Some thoughts on Ron DeSantis's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2011 book, Dreams from Our Founding Fathers
Some thoughts on Ron DeSantis's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2011 book, Dreams from Our Founding Fathers
We now have an official date and time for my zoom conversation with Thomas Zimmer that I previewed in my most recent newsletter. It’ll be next Tuesday night, July 25, at 6pm Pacific time (9pm Eastern). I’ll send the zoom link out to paid subscribers on Tuesday morning. If you’re not a paying subscriber and want to come chat about DeSantis’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book, then just email me at scotlar@willamette.edu and I’ll send you the link.
Thomas and I will briefly introduce the book, but we won’t go on too long about it because a) Thomas has written up this excellent analysis of BOTH of DeSantis’s books that we’ll take as read (I mean, we’re both professors, so how can there not be assigned reading?) and b) I’ve included my own brief assessment of the text below. This is my first time doing one of these zoom things, so we’ll see how it goes. My intention is for this to be more of a free flowing conversation than a presentation by Thomas and I, with lots of time for questions/comments from the audience.
The back story as to why Thomas and I read this book.
About 8 months ago I had the cockamamie idea to submit a panel proposal on DeSantis’s 2011 book for a historians’ conference. It was accepted, and last weekend our panel convened at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic conference in Philadelphia. There were about 70 people in the audience and the panel (with presentations by me, Thomas, Joanne Freeman, Lindsay Chervinsky, and Sean Adams) was well received. We got tons of great questions/comments and there were many hands still up when time ran out—always a good sign. Even though DeSantis’s book is lacking in many ways, it’s a fruitful jumping off point for talking about the intersection of history and politics in our contemporary moment.
A slightly edited version of the comments I made in Philadelphia this past weekend
It is admittedly a little unusual to have a panel discussion about Florida’s current governor at a conference devoted to the History of the Early American Republic (i.e. the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War); but there are two reasons why this seems like an worthwhile thing to do. First, in 2010 a 32 year old Ron DeSantis wrote a 300-page book called Dreams from our Founding Fathers that offered fairly extensive glosses on the ideology of the founders and the original meaning of the Constitution they produced. It’s rare to have a candidate for President who left behind such an extensive, unfiltered statement of their political commitments and their understanding of US history. Given that Gov. DeSantis is likely to be a major political figure for decades to come, who better to discuss his historical interpretations of the founding than professional historians of the founding?
Second, Gov. DeSantis has made reforming history education in Florida (and higher education in general) a top priority–part of his “war on woke” branding–and these very bold and aggressive initiatives will undoubtedly be part of his national campaign as well. Given that the audience was comprised of professional historians who all have an investment in how the public and rising generations of American students learn about the nation’s history, it seemed worthwhile to equip them with as full and accurate an understanding as possible of how Ron DeSantis’s vision of the nation’s past informs his political project.
One of the foundational premises of DeSantis’s book is that Barack Obama was a fairly unknown figure who hadn’t really been scrutinized by the media. DeSantis develops this, shall we say, empirically-challenged claim by breathlessly rehashing all of the right wing talking points that had been ubiquitous since 2007–about Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright and Obama’s radical Kenyan Marxist father–all serving as evidence for his argument that the leftist controlled media was hiding the truth about what a founder-hating, radical leftist collectivist socialist [insert your favorite additional Fox News epithet here] Obama was. Whereas Ron DeSantis’s book invented a largely mythological vision of Barack Obama based on cherry picked and poorly analyzed examples from Obama’s past that caricatured what he actually did or said, in our panel we set out to do what one would have expected a Yale undergraduate history major and Harvard Law School grad like DeSantis to have done–that is, provide an accurate account of our subject at hand based on what he has actually done and said. [Note: if you’re interested in reading an insightful analysis of Obama’s political worldview written by one of the nation’s best intellectual historians, I highly recommend James Kloppenberg’s book Reading Obama.]
There are many reasons not to read DeSantis’s 2010 book. It’s poorly written and argued. It’s filled with many misinformed, inaccurate, and tendentious claims about the founding era as well as American politics ca. 2008-10. Very few people actually read it at the time. The self-published book does not seem to have gone through any sort of meaningful editorial or peer review process. DeSantis’s Tea Party-inflected reading of the founders is what you’d expect from someone socialized into the libertarian far right in the early 2000s, and his take on the politics of the Obama era departs little from what you would have heard from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Fox News at the time. The book is provincial, predictable, angry, and repetitive, utterly lacking in nuance or self-awareness. And it goes on like that for 300 pages with only a few notable exceptions. I will give him points, however, for having the self-discipline to sit his butt in a chair and churn out 300-pages of prose.
