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    Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism

    It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials.In the House, Republicans recently chose a new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, who not only endorsed the attempted overturning of the 2020 election but also helped to devise the rationale behind it.We shouldn’t grow complacent about just how dangerous it all is — and how much more dangerous it could become. The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.That makes this a crucial time to familiarize ourselves with and begin formulating a response to these ideas. If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.The Claremont CatastrophistsProbably the best-known faction of catastrophists and the one with the most direct connection to Republican politics is led by Michael Anton and others with ties to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California. Mr. Anton’s notorious Claremont Review of Books essay in September 2016 called the contest between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” Mr. Anton, who would go on to serve as a National Security Council official in the Trump administration, insisted the choice facing Republicans, like the passengers on the jet hijacked by terrorists intent on self-immolation in a suicide attack on the White House or the Capitol on Sept. 11, was to “charge the cockpit or you die.” (For a few months in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Anton was my boss in the communications office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and we have engaged in spirited debates over the years.)Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.After leaving the Trump White House, Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”America faced a choice: Either Mr. Trump would prevail in his bid for re-election or America was doomed.John Eastman, a conservative lawyer also at the Claremont Institute, agreed. That is why, after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mr. Eastman set about taking the lead in convincing Mr. Trump that there was a way for him to remain in power, if only Vice President Mike Pence treated his ceremonial role in certifying election results as a vastly broader power to delay certification.Despite legal troubles related to the efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Eastman’s attitude hasn’t changed. In a conversation this summer with Thomas Klingenstein, a leading funder of the Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman explained why he thought such unprecedented moves were justified.The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.That’s how, in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.In this conversation, Mr. Anton and Mr. Yarvin swapped ideas about how this theocratic oligarchy might be overthrown. It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.A year ago, Mr. Anton revisited the topic of “the perils and possibilities of Caesarism” on “The Matthew Peterson Show” with several other intellectual catastrophists with ties to the Claremont Institute. (Another panelist on the online show, Charles Haywood, a wealthy former businessman, used the term “Red Caesar,” referring to the color associated with the G.O.P., in a 2021 blog post about Mr. Anton’s second book.)On the Peterson show, Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.” (He also said that he would lament the United States coming to these circumstances because he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)The Christian Reverse RevolutionariesThose on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny. Establishing the validity of that parallel is the main point of the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” (The title is drawn from the writings of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)But Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.” (Mr. Deneen and I worked together professionally at several points over the past two decades, and Mr. Dreher and I have been friends for even longer.)Mr. Deneen’s previous book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” was praised by writers across the political spectrum, including former President Barack Obama, for helping readers understand the appeal of the harder-edged populist conservatism that took control of the Republican Party in 2016. “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.The book opens with a tableau of a decaying country with declining economic prospects, blighted cities, collapsing birthrates, drug addiction and widespread suicidal despair. The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.Mr. Deneen is inconsistent in laying out how postliberal voters should achieve the overthrow of this progressive tyranny. In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace it. They include relocating executive branch departments of the federal government to cities around the country and the establishment of nationwide vocational programs.But in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity. He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.Despite that shift in content and tone, Mr. Deneen has been embraced by many New Right conservatives and G.O.P. politicians like Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Senator Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff has called him “one of the important people thinking about why we are in the moment we are in right now.”Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.The Bronze Age Pervert and the Nietzschean FringeFarther out on the right’s political and philosophical extremes there’s Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us. Mr. Trump, Mr. Alamariu believes, has pointed us in the right direction. But the former president is only the beginning, he writes. “Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”It’s hard to know how seriously to take all of this. Mr. Alamariu, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, writes in such a cartoonish way and laces his outrageous pronouncements with so much irony and humor, not to mention deliberate spelling and syntax errors, that he often seems to be playing a joke on his reader.But that doesn’t mean influential figures on the right aren’t taking him seriously. Nate Hochman, who was let go by the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida after sharing on social media a video containing a Nazi symbol, told The New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset.’”Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.Combating the CatastrophistsSome will undoubtedly suggest we shouldn’t be unduly alarmed about such trends. These are just a handful of obscure writers talking to one another, very far removed from the concerns of Republican officeholders and rank-and-file voters.But such complacency follows from a misunderstanding of the role of intellectuals in radical political movements. These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?” Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.Yes, our politics is increasingly turbulent. Yet the country endured far worse turmoil just over a half-century ago — political assassinations, huge protests, riots, hundreds of bombings, often carried out by left-wing terrorists — without dispensing with democracy or looking to a Caesar as a savior.The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.None of which is meant to imply that liberalism is flawless or that it doesn’t deserve criticism. But the proper arena in which to take advantage of liberalism’s protean character — its historical flexibility in response to cultural, social and economic changes over time — remains ordinary democratic politics, in which clashing parties compete for support and accept the outcome of free and fair elections.Those on different sides of these conflicts need to be willing to accept the possibility of losing. That’s the democratic deal: No election is ever the final election.In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes From the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the department of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Ron DeSantis, su educación y campaña política

    El gobernador de Florida solía enfatizar su educación en Yale y Harvard, escuelas de élite. Ahora, como aspirante presidencial republicano, la utiliza para azuzar las guerras culturales. Esto halló un análisis del Times.El gobernador de Florida, Ron DeSantis, busca la nominación a la candidatura presidencial republicana y ha ido moldeando su campaña y su personaje político en torno a una guerra contra la supuesta clase dirigente del país: una élite incompetente e irresponsable de burócratas, periodistas, educadores y otros “expertos” cuya autoridad perniciosa e inmerecida ha jurado derrotar. A pesar de sus dificultades en la campaña electoral, DeSantis se ha convertido en el líder de una nueva vanguardia conservadora que ve las escuelas y universidades públicas como el principal campo de batalla de las guerras culturales y sus políticas educativas en Florida como un modelo para los estados republicanos de todo el país.Sin embargo, la clase dirigente que DeSantis critica es la misma a la que pertenece. Se educó en las escuelas de Derecho de las universidades de Yale y Harvard, pasó los primeros años de su edad adulta subiendo como la espuma en la élite estadounidense. Un análisis de The New York Times revela el modo en que DeSantis, aunque se sentía genuinamente decepcionado por su paso por las instituciones de élite, también fue muy astuto a la hora de entender cómo podía sacarles provecho. Ahora ofrece al electorado una historia revisionista de sus propios encuentros con la clase dirigente para reforzar sus argumentos a favor de desbancarla y de rehacer la educación pública misma.A continuación, las cinco conclusiones de nuestro artículo de The New York Times.Se benefició de recibir una educación de éliteDurante su campaña, DeSantis suele describir sus años en las escuelas de Derecho de Yale y Harvard como un periodo detrás de las filas enemigas y describe ambas instituciones como lugares donde los estudiantes y los profesores eran antiestadounideses. Pero su experiencia general fue más variada de lo que reconoce.En Yale, formó parte de St. Elmo, una de las “sociedades secretas” de la escuela, conocida históricamente por ser semillero de futuros senadores y presidentes. Aunque, según él, Harvard estaba dominada por los “estudios jurídicos críticos” de izquierdas, la doctrina estaba en decadencia cuando él llegó y la escuela le proporcionó acceso a los intermediarios del poder de la conservadora Sociedad Federalista.Cuando ingresó en la política, su currículo de élite lo ayudó a atraer a donantes adinerados, recaudar fondos y conseguir contactos con republicanos importantes. Como reconoció en una mesa redonda en Cambridge, Massachusetts, poco antes de presentarse por primera vez a la gobernación: “Harvard les abre muchas puertas” a los aspirantes a políticos.Sus hermanos de fraternidad recordaron rituales de novatadas y una temprana comodidad con el poderHaciendo eco del propio relato de DeSantis sobre el choque cultural en Yale, algunos antiguos compañeros de clase contaron que el futuro gobernador, procedente de Dunedin, ciudad suburbana de clase media en la costa del Golfo, quedó perplejo y muy pronto se sintió ajeno al campus de Yale, más cosmopolita y diverso que su comunidad.Encontró a su tribu en el equipo de béisbol y en la fraternidad Delta Kappa Epsilon, donde participó en los brutales rituales de novatadas del grupo, un ejemplo temprano, en opinión de algunos antiguos hermanos de fraternidad, de su comodidad con el poder y la intimidación.En una ocasión, DeSantis y otros hermanos hicieron una broma en la que había que poner en marcha una licuadora entre las piernas de un novato con los ojos vendados. Durante la “semana infernal” de la fraternidad, que se llevaba a cabo en invierno, DeSantis obligó a un aspirante a llevar un pantalón de béisbol sin la parte trasera y los muslos, dejando al descubierto nalgas y genitales, según declararon antiguos hermanos y novatos. DeSantis negó estas versiones a través de su vocero, quien las calificó de “afirmaciones ridículas y completamente falsas”.DeSantis llegó tarde a las guerras culturalesEn la actualidad, no se puede dejar de asociar a DeSantis con políticas que se enfrentan a lo que él considera ideología de izquierdas en las escuelas y universidades públicas de Florida. Estos son algunos ejemplos: su intervención en la escuela de artes liberales New College; las iniciativas que facilitan a los padres cuestionar los libros disponibles en las escuelas primarias y secundarias; una ley que prohíbe hablar en clase sobre orientación sexual e identidad de género de formas que no se consideren “adecuadas para la edad”, así como las prohibiciones contra la enseñanza de ideas como el “racismo sistémico” en las cátedras principales de las universidades públicas.Sin embargo, según averiguó el Times, su ascenso hasta ubicarse como el principal guerrero cultural de su partido no estuvo predeterminado. Durante gran parte de su carrera política, incluidos sus primeros años como gobernador de Florida, no se le identificaba como interesado en la política educativa ni en los debates sobre raza y género (cuando un legislador de Florida propuso por primera vez abolir por completo el New College, la universidad de artes liberales que ofrece una experiencia educativa de excelencia a precios de institución pública, DeSantis respondió: “¿Qué es el New College?”).Tuvo que pasar la pandemia de coronavirus (y las reacciones contra los mandatos de mascarillas, los cierres de escuelas y la difusión de planes de estudios “antirracistas” y de “equidad”) para que DeSantis se diera