Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been busy promoting a new book that sets out the case for his presidential run. His main message: Republicans need a new approach to combatting the cultural power of the left.

The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival begins by narrating DeSantis’s political rise and goes on to give an account of his pandemic leadership. But it reaches a climax when he describes how he used the power of his state office to stand up to “wokeness.” The implication is that he will do the same for the country if he becomes the next president of the United States.

Donald Trump excelled at offending liberal sensibilities while he occupied the White House. But he took few steps to check progressive ideas. Under Trump’s watch, wokeness gained sway over some of the country’s most influential institutions, and public opinion on issues such as race and immigration swung to the left. By contrast, DeSantis has pushed back against the institutional power of such ideas in concrete ways and on several fronts, including in business and entertainment.

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

The main focus of these efforts has been in education. Last April, DeSantis signed a piece of legislation called the Stop WOKE Act; according to a summary by Reason magazine, the sprawling bill was “intended to curb teaching about or conducting trainings on certain topics related to race, sex, and gender in Florida public schools and workplaces.” Earlier this year, DeSantis successfully pressured the College Board to redesign a new AP course in African American studies, and installed close conservative allies on the board of trustees of the New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts college. Now his administration is preparing to go a step further: House Bill 999, pending in Florida’s legislature, would fundamentally remake the nature of public education in the state by abolishing certain majors and granting political appointees the power to fire tenured faculty members.

DeSantis’s pitch is worth taking seriously. His promise to fight wokeness is a big reason for his rapid rise on the right, making him Trump’s leading competitor for the Republican presidential nomination. And because many Americans, of all ethnic origins and ideological stripes, feel alienated by the recent transformation of mainstream institutions, his campaign may even have helped DeSantis win voters outside his party’s base.

Still, a closer look at the changes DeSantis is implementing in Florida reveals that—contrary to the promise encapsulated in the title of his new book—they will make Americans less, rather than more, free. Anybody who believes in basic constitutional values like free speech should reject his blueprint for America’s revival—even if, like me, they have their own misgivings about so-called wokeness.

Most critics of DeSantis have little sympathy for the concerns that drive his policies. They believe that his attacks on universities and corporations are rooted in a desire to impose regressive views. And they assume that his objections to critical race theory derive from a determination to prevent Americans from learning about historical injustices like slavery.

On recent evidence, assuming the worst about American politicians is generally a safe bet, and DeSantis may well be driven by the most venal of intentions. But regardless of his motives, I believe that there are rational grounds for skepticism about CRT and apprehension about the state of higher education in the United States.

To its defenders in the media, CRT simply amounts to a willingness to acknowledge the noxious role that race has always played in American life. And without doubt, the founders of this intellectual tradition, such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, have made important contributions to debates about, for instance, the nature of discrimination in America. But anybody who goes back to CRT’s founding texts will quickly realize that the tradition has, from its inception, conceived of itself as standing in direct conflict with the liberal left. Far from seeking to complete the work of the civil-rights movement, scholars like Bell were intent on exposing the flaws of its most fundamental claims and assumptions—as is clear from his blistering attacks on Brown v. Board of Education. This has all along placed the tradition in conflict with such key constitutional values as free speech and due process.

More generally, I worry about a lack of diversity of viewpoints on campus. Most professors genuinely seek to encourage their students to speak their mind and challenge prevailing ideas. But I regularly talk with students from across the political spectrum who have experienced intolerance of dissent. When they deviated from a narrow ideological consensus in the classroom or the dining hall, they were penalized by professors or shunned by classmates. The problem with the influence of woke ideas on campus is not that some students or faculty members genuinely believe in them; it is that many bullies and administrators impose them by fiat, making it perilous for students and academics alike to disagree without suffering serious adverse consequences.

[Diane Roberts: ‘Most important, we must not upset DeSantis’]

For all these reasons, I wanted to approach with an open mind DeSantis’s blueprint for curtailing the cultural power that a particular set of ideas about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity has acquired, especially in universities. Can public authorities take action to promote a true diversity of viewpoints at universities and avoid turning themselves into censors?