With all that said, I still think it’s a book worth knowing about. I have little doubt that the words in this book are Desantis’s and his alone. He wrote it over the span of several months in 2010 when he was preparing to run for Congress for the first time in 2012. This is not a polished, ghostwritten, poll-tested book like most books by established politicians. In 2010 DeSantis was five years out of Harvard Law, done with his time as a Navy lawyer, newly married, and looking toward the next thing. He was a nobody who was trying to become a somebody, and this book was intended to serve as his calling card. DeSantis hawked copies of his book at the 2011-12 Tea Party gatherings where he cut his political teeth, and he used it as a calling card with the Club for Growth crowd and other DC-based right wing donors who generously funded his first campaigns. The book offers us a fairly unfiltered window into DeSantis’s political ideology, his understanding of the Constitution, and his vision for how the American past should inform how we move into the future. When a major public figure produces such a self-revealing text, we’d be foolish not to mine it for any insights we can.
The argument and structure of the book is fairly straightforward–everything Obama was doing in 2009-10 was wrong because the founders (understood in this case to be a homogenous blob of people who all thought the same way) say so. It’s an argument from history, but a very static and simplistic vision of history in which there are basically only two moments in US history that matter, the late 1780s and the late 2000s. The thesis, in DeSantis’s words goes like this: “As we will see, Obama has, in a number of different contexts, failed to keep faith with the Founding Fathers and the principles that they espoused, but, given his political socialization, this should not be too surprising. He never had faith in their beliefs and principles in the first place.”
This book is like the Federalist papers in a few ways. First, it is not so much a systematic statement of principle as it is a lawyerly brief for a concrete political project–in DeSantis’s case, defeating Obamacare and the broader Obama agenda, as opposed to the Federalist’s project of getting the Constitution ratified. And also like the Federalist papers, the political project this book takes on is a fairly unpopular one. The case has to be made, because the cause is fragile and appears on the verge of failing. Indeed, the final paragraph of the book cites Hamilton in Federalist #1, claiming that the upcoming election of 2012 will be one of those moments in history, like the ratification debates, where if the wrong decision is made, it will “deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”
A third way in which DeSantis’s book is like the Federalist Papers is that, like Madison, DeSantis looks back to history to find supposedly timeless and universal laws of politics that we should abide by in our present. Flattening time like that and using centuries-old sources as guides to the present was a common practice in the late 18th century when Madison did it, but a decidedly less common practice amongst historians at least for the past century or so. To put this another way, DeSantis’s conception of how arguments from history work would appear wildly anachronistic to most people familiar with the methodologies of the modern historical discipline as it has existed for the past century.
The ideology of the founding, as presented by DeSantis in this book, is, conveniently enough, virtually identical to the radically anti-government libertarianism that informed the Tea Party era Freedom Caucus which DeSantis joined as soon as he entered Congress in 2013. The book starts from the assumption that the only mechanism capable of managing the complexity of the modern world is the unregulated free market. What DeSantis calls “leftism” or “collectivism” (which seems to be the same as “socialism”) is the enemy stalking through this book. A more charitable interpreter might refer to that “enemy” as the network of public institutions other than churches and courts that our society has developed since 1789 to help further “the general welfare” and bring about a greater degree of fairness and justice in a complex modern world marked by an array of historically-rooted, structural inequalities. DeSantis, of course, dismisses that “general welfare” clause and regards it as a throw away line in the Constitution that “progressives” have used like a trojan horse to insert elements of un-American pinko collectivism into a political system that was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, a very light smattering of governance layered upon a society where complete freedom of action is taken to be the natural and normal state of affairs. He treats any tradition apart from the radically libertarian tradition he endorses in this book not as alternative threads in our national conversation to be critically engaged with, but rather as alien impositions that must be utterly destroyed.
