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A lot of the comparisons between Trump and DeSantis seem to rely on there being a consequential difference between them in power. I don't think that assumption is valid.
You can run a very explicit culture war campaign and 'actually do things' like DeSantis has done in Florida without doing anything of consequence in other areas. For instance, you can run a very traditional Zionist Heritage Foundation approved government that does nothing of value with regards to immigration and foreign policy and merely acts out on random anti-trans rhetoric. Can you imagine trans people not being allowed in womens sports and bathrooms? You can waste a year at least on just that and the only practical real world impact is an enraged left. Otherwise the decline can proceed as normal.
Trump did much less than that in 4 years and his supporters still adore him. Why do anything different? Pardon my cynicism but, is it for real now? Do we really believe? Are we fighting for real change this time?
3/3 good supreme court picks. Tax reform that hit one of the biggest left wing tax loopholes (SALT). Operation Warp Speed. Making the left and establishment right show their true colors.
I favor DeSantis, but lets not pretend Trump wasn't a great revolutionary president.
And nothing done about immigration, his biggest promise. I don't think it counts for all that much to make the establishment right show their 'true colors' just before you join them. Does anyone love Israel more than Trump? By the same token I don't think you can make much hay about his SC picks, given they are all basic establishment right shoe-ins. Trump had his chance with leveraging his wall funding with the government shutdowns. He caved and in return the US still has infinite illegal immigration.
If we go by rhetoric alone, he was the Che Guevera of US politics. By action? It was business as usual. Along with record low black unemployment numbers...
"Didn't accomplish X specific goal" != "waste a year at least on just that and the only practical real world impact is an enraged left".
The net result is the public has seen this, and Republicans have become better for it. Post-Trump DeSantis >> pre-Trump DeSantis, for example.
Trump never campaigned on being the white nationalist/antisemitic president you seem to wish he was. A reminder of his campaign:
https://twt-thumbs.washtimes.com/media/image/2016/11/01/Trump_c0-40-960-599_s885x516.jpg?f06bd400542c7f2dbc12a384be529bf86e07a1aa
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.-_pm4l4mJKmt7kRHb0Y0dwHaJz?pid=ImgDet&rs=1
This is a bad strawman, but a worse argument. Halting immigration is a goal in and of itself. With obvious 'practical' impact. The fact it would allegedly 'enrage the left' is irrelevant.
The public has seen what? Republicans, outside of the most inane culture war rhetoric, are still the party of big business and Israel.
I never said he did. He did, however, campaign on BUILDING A WALL and DEPORTING ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. Maybe you missed it.
And he did more or less everything he could to accomplish this but failed to defeat the deep state. The courts shut down basically everything he did. In contrast, remember Bush teaming up with Pelosi to pass amnesty?
I do not dispute that Trump failed in this goal. I dispute that Trump was "business as usual."
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Desantis showed willingness to attack the actual centers of power currently occupied by leftists.
He went directly after DEI programs in the colleges and the Universities in his state.
And they signaled that they're going to comply.
It seems like he understands the nature and magnitude of the problem and the places where pressure needs to be applied in order to even begin to unwind the Gordian knot of special interests, diversity hires, grifters, and activists that act as the ground troops for the Cathedral.
Of course this all hinges on whether you believe it is possible to reverse the decline or if the only way out is through, but nobody ever said you have to buy into the hope in order to cast a vote for hope.
And Trump went after 'Sanctuary Cities' or whatever. Which ultimately amounted to very little since the root cause wasn't the cities, they were just a symptom. Very similar to the situation in academia. I mean, how did a 'Sanctuary City' come to be? Extremely lax immigration laws/enforcement? How did 'leftist' academia come to be? E.O. Wilson had a choice remark with regards to that:
Lewontin becoming one of the prime figures in the fraudulent Boasian anthropology cult that reigns supreme in every major institution in the western world to this day.
In essence, 'academic freedom' is worth about as much as a 'closed border' with an open gate. The decline is not irreversible, but reversing back to an earlier point of decline won't do much to prevent one from sliding down again.
Academia ultimately is the root cause though, at least from a practical perspective and not counting abstract social forces.
You can have perfectly fine academic institutions that are not bloated with useless crap. My point is that these institutions in the west became bloated precisely because of the kind of attitude is being expressed by the DeSantis 'attack' on colleges and universities in Florida. The root cause is not academia in and of itself. It's instead whatever process that bloats it.
What bloats it is part of academia. It's coming from inside the ivory tower. Before it got bloated, this tendency was kept in check by external forces (e.g. not enough resources to waste on it) which are now gone.
We keep returning to 'academia' as a current thing. Sure, current academia suffers from all the ills. My point is that an academic institution doesn't have to. To point at current academia and say that it had to become this way because it did is not very pertinent. Stricter oversight over what can be taught, rather than promises of more 'academic freedom' would be a step in the right direction, which is the opposite of the DeSantis rhetoric. Which at best deflates a small part of academia without removing its ability to inflate itself again.
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