cuenta del poder político de los temas educativos y consolidara su desconfianza hacia los expertos académicos y científicos.Encontró una causa común con un nuevo grupo de académicos conservadoresMientras luchaba contra la teoría crítica de la raza y las élites burocráticas, DeSantis se vinculó con un movimiento creciente de académicos y activistas conservadores fuera de Florida, en particular en el Hillsdale College de Míchigan y el Claremont Institute de California.Hace poco, en un retiro de donantes, DeSantis incluyó un panel de Claremont destinado a “definir el ‘régimen’ que nos gobierna con ilegalidad” y exponer una estrategia para “hacer que los estados sean más autónomos del régimen woke al librarse de los intereses de izquierda”, según correos electrónicos de planificación obtenidos por el Times.En un informe en el que se pedía que Florida aboliera los programas de diversidad, uno de los expertos —que en 2021 argumentó en un discurso que el feminismo vuelve a las mujeres “más medicadas, entrometidas y pendencieras”— instaba a DeSantis a “ordenar investigaciones de derechos civiles en todas las unidades universitarias en las que las mujeres superen ampliamente en número a los hombres” y a erradicar “cualquier elemento en contra de los hombres del plan de estudios”.Sus políticas han cambiado de rumbo en materia de libertad de cátedraEn Florida, DeSantis se alejó por completo del compromiso que había hecho antes de mantener la libertad de cátedra. Incluso al pedir que se desmantele la ortodoxia woke, ha impuesto otra, con una prohibición radical de la enseñanza de la “política de identidad” en las clases obligatorias en los colegios y universidades públicas de Florida. En nombre de los “derechos de los padres”, las políticas respaldadas por DeSantis han dado a los floridanos conservadores un derecho de veto sobre los libros y planes de estudio favorecidos por sus vecinos más liberales.Una persona designada por DeSantis, el activista conservador Chris Rufo, ha argumentado que “el objetivo de la universidad no es la indagación libre”. En los tribunales, los abogados del gobierno de DeSantis han esgrimido que el concepto de libertad de cátedra no aplica a los maestros de las universidades públicas, cuya enseñanza es un mero “discurso gubernamental”, controlable por funcionarios debidamente electos.Nicholas Confessore es reportero político y de investigación radicado en Nueva York y miembro de la redacción del Times Magazine; cubre la intersección de la riqueza, el poder y la influencia en Washington y más allá. Se unió al Times en 2004. @nickconfessore • Facebook More

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    How Ron DeSantis Joined the ‘Ruling Class’ — and Turned Against It

    Over the years, Mr. DeSantis embraced and exploited his Ivy League credentials. Now he is reframing his experiences at Yale and Harvard to wage a vengeful political war.Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk.Mr. DeSantis signing the Parental Rights in Education bill, a law last year that banned classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation deemed as not being age-appropriate.Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis, 44, is not the first Republican politician of his generation to rail against his own Ivy League degrees while milking them for access and campaign cash. But now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he is molding his entire campaign and political persona around a vengeful war against what he calls the country’s “ruling class”: an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other supposed “experts” whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish.For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.” Even as he struggles to displace Mr. Trump as the Republican Party’s pre-eminent figure — he has spent heavily since May without denting the former president’s polling lead, and is under extraordinary pressure to make his mark at the first Republican debate on Wednesday, which Mr. Trump plans to skip — Mr. DeSantis has become captain of a new conservative vanguard, positioning it to influence American politics for years to come.Yet his emergence as his party’s chief culture warrior was anything but preordained. Genuinely embittered by his experiences at elite institutions, he also astutely grasped how they could be useful to him as he climbed the political ladder, according to dozens of friends and classmates from college and law school, as well as former aides and associates. For much of his political career, including his early years as Florida governor, he was neither closely identified with education policy nor deeply engaged in the debates over race and gender identity that have come to engulf American politics. It took the Covid epidemic to awaken Mr. DeSantis to the political potency of classrooms and fully mobilize him against what he now calls the “bureaucratic ‘expert’ class.” Now, pursuing the presidency, Mr. DeSantis has fully weaponized his resentments, offering voters a revisionist history of his own encounters with the ruling class to buttress his arguments for razing it.But Mr. DeSantis and his ideological allies — among them a group of conservative intellectuals clustered around Hillsdale and the California-based Claremont Institute who acquired new prominence during the Trump administration — are not aiming to abolish the ruling class. Instead, emboldened by the broader Covid-era backlash over school closures and diversity programs, they hope to replace it with a distinctly conservative one, trained in schools recaptured from liberals and reshaped by “classical” principles — a more traditionalist, Christian-inflected approach to education. “School choice may allow a small number of highly informed and committed parents to insulate their children” from liberal ideas about social justice, the authors of a recent paper from the Manhattan Institute argued, “but it will make little difference to the level of indoctrination in the American school-age population.”A student protest at New College of Florida, a left-leaning public liberal arts school that Mr. DeSantis took over this year and filled with conservative leadership.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesIn a written response to questions for this article, a DeSantis spokesman, Bryan Griffin, described The New York Times’s reporting as a “hit piece likely manufactured and seeded by political opponents designed to smear Ron DeSantis ahead of the debate,” and defended the governor’s record. “In the Covid era, the world went mad with radical gender ideology and began pushing it harder than ever into school curriculum,” Mr. Griffin said. “DeSantis stepped up to the moment and stopped the indoctrination despite the left and the media’s best efforts to cover for it.”To uproot what he considers liberal political activism from public schools and universities, Mr. DeSantis has stripped power from teachers and administrators and transferred it to himself and his appointees. But even as he calls to dismantle “woke” orthodoxy, he has sought to impose another, with a sweeping ban on the teaching of “identity politics” or “systemic racism” in required classes at Florida’s public colleges and universities and new civics training for high school teachers that plays down the role of slavery in early American history. Under the banner of “parental rights,” DeSantis-backed policies have given conservative Floridians a kind of veto power over books and curriculums favored by their more liberal neighbors, even in politically mixed or predominantly left-leaning Florida counties.