Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Do you want Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to win or lose his Republican primary race against Donald Trump? Why? How does he compare, in your estimation, to Joe Biden?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

Back in 2021, I argued that backing Ron DeSantis early was the best bet for Never Trumpers who wanted to deny Donald Trump another GOP nomination. I still think so. And this week, DeSantis launched his campaign, though as my colleague David Graham notes in an article that is bearish on DeSantis’s chances at victory, Trump’s strong numbers in the polls are undeniable.

Still, Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, argues in The New York Times that it is far too early to count DeSantis out:

He’ll be lavishly funded, his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans, he can draw a crowd, he’ll finally actually be in the race, and perhaps most important, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Mr. Trump …

Mr. DeSantis won’t and can’t make the totalist case against Mr. Trump as unfit to serve that Never Trump Republicans and the press might like to hear. But so it is. Much of his anti-Trump case will be based on electability. There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump blew a winnable race in 2020—Mr. DeSantis will need to say he really did lose—and had a large hand in the Republican Party’s disappointing midterms last year. In all likelihood, Mr. DeSantis would have a much easier time beating President Biden than Mr. Trump would, based on the generational contrast alone. But there are limits to this argument.

Mr. Trump is competitive with Mr. Biden in polling, and an electability message doesn’t usually move the type of self-identified very conservative primary voters Mr. DeSantis needs to pry from Mr. Trump. The risk to Mr. DeSantis is that his candidacy takes on the feel of an establishment front-runner—lots of donor enthusiasm, an electability message—when he’s running from behind against an insurgent populist who happens to have once been president of the United States. To counter that, Mr. DeSantis is obviously going to have to retain his hard edge on cultural issues.

I’ll share my own thoughts about how DeSantis might run against Trump soon.

A Gen Z Teen’s Diagnosis of His Generation

Zach Gottlieb grew up with a therapist mom who taught him that discomfort is part of life, but that the world keeps turning even when you’re sad, a message that helps him to stay resilient.

In the Los Angeles Times, he argues that parents who take the opposite approach are creating depressed kids:

Parents and educators have been trying to figure out how to help teens in my generation who are struggling amid rising rates of depression and anxiety. That’s an understandable goal. What worries me, though, is the possibility that many in my generation are confusing mental health issues with normal discomfort, to the point that the term “mental health” is becoming so diluted that it’s starting to lose meaning.

Social media play a large role in this, promoting pseudo-technical and pathologizing language—often leading to cancellation—as the antidote to emotional discomfort.

Someone disagrees with you? They’re “gaslighting” you! Someone has the “wrong” point of view or perspective? They’re “toxic”! Someone declines to do what you ask? They have “no boundaries”! Instead of talking through these situations or trying to understand another perspective better, we run away to the supposed comfort of not having to deal with them. Click—they’re blocked.

Colleges have disinvited speakers who might be triggering to some students or created “safe spaces” where students can go instead; students in high schools and middle schools can choose not to attend assemblies that might be triggering; TV shows and podcasts tell us in advance that we might be triggered by a certain topic discussed, so we should skip that episode in case it makes us uncomfortable. We strive to make everyone comfortable, all the time and in every way—an impossible goal.

All of the warnings are well-intentioned and supposedly in service of our mental health. And of course, many people my age face mental health stressors that go far beyond the disappointments and conflicts of daily life. Anxiety and depression are serious concerns that need to be addressed, and treatment should be encouraged and accessible.

But I wonder if, more broadly, we’re normalizing an almost hyper-vigilant avoidance of anything uncomfortable. By insisting that the mere mention of something difficult is bad for our mental health, are we protecting ourselves from emotional damage—or damaging ourselves emotionally?

Silicon Valley Woo

The writer Tara Isabella Burton argues in The New Atlantis that the zeitgeist has shifted in the following way:

You might call it the postrationalist turn: a cultural shift in both relatively “normie” and hyper-weird online spaces. Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology—that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so—is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits—political, cultural, and social alike—of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost—a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent—must be restored.

What could go wrong?

The Tax Code and Swedish Feminism

In a fascinating essay on Sweden’s approach to the state and individualism, the Swedish history professor Lars Trägårdh spends a few paragraphs on the country’s unique tax code and the effect it has had on women:

In 1971, joint taxation was eliminated in favour of strict individual taxation. The idea was that at a time when women began to flock to the labour market, joint taxation presented an obstacle in the form of a negative incentive. If a woman began to earn money, her income would be added to that of the husband, and in an era of progressive taxation that meant the woman’s income effectively would be subject to a higher tax. Add to this that before the 1970s there was no universal, tax-financed childcare yet in Sweden, meaning that such care—without which it would be impossible for both husband and wife to work—had to be paid for privately, a costly proposition.

