On Ron DeSantis and the Slow Postliberal Putsch

Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian private liberal arts college located in Hillsdale, Michigan. Hillsdale College also happens to be the intellectual engine behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s push to remake public education in the state in his own image. Many have accused DeSantis of positioning himself as Trump lite. The sugar-free option for those wanting the sweet taste of state-enforced bigotry, without the negative health effects that come from consuming too many tweets. But taking a closer look at Hillsdale and its associated acts reveals that DeSantis’s unbridled zeal for culture war isn’t just a naked attempt to peel away sickos from Trump's base. It’s part of a larger sincerely held political project that’s been bubbling under the surface of the Trump era of conservative politics the whole time.

DeSantis’s 2023 budget proposal for Florida has all the aesthetics of a meal based on conservative red meat. It’s called the “Freedom” budget. It contains all the tax cuts for freedom-loving businesses that Republicans love. There is a highlight budget item of $12 million to be allocated to DeSantis’s controversial immigrant relocation program, the one where innocent human beings are defrauded and trafficked halfway across the country to own the libs. 

As you scroll down the plan, however, some things start to catch your eye. Like a 15% paise raise for state employees. Even for teachers! And especially for prison guards and cops. There is money allocated to environmental recovery and preservation in the Florida Everglades. There is a state sales tax cut for baby and toddler necessities. He also proposes an increased budget for state colleges and universities. These economic priorities aren’t too dissimilar to what the neoliberal democratic party was pushing 10 to 20 years ago. Democrats today, led by Joe Biden, have pushed for more funding for police to attract new hires and increase their presence. 

Trump as a political figure was a personification of culture war memes, but there was a structural economic critique that allowed some to look past the blatant racism in his campaign, and see a theoretical path toward an economy that actually supported American workers. Of course while actually governing Trump just kind of flailed wildly in a generally neoliberal lezze-fair direction, save for the covid stimulus. DeSantis’s national profile, by contrast, is 100% culture war, with some mild economic populism left as a footnote in his state budget proposal. While everyone in the media sees the Florida Governor as imitating Trump, it appears that it was Trump cynically employing culture war politics for political benefit while DeSantis is a true believer. 

Fascistical Education

The fact that Hillsdale is a conservative Christian school is not immediately apparent when perusing its recruitment content. Instead, Hillsdale and its associated charter schools and organizations sell parents and students on its Classical Education model. When viewed in a vacuum, Classical Education doesn’t seem particularly nefarious or offensive. A curriculum centered on great works of art and science, philosophy, and core values can seem quite appealing. However, Classical Education’s intellectual history is complicated. 

In 1947, Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins started the Great Books program in Chicago. Hutchins was the president of the University of Chicago and Adler taught philosophy of law there. Both men were fierce critics of the American education system, viewing it as a machine for developing sufficient laborers and market actors but not for matriculating human beings and citizens. Adler was an ardent believer in the Aristotelian tradition and believed that modern education was making an egregious error in trivializing and dismissing the great intellectual product of antiquity. The Great Books lists and programs were Alder’s and Hutchins' attempts to correct that error. In Hutchins's words, “It seemed to me that the Great Books were the most promising avenue to liberal education if only because they are teacher-proof.”

It would be hard to cast Adler and Hutchins as political allies with DeSantis and Hillsdale. Hutchins was an adamant defender of academic freedom, defending his professor's right to teach about communism during the height of the red scare. Adler was also pretty liberal and in his writings, he defended things like the liberal mixed-economy welfare state and gave speeches in support of a world federal government. However, the work of early Classical Education evangelists contains some core ideas that are very appealing to the emerging nativist right. For instance, there is the idea that for a polity to function with any semblance of coherence there must be a shared common sense, or singular identity that is shared amongst the people. Hutchins was careful to say that education should not be an attempt to instill a particular set of values. He believed that students would come to these values on their own through grappling with Great Books and works. 

There is also the idea that postmodern philosophies had needlessly complicated and obscured certain universal truths that were contained within the works of antiquity. There is a loss of tradition that comes with our postmodern sense of subjective philosophical analysis. 

In 1995 the Italian historian Umberto Eco published his seminal essay on Ur-Fascism. In it, he presents 14 common features of fascism. These features are not strictly intellectually consistent as fascism is not an intellectually consistent political ideology. However, Eco contends that the presence of just one is enough to build fascist political formation around it. The most obvious feature we can identify in the postliberal right’s Classical Education push is the cult of tradition and the rejection of modernity, where Classical Education's notable focus on the intellectual tradition of only the Western world fits in nicely. 