“Where local communities create conservative culture and conservative school districts, DeSantis doesn’t touch them,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who served alongside the Mr. DeSantis in Congress. “Where communities confront his conservative ideologies, the state steps in.”Earlier this year, in what amounted to a proof of concept, the governor seized control of New College of Florida, a left-leaning public liberal arts school in Sarasota. He appointed a conservative majority to the board of trustees; the college’s new overseers then fired the school’s leadership, installed Mr. Corcoran as president and announced plans to turn New College into a Florida version of Hillsdale. “The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees, said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”As an undergrad at Yale, Mr. DeSantis found his tribe on the baseball team, where he was known to all as “D.”Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times‘Hell Week,’ Baseball and St. ElmoMr. DeSantis had never been to New England when he arrived at Yale in the late 1990s, an honor student and baseball standout from the middle-class suburban Gulf Coast city of Dunedin. He was far from the only public school graduate in Yale’s freshman class, but he already carried a chip on his shoulder, caught between a powerful confidence in his own gifts — his “superiority complex,” as one classmate described it — and his discomfort with Yale’s more cosmopolitan milieu. He majored in history, taking classes in the culture and politics of the Founders, and closely studied the work of Gordon Wood, whose books emphasized the political radicalness of the American Revolution. He loved “A Few Good Men” and “Scent of a Woman,” especially the rousing speech at the end, in which Al Pacino’s character rails against the rich snobs tormenting a scholarship student at a New England prep school. Though Yale had a thriving conservative political scene, Mr. DeSantis shied away from it. He rarely talked about politics at all.Instead, he found his tribe on the baseball team, where he was known to all as “D,” the name he preferred to his given one. Like every other freshman player, he was hazed by his new teammates, and not just for his jean shorts. The baseball players segregated themselves from the rest of Yale and cultivated a hostility toward their peers, their latent status anxiety sharpened by a realization that some of their fellow students did not take them or their sport seriously. Some recalled being told by classmates, and even professors, that they did not belong at Yale. As athletes, they perceived themselves to be the school’s true meritocrats, admitted on the strength of their own sweat and discipline. “We set ourselves up against the most privileged students at Yale, who, in truth, we did not actually know very well,” Jonathan Levy, a baseball teammate who is now a professor at the University of Chicago, said in an email. “In hindsight, our mid-1990s admission to Yale was our opportunity to join this elite. Every member of the team was handed that same ticket.”As a senior, Mr. DeSantis was elected captain, which his closest Yale friends have sometimes presented as a testament to his leadership qualities. According to other former teammates, however, there were no other contenders: The team had few seniors that year, and Mr. DeSantis was a starting outfielder. His arrogance could startle. At a “captain’s practice” that fall, the team’s revered coach, John Stuper, delivered a brief pep talk to the freshmen. After he left, Mr. DeSantis told the team that their coach, a former major league pitcher, didn’t know what he was doing. Through his spokesman, Mr. DeSantis denied making the remark. In an interview, Mr. Stuper, who described the governor as “like a son” to him, said: “I just can’t imagine that happening. He had a lot of respect for me, still does, has asked me to campaign for him.” Mr. Stuper added, “There’s just no way that he would undermine my authority by doing that.” Mr. DeSantis was elected captain of the baseball team as a senior.Yale AthleticsAlong with many of his teammates, he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity composed largely of athletes, many from working-class backgrounds. “We all kind of bonded through our athletics, and through our fraternity,” said Nick Sinatra, a Buffalo native and Yale friend who played football there. At Yale, D.K.E. was known as boorish even by fraternity standards, with a reputation for over-the-top hazing of pledges. When Mr. DeSantis was a senior, according to former brothers and pledges, a large group of pledges quit after one hazing episode turned violent. On another night, pledges were ordered to a frat house room, two of them recalled. After entering one at a time, each was blindfolded and ordered to drop his pants, with Mr. DeSantis, other brothers, and at least one female guest on hand to mock their genitalia. One of the pledges recalled that a blender was placed between his legs and abruptly turned on to scare him, splashing water on his groin.During the fraternity’s “hell week,” pledges wore costumes smeared with rotten food and condiments. They might be ordered to simulate sex with one another or do outdoor calisthenics in the winter air. According to four former pledges and brothers, Mr. DeSantis required one pledge, for whom he served as “father,” to wear a pair of baseball pants with the back and thighs cut out, exposing his buttocks and genitals.Another D.K.E. brother, Scott Wagner, a friend of Mr. DeSantis who served on the governor’s Florida transition team, said none of the pledges’ costumes involved nudity. Reached by The Times, the former pledge, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that he was made to wear the revealing costume but declined to discuss the experience further. Today, some of the former brothers and pledges regard Mr. DeSantis’s behavior as foreshadowing a comfort with power — and with using it to bully others.Mr. DeSantis denied these accounts through his spokesman, who called them “ridiculous assertions and completely false.”Mr. DeSantis also joined one of the school’s secret societies, St. Elmo. The societies, though swathed in mystery and arcane