The introduction of strict individual taxation—there was no option to select joint taxation—and, over time, universal daycare, created the conditions for women to enter the workforce en masse. This in turn gave them the economic independence without which talk of gender equality would only amount to rhetoric. These reforms, to which can be added the world’s first law criminalising the spanking of children, even at home, and the legalising of gender-neutral marriage, meant that the family became more and more of a voluntary society, rather than the old-fashioned traditional family characterised by patriarchal power relations. To be sure, these reforms, which one perceptive writer has referred to as a ‘bloodless revolution’, created opposition. One group called the Family Campaign collected some 60,000 signatures from irate housewives and religious conservatives to protest the new tax law. But, generally, support far exceeded opposition and the days of the Swedish housewife were indeed numbered.

A Defense of Battle Rap

If you’re horrified by the genre––or a bit unsure of what exactly it is––Jay Caspian Kang’s interesting essay in The New Yorker may provoke more complicated thoughts about its value.

He writes:

​​Battle rap offers a kind of representation politics for the unwoke, a space where there’s some separation between the craft and the respect that the combatants have for one another. In this way, it is both a reflection of a certain reality and, for its fans, a fantasy for how we wish we could talk about identity. There’s something compelling, and even democratic, about battle rap’s premise that identity can always be at the forefront, but will never determine who actually wins.

Conversations of Note

Marking the 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s death, Richard Reeves, who wrote a 2007 book about the great liberal philosopher, revisits his arguments for a culture of free speech:

Mill believed that the pursuit of truth required the collation and combination of ideas and propositions, even those that seem to be in opposition to each other. He urged us to allow others to speak—and then to listen to them—for three main reasons, most crisply articulated in Chapter 2 of On Liberty.

First, the other person’s idea, however controversial it seems today, might turn out to be right. (“The opinion … may possibly be true.”) Second, even if our opinion is largely correct, we hold it more rationally and securely as a result of being challenged. (“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”) Third, and in Mill’s view most likely, opposing views may each contain a portion of the truth, which need to be combined. (“Conflicting doctrines … share the truth between them.”)

For Mill, as for us, this is not primarily a legal issue. His main concern was not government censorship. It was the stultifying consequences of social conformity, of a culture where deviation from a prescribed set of opinions is punished through peer pressure and the fear of ostracism. “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough,” he wrote. “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”

Mill never pretended that this would be easy, either at a personal or political level. The humility and openness that is required is hard-won. Our identity as a person must be kept separable from the ideas we happen to endorse at a given time. Otherwise, when those ideas are criticized, we are likely to experience the criticism as an attack upon our self, rather than as an opportunity to think about something more deeply and to grow intellectually. That’s why education is so important. Liberals are not born; we have to be made.  

The article goes on to defend Mill from his detractors on the post-liberal right.

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It would have been better for Governor Ron DeSantis if his Twitter Spaces announcement had crashed altogether. As bad as the tech failures were, the really bad part of his presidential launch was the part when the tech worked—and the world could hear a man radically and pathetically unready for national leadership.

DeSantis won the governorship of Florida in 2018 after a campaign in which he proclaimed himself one of Donald Trump’s most zealous and fawning followers. His best-known ad showed him indoctrinating his infant children into the Trump cult: “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.” That history raised the question: Could DeSantis ever emerge as his own man; could he transition from follower to leader?

Last night’s formal presidential announcement offered him a big-audience opportunity to reveal himself in a new role. Instead, he showed himself to be a beta to the bottom of his soul, one of nature’s henchmen.

After racing through his drab, standard-issue stump speech, DeSantis submitted himself to what felt like an old-time radio call-in show, hosted by Elon Musk and Musk’s business partner, David Sacks, who is also known as one of the most scornful anti-Ukraine trolls on Twitter. The two hosts made it clear that, in their opinion, DeSantis was the third-ranking attraction of the evening. They talked about Twitter, not about DeSantis’s presidential aspirations. They summoned callers from the weirdest corners of the far right. One of them needed to be reminded to unmute himself, like Grandpa on the Zoom call. Another praised DeSantis as a “cold-blooded, ruthless assassin”—this on the first anniversary of the Uvalde school massacre.

In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning.

DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among actual people, they look at one another and raise their phones toward him, presumably to video the encounter. In his second ad, DeSantis walks toward a speaker’s platform as somebody else’s voice delivers his message for him. Obviously, the directors of these ads are adopting strategies to cope with an immediate problem: DeSantis looks awkward when he interacts with people, and his voice is grating and uninspiring. But the unintended effect is to send a message that the candidate is a contrivance.

So it was unsurprising that DeSantis would make his announcement on what sounded like an amateur hour. He was literally invisible at his own announcement. He did not interact with voters. He was protected from direct exposure by the interposition of allies and supporters. Or such was the plan.  

[David A. Graham: The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis]

Only, the plan backfired. This time, DeSantis was not protected by all the layers of mediation around him. He was thoroughly and humiliatingly exposed.