We can also identify features like describing the enemy as both strong and weak -- Marxism, CRT, and wokeness are dominating the popular consensus and yet is antithetical to a silent majority that only requires the will to push back. Or the appeal to social frustration -- Parents and children being made to feel shame for past acts they did not participate in combined with an education system that is underfunded and leaving kids behind. The obsession with a plot -- Cultural Marxists infiltrating American institutions to destroy western civilization from within. There are others but perhaps the most important of these features that we can observe in DeSantis and Hillsdale’s educational project is the cult of action for action's sake. 

As governor of Florida, many of Desantis’s publicly touted policies have seemed geared toward addressing the latest conservative controversy on Twitter rather than the needs of his constituents. Trans people are trending, and Desantis makes a move to ban them from sports, bathrooms, and the classroom. CRT is trending, and Desantis rejects AP Black History courses on flimsy grounds. There is no need to understand these cultural phenomena. No need to deliberate and think carefully about these issues. The right craves immediate action, and DeSantis is all but happy to indulge. 

This is not to say that Classical Education or the Great Books discourse is inherently fascist. But they can provide an accessible entry point to fascism when adopted by a political formation based on a nativist and theologically prescribed objective moral truth. Especially one that views itself as under attack by an amorphous cabal of intellectually subversive actors. 

An Integral Part of the Story

As easy as it is to draw comparisons between DeSantis and company’s political culture war and Ur-fascism, it’s an observation that may not be entirely sufficient for understanding the larger Hillsdale project. After all, we live in a time of peak Godwin’s law with everything from the IRS to woke M&Ms being compared to the Wehrmacht. There is a level of specificity to what the postliberal right is trying to accomplish that needs to be examined in greater detail.

Catholic integralism is a political philosophy born in 19th-century Europe. It arose as a reaction to the spread of liberalism, which was seen by Catholic traditionalists as a destabilizing force. The basic premise of integralism is that the state should function as an authoritarian and anti-pluralist arm of the Catholic church. In the integralist sense, liberty is not defined by such liberal goals as freedom of expression and belief but as the ability to live freely within the confines of the Good. The word “Good” here is capitalized to denote its reference to a specific traditional Catholic definition. 

Patrick Deneen is a conservative academic and writer, whose book Why Liberalism Failed was recommended by Barack Obama in his 2018 summer book reading list. Deneen however, is a notable contemporary integralist and in his 2017 essay for First Things on the Moral Minority he takes a few pointed shots at the Obama presidency:

“Obama’s war against traditional Christians paid electoral dividends, supported all the while by the media, schools, universities, and even corporate America. This has caused a growing number of Christians to conclude that the nation is no longer a Christian nation, if it ever was.”

So what was it about Deneen’s analysis of the failures of liberalism that Obama, ever the crypto Marxist, found compelling? According to the former president:

“Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.”

Integralism intersects with Obama’s neoliberalism, the postliberal right, and the Great books discourse at one crucial juncture. All four of these political formations are seeking to address the alienation and loss of communitarian values that are the product of capitalism while trying desperately to avoid mentioning capitalism. 

For the integralist, America’s decline is the product of liberalism wrenching American politics away from the safe and secure moral boundaries of traditional theologic practice. The broader postliberal right and the Great Books discourse they opportunistically draw from is less strictly religious and identifies a more secular reverence for Western European cultural product as what has been lost due to postmodern influences. The Neoliberal sees a tribalized partisan divide, created and nurtured by individual bad actors for personal profit. They all decry a loss of shared identity. A commonality that can be appealed to for the sake of addressing cultural and material problems. 

Integralism will at times obliquely reference capitalism as a cause of failure for movement conservatism. Right-wing heroes like Reagan and Gingrich took the energy of the conservative Christian movement and used it for the Supreme Court and tax cuts but failed to properly use state power to cultivate a moral basis for Americans to live by. Instead, the old New Right played footsie with pluralism and allowed the immoral and libertine left to dominate the public square. This they see as the disappointing end result of conservative fusionism, a political formation born of the great realignment that saw Neocon libertarians form an alliance with the evangelical right to harness a tide of racial resentment and stagnant economic outcomes for political power. 

This is now known as the Dead Consensus and is widely seen to have been officially pronounced deceased with the election of Trump. Those dancing on the grave of the dead consensus are touting a turn for conservative politics away from the craven capital-focused economic policy of libertarian free market sycophants to a more populist, even economically liberal, set of economic proposals. From DeSantis’s budget helping poor families afford necessities for their kids to conservatism’s newfound antagonism toward big tech and big pharma, there is a populist bent that is hard to ignore. 