symbolism, mostly functioned to introduce Yale seniors to classmates they might not know. His St. Elmo class was a diverse group that met weekly for a family-style dinner in a comfortable, run-down townhouse near campus. At meetings, the members took turns delivering their “bios,” or life stories, in the living room, in speeches that could last hours. Mr. DeSantis often showed up in his baseball uniform; his own bio leaned heavily on baseball, his Florida roots and his journey to Yale. But when it came time for others to tell their stories, Mr. DeSantis tuned out, according to former St. Elmo members. He rolled his eyes as one member, Cristina Sosa Noriega, talked about growing up as a Hispanic public schoolgirl in San Antonio, Ms. Sosa Noriega and two other members recalled. “He seemed bored and disinterested,” Ms. Sosa Noriega said. “It was like I wasn’t worth listening to. I had the feeling that he assumed that I didn’t deserve to be there.” (Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman denied that account and said it was “frankly absurd” to suggest that anyone would remember “such a detail from decades ago.”)In “The Courage to Be Free,” Mr. DeSantis’s Yale education is tidily repackaged as a prologue to his future battles with the ruling class. “In retrospect, Yale allowed me to see the future,” he writes. “It just took me 20 years to realize it.” Yet the book is curiously vague, identifying no particular exchanges or classes where he encountered the fervent anti-Americanism that, in his telling, defined his education there. His spokesman declined to identify any.But other perspectives were easily available: According to Mr. Sinatra, Mr. DeSantis took Yale’s most popular undergraduate class about the Cold War, taught by the historian John Lewis Gaddis, whose work blamed the Soviet Union for the conflict, not the United States. (The governor’s spokesman said Mr. DeSantis “did not take issue with John Gaddis’s class.”) While the book paints turn-of-the-century Yale as cloyingly liberal, awash in Soviet flags and Che Guevara T-shirts, other classmates recall a left-leaning but generally apathetic campus of the pre-9/11 era, and a Che shirt worn by one particular roommate, with whom Mr. DeSantis seemed friendly enough.After graduation, some of his baseball teammates “punched their Yale ticket,” according to Dr. Levy, moving into banking, consulting or medicine. Others returned to their hometowns, starting careers that didn’t necessarily require the credentials they had acquired. And some, Dr. Levy observed, “wanted it both ways, to have a Yale-charged life but to reject Yale elitism.” He added: “I think this is what DeSantis is still doing, in the form of a political project — trying to reach the elite pinnacle of the American political establishment while railing against that same establishment.”Harvard Law School, where Mr. DeSantis was a graduate student. He has criticized it as both a bastion of left-wing ideology and a cold factory of corporate lawyers.Billy Hickey for The New York TimesA Short Climb to the EliteMr. DeSantis began fashioning a deeper critique of the ruling class even as he quietly climbed its ranks, already telling others that he imagined himself as a future president. Harvard Law was little different from Yale, he writes in “The Courage to Be Free,” with a stultifying careerism layered onto overtly liberal politics. The Harvard faculty of the early 2000s, Mr. DeSantis asserted, “was increasingly dominated by adherents of so-called critical legal studies” — a left-wing school of argument that seemingly neutral laws can be racist or discriminatory. At the same time, he wrote, Harvard offered an “assembly-line style of education” aimed chiefly at preparing students for “a lucrative career in business or law.” Mr. DeSantis instead joined the Navy, serving as a military prosecutor and combat adviser. Later, as the Tea Party movement arrived in Washington, he started writing his first book, about the Founders and President Barack Obama.“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” came out in fall 2011, a dense tract packed with quotes from Madison and Hamilton and casting Mr. Obama as a European-style socialist bent on deconstructing the republic they imagined. As anti-Obama polemicist, Mr. DeSantis treated slavery as a kind of constitutional sideshow — an institution whose stubborn persistence in early America need not disturb a close adherence to the Founders’ vision, since it was “doomed to fail” in a nation guided by their universal truths. Mr. DeSantis attributed Mr. Obama’s purported radicalism to his education at Harvard Law, and to his years living in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, where the future president taught law at the University of Chicago. It was in these places — “monolithically” far left, populated by the “credentialed elite” and isolated from the “broader political society” — that Mr. Obama absorbed the progressive tradition, with its attachment to “a large administrative state” and “ostensibly nonpartisan ‘solutions’ devised by experts.”Though many classmates shared Mr. DeSantis’s recollection of Harvard as heavily oriented toward corporate law careers, other aspects of his narrative do not hold up. Faculty battles over critical legal studies had unfolded vividly at Harvard Law in the 1970s and 1980s, but by the time Mr. DeSantis arrived a quarter-century later, the approach had reached a nadir. Harvard students of his era were more drawn to the discipline of law and economics, advanced by conservative legal scholars. (Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman noted that, nonetheless, “there were critical legal studies being taught at the time.”) In interviews, some of his conservative classmates recalled being reluctant to express their political views in class. But far more described Harvard as intellectually open and committed to ideological diversity. “The picture DeSantis gives is just not right — it’s kind of a cliché about Harvard, and it’s simply not true,” said Charles Fried, a longtime Harvard Law professor and a faculty sponsor of Harvard’s chapter of the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal organization. “He must have known it, because everyone knew it.”When Mr. DeSantis started at Harvard in 2002, the school had a conservative dean, Robert C. Clark, an early Federalist Society supporter whose appointment had been part of a deliberate effort to re-center the professoriate. A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”Mr. DeSantis joined the Navy after attending Harvard, serving as a military prosecutor and combat adviserU.S. NavyMr. DeSantis’s own foray into big-firm corporate law — a stint as a litigator for the Miami-based Holland & Knight before he ran for Congress — goes unmentioned in his memoir. So does his involvement in Harvard’s Federalist Society chapter, where he served as a business manager for the