DeSantis, the self-avowed lover of freedom, never engages the question of who exactly was free to act in an entirely ungoverned way in that idyllic founding moment–i.e. the approximately 20% of the population who were adult, white, property owning, men. The book barely mentions slavery (and when it does it describes the ⅗ compromise as a straightforward win for the anti-slavery side) and makes no mention of women, Native Americans, or white men excluded from the vote due to property restrictions. DeSantis of course does not explicitly endorse the exclusionary features of the founding era, he just breezily dismisses them as things the great, universal principles of the Constitution would presumably remedy in good time. Because according to the DeSantis we encounter in this book, there are apparently no existing social disparities in the US ca. 2010 that require discussion, let alone redress. When one defines “history” as what happened between 1787-9 and then what’s happening in 2010, one needn’t address thorny questions about how the US came to extend beyond the Appalachians, how it developed into one of the world’s wealthiest and most militarily powerful nations, why it was that the approximately century-long Jim Crow era followed the end of Reconstruction, why there were four times as many enslaved people in 1860 as there were at the time the supposedly anti-slavery Constitution was ratified, and so on and so on. All we need to know is that America’s founding principles are great and true because they unleashed the free energies of untrammeled Americans to create centuries of greatness, but sadly, this greatness is at risk of being strangled to death in the next few years by the un-American intrusions of Obama’s outlandish, un-American, and blinkered leftist ideology that seemingly came out of nowhere and is totally un-American despite the fact that he won the popular vote overwhelmingly and was a fairly popular and respected public figure. This 2010 book is a useful reminder that long before our present moment, many people (like DeSantis’s imagined readers) lived in a bizarro alternative reality carefully curated by the right wing media ecosystem which followed its own illogical logic.
One notable moment when DeSantis surprised me in this book is when he argues against the Supreme Court’s monopoly on determining the constitutionality of laws. [It would be interesting to know if he still dislikes SCOTUS’s monopoly on judicial review given the 6-3 conservative majority that now prevails.] His argument feels a bit like Larry Kramer’s idea of popular constitutionalism, but DeSantis never specifies how he sees people other than the Supreme Court justices actually participating in the process of constitutional review. His opposition to judicial review seems to stem entirely from his very 2010-specific anger about John Roberts’ decision to allow what DeSantis considered to be the obviously unconstitutional Obamacare to survive SCOTUS scrutiny. The most charitable reading of DeSantis’s vision of popular constitutionalism is that it is a celebration of the right of citizens and elected officials to make strong claims about what is and isn’t constitutional, but he considers this to be a legitimate political move only when ordinary citizens are saying no to things that federal legislators want to do. Democratic people power, something Tea Partier DeSantis enthusiastically endorsed, is always only negating in form, never constitutive. When DeSantis shows us liberals arguing for the constitutionality of Obamacare, he simply dismisses those claims out of hand. The Constitution, as he sees it, is a salubrious roadblock in the way of any sort of progressive change, or as he would call it, redistributive collectivism. Thus, it’s unsurprising that DeSantis’s vision of US history (as portrayed in this book) contains no women, no people of color, and the closest we get to hearing the voice of a poor or middling person is Alexander Hamilton. In a weird sort of way, DeSantis has ended up presenting a founding bunch who Charles Beard would have recognized, though the valence is reversed.
What most stands out to me, reading this book 13 years later when the “post-liberal” right has blossomed, is how precociously Schmittian this book is. By Schmittian I mean reminiscent of the work of early 20th century German political philosopher Carl Schmitt who saw the “friend-enemy” distinction as a foundational element of political life. We see this Schmittian view in the way DeSantis discusses his opponents. He shamelessly red baits Obama’s mother. He makes frequent reference to Obama’s father’s anti-colonial politics to imply that his son, who he had little contact with, had inherited his father’s Marxism and his hatred of America. DeSantis implies that since Obama was born to such supposedly un-American parents, therefore Obama must be un-American too. DeSantis even red baits Obama’s white, Kansan, normie American grandparents—noting that the Unitarian Church to which they belonged was often referred to as “the little red church on the hill.” I must admit that this line made me laugh out loud, though I was laughing at, not with the author. The book panders to the racism and Islamophobia of the Tea Party movement, while also angrily denouncing the “elitists” in the media who would say that racism or xenophobia had anything to do with the Tea Party. This is a deeply angry and divisive book that projects all of that anger and divisiveness on to the figure of a dangerously un-American Black man named Barack Hussein Obama.
Though this book was written before Trump was even a glimmer in the eye of Republican primary voters, the Schmittian nature of the book makes it feel of a piece with the illiberal (or post-liberal) political culture of the MAGA era. While Trump claims credit for making Ron DeSantis who he is today, we could just as easily say that Ron DeSantis’s 2010 book gave voice to the political energies that made the rise of a political figure like Trump possible in the first place. That this figure would end up inspiring an insurrection to take down the Constitutional edifice constructed by those Founders who DeSantis so adored, is an irony to be contemplated, and hopefully not a tragedy with future manifestations to be lamented.