Nate Monroe: Hi America, now Ron DeSantis is your problem, too

COMMENTARY | In Ron DeSantis' Florida, lawmakers want to make it easier to sue journalists for defamation while making it harder for them to collect basic factual information, like the physical location of the governor, who is applying to lead the state's universities, and key records showing how public policy is shaped and why.

In the Free state of Florida, the governor needs not one police force to command but three — a state police, an elections force, and a more abstract state military with a proposed $100 million budget for planes, helicopters and vendor contracts for technology to crack into smart phones.

In DeSantis' Florida, the government closest to the people knows best — until it doesn't. And parents know best, except when they don't. And teachers know best ... unless they run afoul of vague statutes and the moral judgments of hysterical activists. Speech is free as long as it's carefully tailored to avoid offending white people, and books aren't "banned" — they're just mysteriously missing from the library. Protecting children is paramount, except for the most vulnerable among them, who are to be demonized.

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In DeSantistan, competent and efficient government means de-professionalizing it, staffing key jobs with unqualified sycophants, loons and politicians — and then grossly overpaying them — while destroying a system of tenure that is critical to maintaining the academic freedom necessary for researchers and professors to do their jobs. "Education policy" means designing new ways to shove untold millions in public wealth into private pockets, subsidizing real-estate deals, and hooking up friends with pricey vendor contracts.

In DeSantis' Florida, long-standing nonpartisan institutions, like school boards, should be politicized, and decisions made by local voters are subject to gubernatorial veto — unreviewable by the courts.

In the Sunshine State, adherence to the rule of law and reverence for the U.S. Constitution are expressed by ignoring existing laws and passing sloppy, blatantly unconstitutional ones that federal judges, at great cost to Florida taxpayers, must later clean up.

"Serving as governor" means running for president, and "addressing issues critical to Floridians" means advocating divisive, performative claptrap while the property insurance market collapses, red tide poisons the water and the air, and hundreds of thousands of actual Floridians lose access to basic healthcare. Responsive government means being decidedly unresponsive.

In DeSantis' Florida, the right of private electric companies to pay dividends to shareholders is sacrosanct, but the ability of municipally owned utilities to help fund public services is suspect. Legal protections for car dealerships are prized over consumer choice. Landlords dominate tenants. A moral stand against "woke banks" just so happened to benefit an important corporate donor.

These are the conditions on the ground in DeSantis' Florida. A through line of all this has been the accumulation of power into the governor's hands: jobs that were once the explicit province of the state Legislature, like redistricting, were snatched away, with the Legislature's consent, and are now part of the widening portfolio of the executive branch. The shattering of independence in higher education, the crackup of home rule, the proliferation and militarization of state police organizations, the delegitimization of the Cabinet, the push to make school board races partisan — all of it centers power in a single elected official. Dissent is still allowed but, if DeSantis gets his way, will exact a high price from the dissenter, more than many will be willing to bear.

DeSantis' zeal for inflaming division often obscures another narrative consistency: that all this culture war posturing is good business for his friends and his donors, that the vast state bureaucracy can be turned into a fat grab bag of sugar plums. And it is just that: posturing.

During his nascent and thus-far disastrous presidential campaign, DeSantis' rather flexible worldview has been exposed: Ukraine is a "territorial dispute" until his own words get him in trouble. Abortion? Muddled. Social Security and Medicare? U.S. Rep. DeSantis and Gov. DeSantis need to sort some things out.

But what will always be true is what's good for Ron DeSantis will be exactly where Ron DeSantis ultimately lands. This self-centeredness is one of his essential aspects. Its legacy is a state more expensive to live in than almost any other, where millions of poor residents are treated with punishing frugality, and wealthy ones are catered to with shameful obedience, where ecological disasters linger — always reacted to rather than proacted against. It's a state less happy and more divided, more suspicious and less forgiving, where the sun seems to be setting rather than rising.

Pay attention, America: DeSantis is now your problem, too.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Eyeing White House, DeSantis accumulates power in Florida | Nate Monroe