journal, crossed paths with future judges and politicians and met Leonard Leo, the conservative power broker who years later would help him execute a right-wing takeover of Florida’s Supreme Court. Indeed, Mr. DeSantis showed scant public trace of bitterness about his elite education in the years before his political career.After leaving the Navy, he again put his elite educational bona fides forward, joining with two of his closest law school friends to found an Ivy-themed test-prep company, LSAT Freedom, headquartered at his home in Ponte Vedra Beach. In a series of brief YouTube seminars with his co-founders, Mr. DeSantis comes off as earnest and knowledgeable about the mechanisms of elite advancement. “If you’re in a fourth-tier school, versus, like, a school that’s maybe in the top 50,” he observed, “then there’s a world of difference in terms of your investment and the return on your investment.”His own credentials would yield a bounty when he finally entered politics. He was little-known to local Republican leaders and voters in the newly drawn congressional district he set out to win in early 2012, but he was a disciplined campaigner and proved a formidable fund-raiser. Supporters nicknamed him “the Résumé.” Yale friends around the country — baseball teammates, fraternity brothers, fellow secret-society members — sent checks, helping drive a flood of out-of-state money. A Yale friend put him in touch with a political adviser to Mr. Trump, who praised him on Twitter as “very impressive.” Law school classmates got him meetings with national Republican figures who went on to endorse his winning bid.When Mr. DeSantis decided to run for governor a few years later, he had even more help from the Yale world, tapping an older, more conservative generation of alumni, such as the former financial executive Joseph J. Fogg III. “He came to my attention because he’s a Yalie,” Mr. Fogg told The Miami Herald. A few months before announcing his campaign, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to join a panel of Harvard alumni serving in Congress. While some Republican voters might take a dim view of Harvard, he told them, the school “opens a lot of doors” for aspiring politicians. To the networks of ultrarich conservative donors whose money could help advance him to the next rung, his elite résumé was part of the appeal. “I had a good story,” he said, “an appealing biography to people that were looking to help young leaders.”Katie Stallings setting up her second-grade classroom at MacFarlane Park Elementary School in Tampa in August 2020. Mr. DeSantis ordered all Florida schools to reopen for in-person instruction when the academic year began.Octavio Jones for The New York TimesThe OutbreakAfter being elected governor by a hair’s breadth, Mr. DeSantis at first seemed mindful of the political center. He committed billions of dollars to protect the Everglades. Appearing at his alma mater Dunedin High School, he announced a proposal to raise teachers’ minimum salaries. In the face of efforts by liberal students and activists to shut down conservative speakers on college campuses, Mr. DeSantis, like many other Republican officials in the pre-Covid era, urged Florida universities to adopt a version of the “Chicago principles” favoring academic free expression.Building on the work of his Republican predecessors, he signed legislation creating a small voucher program for low-income students. Though school-choice advocates view the program as a pivotal early step toward taxpayer-funded vouchers in Florida, Mr. DeSantis resisted advisers who wanted him to move even more aggressively on choice in his first year, fearing it would crowd out other priorities, according to two former aides. (His spokesman said Mr. DeSantis “has always been a fervent supporter of expanding school choice, and it was one of his first-term campaign platforms.”) When the Florida House speaker at the time proposed to him abolishing New College entirely, Mr. DeSantis recalled recently, he replied, “What is New College?”Then came Covid. At first, Mr. DeSantis reluctantly heeded Trump administration health officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. He imposed a state lockdown in April 2020; he sometimes appeared masked at public events. But amid shifting federal guidance and growing worry about the social and economic impacts of lockdowns, he began doing his own research. He consulted experts who departed from the emerging medical consensus around Covid restrictions, and he moved quickly to relax them. That summer, embracing data showing that children were at low risk for severe illness or death from Covid, Mr. DeSantis took perhaps his biggest gamble: His administration ordered all Florida schools to reopen for in-person instruction when the school year began.He was widely attacked, even mocked, for his decisions — criticism that would galvanize Mr. DeSantis, according to former aides, and cement his nascent suspicion of bureaucrats and supposed experts. Florida schools did not become superspreaders; research later showed that students in open schools around the country tended to lose less ground during the pandemic than students in closed schools. Mr. DeSantis doubled down. In early 2021, as conservative activists and outlets fanned suspicion of the new Covid vaccines, he effectively stopped promoting them — a turn that contributed to overwhelmed Florida hospitals, public health experts later said, and thousands of deaths that the state’s own former surgeon general would deem “preventable.” But by then, the governor had already claimed victory over the experts. “The Covid-19 pandemic represented a test of elites in the U.S., from public-health experts to the corporate media,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in The Wall Street Journal in March 2021. “Policymakers who bucked the elites and challenged the narrative have been proven right to do so.”Mr. DeSantis greeted local officials at Dunedin High School, his alma mater, in 2019 to announce his plan to raise teacher pay.Megan Reeves/Tampa Bay Times, via TNS, via Abacapress.comThe pandemic had also changed the political contours of education. In blue and purple states around the country, a swath of otherwise middle-of-the-road parents erupted against Democrats and teachers’ unions over continued school closures. There was a rising backlash against mask mandates and the spread, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, of “anti-racist” and “equity” curriculums. Mr. Rufo, previously a little-known documentarian and activist, had introduced millions of people to the academic doctrine known as critical race theory, saying it had infiltrated public school classrooms and workplaces around the country. New groups quickly formed to channel this swell of parental anger into political action, notably in Florida, where three mothers, one with ties to the state Republican Party, formed a group called