As if all of that wasn’t enough, DeSantis is just a hypocrite too. Nobody compared him to Trump faster than DeSantis himself, at least a few years ago. in one Campaign ad 2018, DeSantis “builds a wall” with one of his kids and reads another (later seen in the commercial in a MAGA onesie) a book about Trump, with “Ron DeSantis: Pitbull Trump Defender” in all caps at the bottom. With the rise of Conservatives win through Flip flops on Trump like JD Vancethe hypocrisy in it is worth identifying, although not surprising.
Like Trump, DeSantis is a wealthy, pro-business, Ivy League-educated politician posing as a populist. Empowering someone like him would have dire consequences, especially given the chaos his governorship has wreaked. But holding it against DeSantis as if he were uniquely Trump’s or as if we need to stop their individual wrongdoing is missing the wood for the trees. We must reject this normalization at its root.
Media comments separating DeSantis from a broader conservative campaign to rip up every remaining social safety net for marginalized communities in this country plays into a concept by philosopher Hannah Arendt. In one of her writings about the Holocaust what she witnessed, she coined her theory of the “banality of evil. As described by theorist Judith Butler, “If a crime against humanity has become ‘banal’ in a certain sense, it is precisely because it was committed routinely, systematically, without adequate naming and combating.”
DeSantis’ tactics — and their movement into the mainstream — don’t exist in a vacuum; They are empowered by a media ecosystem that is all too eager to sanitize his image and thereby empower him. Arendt wrote for the Butler Guardian in 2011 “attempted to show how crime was accepted, routined and implemented for the criminals without moral dislike and political outrage and resistance.” This banality – this “normal” – should not be accepted as such.