If H.B. 999 is any indication, the answer seems to be a resounding no. DeSantis claims that he is intent on defending free speech and academic freedom from the coercive power now enjoyed by a new set of radical ideas. But in the process, he is proposing to turn the state into an even more powerful censor, giving political appointees unprecedented authority over what students and faculty members can do and say.

The bill’s most blatant restriction of academic freedom concerns the content of courses taught at public universities in Florida. Although it is appropriate for a legislature to set broad expectations for what the institutions it funds will teach—for example, by directing them to prepare students for the needs of the state’s economy—academic freedom is severely undermined when faculty members are prohibited from teaching particular topics or expressing certain points of view.

Such prohibitions stand at the core of H.B. 999. The bill explicitly bars public universities from teaching materials that constitute “identity politics” or are rooted in “Critical Race Theory,” two concepts whose legal meaning it fails to define in precise terms. As FIRE, a nonprofit devoted to defending academic freedom, points out in a recent article, “Faculty teaching courses on history, philosophy, humanities, literature, sociology, or art would be required to guess what material administrators, political appointees, or lawmakers might label ‘identity politics.’”

(Reading the legislation, I realized that many of the classes I teach would likely fall into the interdicted category. Although I am critical of most forms of identity politics, I believe that my task in the classroom is to facilitate debate, not to evangelize my views. When I teach students about so-called cultural appropriation, for example, I freely express my conviction that we have gone too far in putting healthy forms of mutual cultural influence under a pall of general suspicion. But to facilitate a meaningful debate, I also assign philosophical articles justifying expansive prohibitions on cultural appropriation that a well-informed judge would reasonably interpret as standing in the tradition of identity politics.)

H.B. 999 would also prohibit the inclusion of “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” in general-education courses. This not only makes it impossible for professors to let students participate in the process of scientific discovery (exploratory), but would also, on its face, obviate any number of classic college courses, including on Shakespeare’s plays (unproven) or quantum physics (theoretical).

The vague, catch-all nature of these prohibitions is aggravated by the fact that the same bill would effectively end the protections for unpopular speech that have historically been a central feature of American universities. The bill would require virtually all hiring to be done by political appointees, such as university presidents and boards of trustees. These same bodies would also be empowered to review a faculty member’s tenure status for any reason, enabling them to fire anyone with politically inconvenient views. “If the political appointees who populate boards of trustees can review tenure at any time, for any reason,” FIRE rightly notes, “it will strip faculty of a primary purpose of tenure: to protect scholarship, research, and teaching from political pressure.”

Thankfully, the most extreme elements of DeSantis’s legislation will never be implemented. Many provisions in the bill are blatantly unconstitutional. If it passes the Florida legislature in anything resembling its current form, its main provisions will—as has already happened to key parts of the Stop WOKE Act—almost certainly be struck down by the courts.

Yet H.B. 999 is a harbinger of a larger danger. Whether or not DeSantis wins the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he already has an outsize impact on the GOP’s plans for taking on the left’s cultural power. And although some of the views and customs that now exert real influence in many American institutions are profoundly illiberal, DeSantis’s blueprint for fixing this problem will, by enlisting the power of the state, undermine basic constitutional values, including freedom of speech.

[Read: The forgotten Ron DeSantis book]

Universities across the country need to fight back against the legislative proposals in Florida. If they are to retain a modicum of academic freedom, they must defend the right of teachers and researchers to pose awkward questions and publish uncomfortable answers—irrespective of whether they offend the sensibilities of progressive activists or conservative trustees.

At the same time, university presidents who oppose such legislative efforts would be well advised to reflect on how they can win back the broad-based respect that their institutions once enjoyed. Public universities are, as recent events in Florida make clear, especially vulnerable to political interference. But elite private universities enjoy tax-exempt status for their endowments and draw part of their budget from federal research grants, making them nearly as dependent on political support for their health and survival. All universities, public or private, should be deeply alarmed that large segments of the country now perceive them as ideologically intolerant monoliths and feel alienated by their reigning ethos.

For now, DeSantis’s attack on academic freedom seems likely to fail. But in a democracy, colleges will always depend on the goodwill of the people. Universities that care about their long-term success must seek to sustain that support. This means, at a minimum, that they must do on their own what legislators neither could nor should do on their behalf: nurture a true culture of viewpoint diversity—one that empowers students and researchers alike to pursue unpopular ideas without fear of retribution.

