Anthony Fauci is worthy of criticism for a thousand reasons, but it was childish and pointless for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to call him “a little elf” and say he needs to be “chuck[ed] across the Potomac.”
DeSantis isn’t naturally an insult-peddler. Normally, he is extraordinarily smart and self-controlled. We should assume, then, that DeSantis believes a good political strategy for him is to imitate former President Donald Trump’s personality when it comes to venting disdain for the other side.
DeSantis isn’t alone in this approach. In fact, the most prominent Democratic governors and gubernatorial candidates are all following a more elitist version of the same game plan: Show that you hate not only the other party but all the voters in the other party.
Hating Republican voters is becoming a central tenet of the Democratic Party. Recall Hillary Clinton calling a huge portion of the country “deplorable”? Well, everyone’s doing it now.
Charlie Crist, right after winning the Democratic nomination for Florida’s governorship, made it clear he didn’t want Republican votes, because Republican voters are evil.
Crist: “Those who support DeSantis should stay with him and vote for him and I don’t want your vote. If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there.” pic.twitter.com/S0B93bw52i
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 24, 2022
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, is running for president by avoiding California’s problems and signaling instead how much he hates Republican politicians and DeSantis in particular. As Conor Friedersdorf, an Atlantic writer in Los Angeles, puts it, Newsom “seems to think that, in today’s political environment, the best way to improve his national prospects is to mock and irritate the other side.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told (among others) Rep. Lee Zeldin — who was born in East Meadow, New York, went to college at SUNY Albany, got his law degree at Albany Law School, has lived and worked in New York his whole life — to “just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK? Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.”
This isn’t unique to the Trump era, of course. Jim Geraghty at National Review points out that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was very explicit in 2014 that he hated pro-lifers and gun owners:
It is not great for our country that hating the other side, sometimes called “negative partisanship,” is so common. But it will get worse — if it works.