Nobody ever seemed to have given any thought to the question What’s our message to the people we hope to persuade to our cause?

Watch some old announcement speeches on YouTube, and you see a carefully considered plan in every one. The candidates stand among family or supporters; they speak to particular crowds; they focus on biography or policy or some crisis of the day. Somebody has thought hard about why the candidate is there, what the candidate hopes to achieve, what the point of this exercise is.

DeSantis’s corporate sponsors had a plan. They were there to demonstrate the messaging potential of Twitter Spaces for far-right political content. That plan went awry when Twitter Spaces proved glitchy and unreliable, but still, a plan it was. DeSantis, though, had no plan. He just twirled about Elon Musk’s ballroom, dancing to Musk’s tune.

Why should Ron DeSantis be the Republican nominee, then perhaps ultimately the president of the United States? What does he hope to achieve for his country? Those were the questions he should have been seeking to answer, but almost all of his remarks were backwards-looking: about COVID, book bans, his feud with Disney. Whether you agreed or disagreed with his talking points, whether you thought his tone whining and aggrieved or righteous and defiant, everything he had to say was about the past, his past: how he’d been right and his critics had been unfair and wrong (he specifically complained about The Atlantic).

Announcement speeches are occasions for broad visions, reflections on the things that bind and unite Americans. Barack Obama expressed such a vision in 2007:

This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice to push us forward when we’re doing right, and let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.

George W. Bush hit the same notes in 1999:

We will also tell every American, “The dream is for you.” Tell forgotten children in failed schools, “The dream is for you.” Tell families, from the barrios of L.A. to the Rio Grande Valley: “El sueno americano es para ti.” Tell men and women in our decaying cities, “The dream is for you.” Tell confused young people, starved of ideals, “The dream is for you.” This is the kind of campaign we must run.

There was no such message from DeSantis for Americans in 2023. No dreams, no commonality. It was a message for a faction, not a nation. It was a small message for a big country. DeSantis has gotten this far by identifying enemies rather than building coalitions—but it now seems that “this far” is as far as he’s going to go.

Into the gap where the intentional message should have gone, DeSantis’s true message inserted itself. He’s a divider who seeks a position that usually is won by unifiers. To the question of his potential for the highest office, he showed us once again that he is merely one of nature’s followers hoping to thrust himself into a leadership role that does not suit him.

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

DeSantis likes to present himself as a man eager for political combat. In a 2022 ad for reelection as governor, he dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to instruct fellow pilots: “Never, ever back down from a fight.” His super PAC is literally named “Never Back Down.” Yet in the fight immediately upon him, the fight against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, DeSantis always backs down. He may deal the occasional side insult in oblique, passive-aggressive language that does not mention Trump by name. He decries a “culture of losing” in the GOP, and maybe that’s supposed to imply that Trump did, in fact, lose the presidential election of 2020. But DeSantis does not dare say so explicitly—and it’s almost unimaginable that he’d ever have the nerve to say so to Trump’s face on a debate stage, assuming he ever had the nerve to share a debate stage with Trump at all.

“Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals,” I wrote here a year ago. “Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again.” DeSantis has rolled over so often for Trump that by now he qualifies for a job with Cirque du Soleil. Trump attacks, and DeSantis bleeds; Trump attacks again, and DeSantis bleeds some more. DeSantis is tough on gay school teachers, tough on Disney, but weak on foreign dictators and weak on Trump.

Bill Clinton used to say that “strong and wrong beats weak and right.” DeSantis already bet his political career on the hope that truculence and peevishness might be perceived as strength. That bet was proving a bad one even before his self-abasing announcement event. It looks even worse afterward.

[David Frum: Never again Trump]

Those of us who identify as Never Trump Republicans are sometimes challenged: Why don’t we  back DeSantis, the poll-leading alternative to Trump? One answer was to doubt that DeSantis ever presented much of an alternative. Back in 2021, a wealthy Floridian who had donated to DeSantis’s campaigns for governor cautioned me, “There are two kinds of people in politics: those who think DeSantis is a viable national candidate, and those who have met Ron DeSantis.”

Yet even assuming his viability, the question remains for us: What kind of alternative would DeSantis be? We did not want Trump’s abuse of power for selfish advantage replicated by a president who differed from Trump only by arriving at the office on time instead of watching television until 11 a.m. We did not want a more efficient use of nontransparency to conceal financial corruption. We did not want more strenuous disdain for allies—Ukraine today, who knows who else tomorrow? We did not want a more systematic and shrewd exploitation of tensions in American society, more deft manipulation of resentments along lines of race, faith, sex, region, and educational attainment.

Never Trump Republicans want a free-trade, free-market economic conservative. We want a Republican who upholds the rule of law, defends free institutions, and supports democracies under fire. We want honor, character, and largeness of spirit. Is that too much to ask from our former political home? And if so, why would we return to it?