The same fundamental dynamic that decided the 2016 Republican presidential primaries is already resurfacing as the 2024 contest takes shape.

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Former President Donald Trump gave a long and deranged speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend. We need to stop treating support for Trump as if it’s just another political choice and instead work to isolate his renewed threat to our democracy and our national security.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Cover story: The new anarchy Special ed shouldn’t be separate. Pregnancy shouldn’t work like this.

A Test of Character

Donald Trump went to CPAC and gave a speech that was, even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory. Amusing as it is to listen to President von Munchausen and his many “sir” stories, Trump is the former commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces and the current front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. He is as  dangerous as ever to our democracy and to our national security.

But I also want to turn attention from Trump’s evident emotional issues to consider a more unsettling question: How, in 2023, after all we know about this man and his attacks on our government and our Constitution, do we engage the people who heard that speech and support Donald Trump’s candidacy? How do we turn the discussion away from partisanship and toward good citizenship—and to the protection of our constitutional order?

In the past, reporters have approached such questions gingerly, poking their head into coffee shops, asking for comments at rallies, and claiming to overhear conversations at gas stations, all in the service of trying to understand Trump voters. (Only The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper has ever managed to get anywhere in such interviews, and the answers he elicits are often terrifyingly dumb.) These respectful conversations with Trump voters have produced almost nothing useful beyond failed theories about “economic anxiety” and other rationalizations that capture little about why Trump voters continue to support a posse of authoritarian goons.

In 2016, Trump supporters could lean on a slew of hopeful arguments: Trump is just acting; he’ll hire professional staff; the “good” Republicans will keep him in line; the job will sober him up. All of these would be disproved over time. (It didn’t help that the alternative at the time was Hillary Clinton, for whom I voted but whose campaign was a tough sell to many people.) But by 2020, Trump, along with his enablers at Fox and other right-wing outlets, had created a kind of impermeable anti-reality field around the GOP base. This shell of pure denial defeated almost any argument about anything.

Media, flummoxed by having a sociopathic narcissist in the Oval Office, treated Trump like a normal political leader, and soon we all—even me—became accustomed to the fact that the president of the United States routinely sounded like the guy at the end of the bar who makes you decide to take your drink over to a table or a booth. When Joe Biden won, I hoped that this strange fever gripping so many Americans would finally pass. But the fever did not break, not even after January 6, 2021, and the many hearings that showed Trump’s responsibility for the events of that black day.

And now Trump has kicked off his attempt to regain office with a litany of lunacy. His speech at CPAC has been recounted by my Atlantic colleagues; John Hendrickson notes Trump’s return to the classics of grievance, and McKay Coppins describes how Trump has managed to become part of the typically boring CPAC kitsch.

But we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s gibbering for harmless political glossolalia. As Charlie Sykes said this morning, CPAC is “a serious threat masquerading as a cultic circus cum clown car,” and revealed “what a Trump 2.0 would look like.” This is a former president whose pitch included “I am your retribution.” Retribution for what, exactly, was left unsaid, but revenge for being turned out of office is likely high on the list. The Trumpian millennium turned into a tawdry four years of grubby incompetence and an ignominious loss. If Trump wins again, there will be a flurry of pardons, the same cast of miscreants will return to Pennsylvania Avenue, and, this time, they won’t even pretend to care about the Constitution or the rule of law.

Imagine an administration where we’ll all be nostalgic for the high-mindedness of Bill Barr.

Trump also reminded us that he is an existential menace to our national security. He reveled in a story he first told last spring—almost certainly a fiction—about how he informed a meeting of NATO leaders that he would let the Russians roll over them if they weren’t paid up. (Trump still thinks NATO is a protection racket.) He then fantasized about how easily a Russian attack could destroy NATO’s headquarters.

We’ve all cataloged this kind of Trumpian weirdness many times, and I still feel pity for the fact-checkers who try to keep up with him. But I wonder if there is any point. By now it should be clear that the people listening to Trump don’t care about facts, or even about policy or politics. They enjoy the show, and they want it back on TV for another four years. And this is a problem not with Trump but with the voters.