Moms for Liberty and quickly built it into a national force. After years of playing defense on schools, Republicans now had a fight that could simultaneously energize their base, win more independents and peel off skeptical Democrats — defending “parental rights” against the left-wing teachers, administrators and diversity consultants they argued were indoctrinating their children.For Mr. DeSantis, education officials represented yet another set of “experts” who were getting it wrong. “Ron bet big against the grain on one thing, which was reopening schools,” said one former aide. “It paid off, and he was right. He learned that lesson at the same time that education became more political. And he cared more about education because Moms for Liberty suddenly existed.”Florida, already shifting rapidly to the right, would have a starring role in the country’s new culture wars, and Mr. DeSantis was quick to grasp the political opportunity. In 2022, Florida lawmakers began drafting what its detractors would label the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Though Mr. DeSantis is now indelibly linked to the legislation, at first, “I was not fully versed in the intricacies of the Parental Rights in Education bill,” he recalled in his memoir. “Yet I saw the corporate media and the political left colluding to create and repeat a false narrative about the bill.” For critics, the bill — a complex piece of legislation banning classroom discussion or instruction about “sexual orientation or gender identity” in ways that were not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” — seemed designed to force gay students and teachers into the closet. Mr. DeSantis and his aides were soon defending the bill vigorously; one claimed that anyone opposing the bill “is probably a groomer.” The conflict thrust Mr. DeSantis to the culture war’s front lines, and he would repeat the playbook over and over, with a blitz of hard-edge school and curriculum policies that outraged many liberals and endeared him to the grass-roots right.A discussion in April with Larry P. Arnn, president of the conservative Hillsdale College, which has partnered with Mr. DeSantis to establish classical charter schools in Florida.Chris Dumond/Getty ImagesAt the Heart of a MovementAs he battled against critical race theory and bureaucratic elites, Mr. DeSantis became entwined with a rising movement of conservative academics and activists outside Florida.Less known for technical policy advice than for sweeping polemics about the decay of American government and culture, Claremont scholars shared Mr. DeSantis’s belief that “American freedom required a recovering of the Founding ideals,” as Brian T. Kennedy, a former president of Claremont who remains a fellow there, put it. One of Claremont’s founders, Dr. Arnn, had taken over Hillsdale in 2000 and transformed it into both a fund-raising juggernaut and a redoubt of Christian, classically oriented liberal arts education. The upset win of Mr. Trump, whose rough brand of populism echoed Claremont’s more highbrow take on American decline, gave both institutions new prominence in Washington. His tumultuous defeat, in 2020, left the intellectuals and funders of Claremont and Hillsdale considering whether they ought to find a new horse to back.Mr. DeSantis had cultivated them even before becoming governor. As a congressman, he sent Dr. Arnn a copy of “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers.” “I read his book, and I went, ‘Wow, this is pretty good,’” Dr. Arnn recalled last year. “This guy can actually walk and chew gum.” Later, as Hillsdale looked to expand its network of classical charter schools, it found the DeSantis administration a willing partner. (Today, Florida has one of the largest concentrations of Hillsdale-affiliated charters in the country.) Mr. DeSantis was connected to Claremont in part through friends: Adam Laxalt, a Navy roommate and scion of a Nevada political dynasty, and Michael B. McClellan, a California lawyer, Yale classmate and former Claremont fellow. But the institute’s core political critique — that American constitutional ideals had been corrupted by the emergence of the so-called administrative state — also resonated with Mr. DeSantis. Among the only modern-day intellectual influences he has acknowledged in his recent book and public appearances is Angelo Codevilla, the late Claremont scholar and author of a seminal 2010 essay attacking what he called the American ruling class.Dr. Codevilla held that class was a matter of culture and ideology, not money. A foreign service officer turned academic, he was scathing about the ruling class’s credentialism and faith in scientific consensus, and critiqued the role of schools in perpetuating the American elite. “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits,” he wrote. “These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment) and saints.” Usefully, Dr. Codevilla’s formulation placed traditionalist intellectuals and wealthy Middle American elites on the side of the common man. “An underpaid but well-connected blogger for The New York Times who graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and supports open borders would be considered part of the ruling class,” David Azerrad, a Hillsdale professor, wrote in The American Spectator in 2017. “A millionaire used-car dealer in Omaha who ‘clings to his guns and religion’ and is proudly patriotic would not.”As Mr. DeSantis’s profile rose amid the Covid battles, both Claremont and Hillsdale lavished him with attention and praise. In Naples last year, Dr. Arnn introduced Mr. DeSantis as “one of the most important people living.” Claremont scholars describe Florida as a test bed for the new right, and at its annual gala in 2021, Claremont awarded Mr. DeSantis its statesmanship award. “Governor DeSantis is a product of elite education and yet, wonderfully, rejects its core premises,” the institute’s president, Ryan P. Williams, said by way of introduction, and he “wields the prestige that he got from that elite education on behalf of normal America — a too-rare thing.” Accepting the award, Mr. DeSantis approvingly cited Dr. Codevilla and called for battle against the ruling class. “He saw this probably before anybody,” said Mr. DeSantis. “But he was right on the money.”Hillsdale College, a liberal arts school in Michigan, has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right.Sean Proctor for The New York TimesLecturing the LecturersAs his preparations for the presidential campaign accelerated this year, so did Mr. DeSantis’s crusade against the ruling class. In February, the governor and his wife, Casey, invited Mr. Williams, along with several other Claremont fellows and affiliates, to a private meeting at the Capitol in Tallahassee. The occasion was the opening of Claremont’s new Florida outpost, under the aegis of Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University and a