The problem of course is that this populism is wrapped up in a blanket of moral conformity. Moral conformity that is to be enforced by state power. After all, it was the application of state power that led to our current moral degradation, so why not use it to correct what was broken. Or as Patrick Deneen put it:

“Christianity is inevitably political. If Christians are to eschew Washington, D.C., as a lost cause, they should not imagine they can just build familial monasteries. Instead, we need to focus on our town and city halls, and our neighborhood associations, seeking to foster the kinds of communities where our children can—and will—roam the fields again. At some scale, however small, the moral minority must become a majority again.”

The Postliberal Right 

DeSantis is Catholic. He grew up in the white enclave of Dunedin, Florida, a hyper-conservative municipality that enforces conformity. To the point where a resident was fined $30,000 for not mowing his lawn. When he was a history teacher at a private high school, students alleged that he argued in favor of the economic efficacy of slavery, as well as displayed a general animosity toward Black students. As a lawyer for the Navy, he oversaw and signed off on the torture of innocent detainees. While Trump has famously been all over the political spectrum, DeSantis has always been a real one. 

While DeSantis’s views on integralism are unclear, it is a prominent theme in the intellectual output of our old friends, the West Coast Straussians at the Claremont Institute. And there is a ton of overlap between Hillsdale and Claremont and the world of DeSantis supporters. Larry Arnn, the current president of Hillsdale, was a founder of the Claremont Institute and was one of the authors behind Trump’s sad ahistorical propaganda, the 1776 Report. Both Chris Rufo and Ben Shapiro have been Claremont scholars.

Claremont’s function in recent years has been to intellectually launder the most fringe and authoritarian impulses hidden away in obscure sectors of the American right. The Claremont Review of books published several defenses of integralism (even if they don’t outright endorse it) including a positive profile of conservative legal scholar Adrian Vermule. Vermule, an integralist in the traditional sense, is famous for his Common Good Constitutional legal framework, in which originalism is rejected where convenient for an interpretation of the constitution that affirms the public Good. While the West Coast Straussian political project is not strictly Catholic, there is a lot of overlap in their views on modernity vs antiquity and how concerned citizens should interact with the political process.

It’s important to note here that integralism is just one of the flavors swirling about within the new postliberal right. Claremont has platformed everyone from radical libertarian monarchists who would see America install a CEO as opposed to democratically elect a president, to plain outright Nazis. The common theme in both Claremont's intellectual philosophizing and Hillsdale’s praxis in building an educational system based on western chauvinist theological monoculture is a push for a more muscular authoritarian right wing. If the American people won’t reject the moral decline celebrated by contemporary pop culture, they must be dragged kicking and screaming under a more morally concrete superstructure by an authoritarian state that has their best interests at heart. 

Rank and file conservative voters, primed by the stock reactionary backlash to social change that is ever present on the right, support DeSantis because of his propensity to own the libs. Not just through tweets but through actual legislative action. What they may not be aware of is that they are signing up for a political movement predicated on limiting the value they hold most dear: Freedom. And the discordant tone that blares when the postliberal right tries to present its vision to an American public raised on notions of individual liberty and freedom of expression was present when Republicans lost the midterms running primarily on anti-wokeness and LGBTQ bigotry. 

As writer and cohost of the excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, Sam Adler-Bell once told me in an interview about West Coast Straussianism and the broader themes within the postliberal right:

“Their goal is to make it seem like what they want is totally in keeping with the grain of the American soul. They are trying to preserve what America is and should be, but in many cases what they say and what they do is actually just really weird and not attractive to people who aren’t already fully committed to a political project”

While the postliberal right with all its attendant integralists, neo-monarchists, and yes fascists, can speak directly to the problems of modernity, they are unable to locate solutions based on material realities. For the average American, the biggest problem with education is their child's ability to receive adequate nutrition, have manageable class sizes, or have heating and cooling in their classrooms. The general unease parents feel in being unable to relate to their purple-haired, gender-fluid children is more a product of the workplace demanding more of their time than ever than a Marxist cabal attempting to steal your kids. 

Time will tell if DeSantis’s culture war will propel him to the white house. He not only has to contend with a still very relevant Trump looking to reclaim his throne but also the political fact that banning abortion and harassing trans kids and their families just isn’t as popular as LibsofTikTok would like you to believe. However, the problems that he and Hillsdale are identifying with modern American life are very real and if no one else is offering a compelling class-based explanation, a Catholic theocracy may look like the best and last chance for some to “save America”. 

Solidarity Forever.