillips, author and former Nixon aide, called Buckley “Squire Willie,” and in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, (1969) heralded a “New Right” that connected with real people. “Nor can we expect Alabama truck drivers or Ohio steelworkers to sign on with a politics captivated by Ivy League five-syllable word polishers,” wrote Phillips, who attended Harvard. “Any politics or coalition has to surge up from Middle America … not dribble down from Bill Buckley’s wine rack and favorite philosophers shelf.”

*Is it likely that the Governor of Florida doesn’t understand this word? It is unlikely. Pretending you don’t know a word when you know a word is the kind of thing that Donald Trump might spend a lot of time lampooning. All the while he does so, Trump will repeat the word “sanctimonious,” thereby cementing the underlying charge. Then, people will go look up the word and see that it means “making a show of being morally superior to other people,” and they will decide that pretending you don’t know a word and that a childish nickname doesn’t matter to you because you’re focused on morally superior pursuits is a behavior consistent with a word you recently looked up.