It is long past time to admit that support for Trump, after all that we now know, is a moral failing. As I wrote in a recent book, there is such a thing as being a bad citizen in a democracy, and we should cease the pretend arguments about policy—remember, the 2020 GOP convention didn’t even bother with a platform. Instead, anyone who cares about the health of American democracy, of any party or political belief, should say clearly that to applaud Trump’s fantasies and threats at CPAC is to show an utter lack of civic character. (I might say that it is no better than applauding David Duke, but why invoke the former KKK leader when Trump has already had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who he seems to think is a swell guy?)

The man who bellowed and sweated his way through almost two hours of authoritarian madness is still the same man who instigated an attack on our Capitol (and on his own vice president), the man who would hand our allies to Russia if they’re behind on the vig, the man who thinks a free press is his enemy, the man who tried to wave away a pandemic as thousands and thousands of Americans died.

Stigma and judgment have a place in politics. There was a time when we forced people out of public life for offenses far less than Donald Trump’s violent and seditious corruption. We were a better country for it, and returning to that better time starts with media outlets holding elected Republicans to account for Trump’s statements—but also with each of us refusing to accept rationalizations and equivocation from even our friends and family. I said in 2016 that the Trump campaign was a test of character, and that millions of us were failing it. The stakes are even clearer and steeper now; we cannot fail this test again.

Related:

The martyr at CPAC Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be.

Today’s News

The Biden administration is reportedly considering a mass-vaccination campaign for poultry as an outbreak of bird flu continues to kill millions of chickens. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced yesterday that he would not be seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. A stampede at a GloRilla concert in Rochester, New York, on Sunday night killed one person and injured nine more. Two of the injured are in critical condition.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up more reader responses about organized religion.

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Evening Read

Teresa Kopec / Getty

A Bird’s-Eye View

By Elaine Godfrey

Have you ever looked at a duck? I mean really looked at one.

If you have, then you’ve probably noticed how a duck somehow manages to appear graceful and goofy at the same time, with her rounded head nestled perfectly into her body and her rubbery feet flapping beneath the water. Sometimes she’ll twist her elegant neck around to peck and pull at her wings, preening—which actually involves gathering oil from glands near her tail and combing it through her feathers to keep them waterproof.

This is important work for a duck. And it can be nice to watch, pondering how else she occupies her time and letting your mind wander back to childhood memories of Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck and Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings. I indulged in this for a while this week during a tour of the National Zoo’s Bird House, in Northwest Washington, D.C. After six years of renovation, the exhibit will finally reopen on March 13.

Read the full article.

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Read. Wolfish, Erica Berry’s debut book, explores what we perceive as threats—and teaches us to live with our fears.

Watch. If blockbuster-level gore is what you’re after, our critic writes, Cocaine Bear (in theaters) delivers.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Some folks on social media recently pointed me to a documentary on Amazon Prime titled The Sound of 007. I am a sucker for all things James Bond (and I have been known to have some controversial views on casting the role), but I especially love the music. The brassy horns and electric guitars, the cheesy lyrics, the overwrought performances—all of it makes me wish I were playing baccarat in London or Hong Kong in 1967 while smoking and saying things like “banco.”

There’s a lot in the special about John Barry, the king of 007 scores, and especially about the origins of Monty Norman’s instantly recognizable theme. (Weird factoid: It was originally meant for a musical that Norman was writing based on a V. S. Naipaul novel set among the East Indian community of Trinidad, and so it had a kind of bouncy, sitar-influenced sound. Barry jazzed it up.) The documentary includes many interviews and archival clips, and some of the stories behind these songs are amazing: Dame Shirley Bassey had to take off her bustier to hit the notes in “Goldfinger,” and Tom Jones says he nearly passed out trying to finish off “Thunderball.” There’s also some honest talk about the not-great themes: Dame Shirley detested “Moonraker,” and no one much liked “All Time High,” from Octopussy. The producer Harry Saltzman apparently tried to veto one of the true classics, “Diamonds Are Forever,” because it was too risqué. (No, really.) I admit I yawned a bit at the later contributions from Sam Smith and Billie Eilish, but The Sound of 007 is an engrossing musical tour through the Bond movies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.