Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” illustrates his success transforming the Republican Party’s vision, from limiting government’s reach in American lives to expanding it so broadly that even school boards become political battlegrounds.
(Bloomberg) — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” illustrates his success transforming the Republican Party’s vision, from limiting government’s reach in American lives to expanding it so broadly that even school boards become political battlegrounds.
But readers curious about the man expected to try to dethrone former President Donald Trump as the GOP’s standard-bearer will find little insight in his roughly 250-page book, which is light on details about his upbringing, family or life before politics. It also offers little criticism of Trump, and DeSantis does not hint at a 2024 presidential run.
Instead, the book is a call-to-arms for Republicans to involve themselves deeply in every level of government, to ensure that US policy — and daily life — reflect conservative ideology. DeSantis makes plain his disdain for what he calls “the Woke,” legacy media, “socialist” Democrats, technology companies and efforts by corporations to diversify their executive ranks, or adopt environmental, social and governance standards.
“Reining in Big Tech, enforcing antitrust laws, prohibiting discriminatory job training, and crippling the ESG movement are all ways in which the political branches can protect individual freedom from stridently ideological private actors,” he writes in a chapter about power and the Constitution.
The book serves as a road map for what could become DeSantis’s 2024 campaign platform. Though he has yet to declare a bid for the presidency, he has spent the last several weeks hiring campaign staff, wooing donors and traveling the country to set himself up for a run.
The Republican Party finds itself at a crossroads, as it tries to sort out whether its voters are ready for a new leader. DeSantis, 44, presents himself as the next generation, compared to Trump, 76, and President Joe Biden, 80.
‘World Gone Mad’
The Florida governor claims to be an internationally recognized example of leadership “in a world gone mad.” He portrays himself as a fierce opponent of Covid-19-era public health mandates, even though he adopted some of them for his own state.
He calls for Republicans to involve themselves much more in education, down to grade-school curriculum, as he has in Florida. A law DeSantis pushed, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics, bars instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation before the fourth grade.
He also advocates punishing corporations that defy conservative ideology, as he has the Walt Disney Co. — a firm integral to the state’s economy that has nonetheless seen its special tax status come under assault by DeSantis and his allies after publicly opposing his education agenda. He says the government should monitor investment of public funds by financial firms to make sure cash isn’t steered toward companies that seek to fight climate change or pursue other environmental initiatives.
Early in the book, DeSantis rails against “elites” in universities, government, the media and other institutions who he says are out of touch with ordinary Americans. He describes his own degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School as “political scarlet letters.”
But there’s little revealing about DeSantis, the person. There’s not much about his family, save for brief, adoring mentions of his wife, Casey DeSantis, and their three young children. There are just a few words about his parents and grandparents and no mention of his sister’s 2015 death. Friends are mostly unnamed.
He does not discuss the year he spent teaching at a boarding school, where the New York Times reported that DeSantis was a popular instructor who demonstrated his deeply conservative views in debates with students.
He also doesn’t touch on his work as a Navy lawyer at the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Drive For Power
In many ways, “Courage” is a sequel to “Dreams of our Founding Fathers,” DeSantis’s 2011 rebuke to former President Barack Obama’s book of a similar name. In that treatise, DeSantis portrays Obama as dangerously seeking to mold the US constitution around a far-left, if not socialist, agenda.
The new book describes how DeSantis set out to amass the most power possible from the governor’s mansion. One of his first actions was to draw up a list of all the powers legally invested in the governor.
“I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available,” he writes.
The legislature was clearly in GOP hands, he said, but the courts were an obstacle. DeSantis viewed the Florida Supreme Court as pursuing an “unpopular” socialist agenda and effectively vetoing legislation rather than staying in its judicial lane.
After the terms of three liberal justices ended, DeSantis replaced them with conservative allies.
He was careful with his own staffing hires, wary of insiders more loyal to the Tallahassee, Florida, “swamp” than to him. He prized personal loyalty above all else, he writes: “I did not need staff to tell me what to do. What I needed was staff to implement our vision.”
Nowhere in “Courage” does DeSantis criticize the man he’d likely face in a presidential primary showdown: His long-time mentor and political patron, Trump.
DeSantis praises the former president for winning the 2016 race when few thought he would and compliments Trump for keeping campaign promises, including moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Yet he tries to draw a contrast on Covid, insisting that it was the Trump administration — not the Florida governor — that recommended shutting schools and businesses at the pandemic’s outset. DeSantis, in his telling, resisted such mandates and tried to keep the state open.
Trump has attacked DeSantis’s response to Covid, trying to address his own vulnerability on the issue as conservatives increasingly turn against nearly all public health measures to control the virus, including the vaccines the former president championed.
Trump often says that DeSantis “would be dead in politics” and never would have been elected governor without his endorsement. But DeSantis downplays the significance of Trump’s backing in his book, saying it was just “one way for me to enhance my name recognition” and provide him “exposure to GOP primary voters.”
–With assistance from Christian Hall.
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