DeSantis's Fascist-Style Macho Video
Another round of the White male extremist smackdown
"I will win and I will serve two terms," Florida Governor and GOP presidential contender Ron DeSantis declared in June, indicating his intention to bring about long-lasting change in America. "Why does he need eight years? Why should we wait eight years?" responded his rival for the nomination, former president Donald Trump. "I will get everything done in six months." Coming from an individual who staged a violent coup to stay in power illegally, this allusion to a Blitzkrieg of executive orders upon his return to the White House is alarming.
This exchange highlights the way the GOP race is shaping up as a race to the bottom, with the two leading candidates competing to be as lawless, domineering, and anti-democratic as possible.
This smackdown between two White male extremist brutes may seem entertaining to some. Yet as a scholar of strongmen and the destruction they cause to societies, I see this macho posturing about who can be more commanding and violent as dangerous in myriad ways.
As governor, DeSantis has a track record as an authoritarian who seeks to silence and intimidate anyone who does not conform to his fanatic agenda. "Florida is the place woke goes to die," he proclaims ceaselessly, relishing his power to "kill off" anything that bothers him —and sending armed extremists a message that violence against ideological enemies is not a bad thing.
It's hard to compete with Trump on that front, though. His multifaceted criminality is unparalleled among American political figures, as is his financial and other indebtedness to authoritarian regimes and the level of his thirst to have dictatorial powers.
Trump has made no secret of leadership model he'd like to bring to America: he recently praised the current rulers of China, Russia, and North Korea as "top of the line people at the top of their game" --that game being the ability to engage in corruption and mass repression with impunity.
Yet DeSantis is trying his best to seem more ferocious and right-wing than Trump: he uses violent speech daily, has intensified his campaigns of hate and suppression of intellectual freedom, and has doubled down on attempts to use social media and campaign ads to manufacture a personality cult.
“Vote for me because I am a violent homophobe," is the message of his latest video, which tries to replicate some of Trump's rogue glamour and uses Fascist-style devices to equate leadership with the power to harm your adversaries.
Fascist aesthetics work through contrasts: things are good or bad, black or white, and there is no room for nuance. This dictates the structure of the ad, which juxtaposes Trump as "soft" on LGBTQ issues and DeSantis as "hard." Although Trump banned transgender people from military service during his presidency, we see older footage of Trump expressing support for the LGBTQ community, and a clip of him as owner of the Miss Universe pageant saying he would allow transgender people to compete.
Then comes an aural and visual delirium designed to make DeSantis look like an alpha male, but --as usual with the governor's off-tone and "trying-too-hard" efforts--merely points up his insecurity about his masculine image.
As the author of a book on Fascist propaganda movies, I have viewed many Fascist fantasies in film form. The point of the images is to train viewers to see hatred and brute force as positive male attributes, and this is what the DeSantis ad does as well. The hammering music and quick pace are also familiar: they are meant to elicit strong emotions rather than give you time to think.
In the DeSantis ad, thumping thrusting beats are the background for a montage of images of "real men": handsome actors such as Brad Pitt playing rogue and lawless characters, bodybuilders, and clips of DeSantis doing "strongman things." "DeSantis Signs Draconian Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill into Law," one banner proudly reads.
Notably, there are no woman in the DeSantis portion of the video --but there are plenty of muscled bodies standing in for DeSantis's own, and comparisons of the governor to predators. There is a drawing of him as an alligator-type figure waiting to pounce in the water, his sharp teeth bared, and a banner that proclaims "a real wolf had finally arrived" (by that time, I was waiting for a shot of DeSantis wrestling with a wild animal, à la Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin).
In other words, DeSantis can only be an alpha male by associating his image with individuals or animals who are recognized publicly as “alphas.”. Sad!
More ominously, this twisted video presents DeSantis as worthy of your adulation as a politician and a man because he persecutes LGBTQ people. That's why even the Log Cabin Republicans denounced it as "divisive and desperate."
As Chris Hayes remarked on MSNBC, DeSantis' idea that beating Trump means convincing people "that you are even more of a callous psychopath than he is" is bizarre. It's also a symptom of how Trump and his radicalized GOP, which is complicit with his crimes and shares his taste for violence, have made the 2024 Republican presidential contest a race to the bottom.
The next round of the White male extremist smackdown will surely come soon. But the real winner here is Trump. By spawning creations such as DeSantis, who believes that out-Trumping Trump is the path to victory, Trump has multiplied his powers and ensured the longevity of his brute-force brand.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat - in the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt said it all. We’re here, or there. The danger is rising. Anne Frank left her diary. What will we leave?
The DeSantis video was so absurd and over the top that it seems like a parody of itself, DeSantis intespersed with shots of oiled muscle men and Christian Bale from "American Psycho?" Really? Who is he trying to reach, other psychopaths? The INCEL vote? Wuh? Adolescent boys are too young to vote the last time I checked.
Pete Buttigieg put it best: "“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders, and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again, who are you trying to help?”