Claremont fellow, now the institute’s new “senior director of state coalitions.” “Protecting Americans from infringing woke ideology is important work,” tweeted Ms. DeSantis, “and we are grateful Scott and the Claremont Institute picked Florida to continue their mission.” Later that day, the Claremont crowd joined the governor and his top aides for cocktails and dinner. Over a glass of Macallan at the Governor’s Mansion, he regaled them with the story of his takeover of New College the previous month and exchanged ideas about battling campus liberals.The red-carpet welcome underscored Claremont’s increasingly prominent role in Mr. DeSantis’s policy apparatus. Earlier that month, Mr. DeSantis had invited another Claremont fellow to join his “round table” on the need to pass new laws against “legacy media defamation.” (The setting was a mock television studio, with Mr. DeSantis playing the role of host.) A few weeks later, in advance of his expected presidential bid, Mr. DeSantis treated his top donors and fund-raisers to a Claremont-only panel at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. (The purpose of the panel, according to planning emails obtained by The Times, was to “define the ‘Regime’ which illegitimately rules us” and lay out a strategy to “make states more autonomous from the woke regime by ridding themselves of leftist interests.”) In March, Dr. Yenor joined Mr. DeSantis for yet another round table, this one focused on the evils of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education.Dr. Yenor was already a controversial figure. In a 2021 speech in Orlando, Fla., describing “the political and personal evils that flow from feminism,” he had claimed that feminist “careerism” made women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” Calling modern universities “citadels of our gynecocracy,” he argued that they should stop recruiting women to medical, law and trade schools and instead focus on recruiting more men. Boise State officials resisted calls to fire Dr. Yenor for his remarks, citing the principles of academic freedom and his First Amendment rights; though some students filed Title IX complaints, he was ultimately cleared.On the same day he appeared with the governor in March, Dr. Yenor unveiled a report, “Florida Universities: From Woke to Professionalism,” asserting that public colleges were “gripped by D.E.I. ideology” that threatened to “tear Florida apart.” Though released by Claremont, the report was first edited by a top DeSantis aide, according to emails obtained by The Times. And though it drew little notice outside Florida, the report echoed Dr. Yenor’s viral speech. The state should not only defund “D.E.I.-infused” programs and classes, he recommended, but ban the collection of “race-based data” entirely, in order to hobble federal investigations into discrimination at Florida institutions. The real victims of higher-education discrimination, Dr. Yenor wrote, were men: Florida should “order civil rights investigations of all university units in which women vastly outnumber men among the student body and/or faculty — especially colleges of nursing and education — for disparate impact” and root out “any anti-male elements of curriculum.” (At New College, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported in August, DeSantis allies have boosted male enrollment in part by doling out a disproportionate share of the school’s merit scholarships to a new crop of student-athlete applicants, though that group had lower-than-average grades and test scores.) Rather than defend academic free speech, Dr. Yenor advised, Mr. DeSantis and his appointees should adopt “a more ideological bent” to rein in administrators and teachers and cultivate love of country.Two months later, the governor signed a law banning the state’s public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity programs, setting off a now-familiar cycle of negative headlines and DeSantis counterattacks. Despite the coverage, however, only portions of the bill actually addressed D.E.I. administrators. Perhaps more consequentially, the legislation imposed a vague but expansive speech code on Florida public university campuses — prohibiting required courses “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” (In an interview, Manny Diaz Jr., the state’s current education commissioner, said that “conversations about theories and the debates about these theories” should take place only in higher-level elective courses. “Why am I talking about that in a math class? In a literature class?”) In legal battles to defend Mr. DeSantis’s higher-education agenda, lawyers for his administration, far from defending academic freedom, have argued that the concept does not even apply to public university professors: College curriculums and in-class instruction are merely “government speech,” controllable by duly elected officials. The American Association of University Professors likened the state’s position to “authoritarian control of education similar to what exists in North Korea, Iran, or Russia.”In April 2022, the state’s Department of Education rejected dozens of math textbooks because, officials claimed, they “contained prohibited topics,” including critical race theory. A Times review of about half the textbooks found little reference to race at all, let alone the more abstruse academic topic of critical race theory. In fact, only three of 125 state-appointed reviewers had found objectionable content, The Herald reported. Two had ties to Hillsdale — a civics education specialist involved in the college’s “1776 Curriculum,” which emphasizes a patriotic, traditional view of the Founding, and a sophomore political science major who was secretary of the Hillsdale College Republicans.Mr. Corcoran, then the education commissioner, also tapped Hillsdale to join a small group of outside institutions helping to revise the state’s civics standards, another signature DeSantis initiative. Both Hillsdale and Claremont personnel feature disproportionately in a series of online teacher training courses subsequently created for the effort. (A Hillsdale spokeswoman said individuals involved in the training and in Florida’s textbook reviews had acted in their “private capacity,” not on behalf of the school.) In-person training last summer amounted to an indoctrination, according to some teachers who attended, into conservative views about constitutional “originalism” and the separation of church and state. Much as Mr. DeSantis had in his own writing, the training sessions sought to minimize the relevance of slavery to an understanding of the Founding: One slide stated that even those Founders “that held slaves did not defend the institution.” (Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman said it was “inane media propaganda” to suggest that the training slides minimized slavery or that the governor had ever done so.) Other slides criticized court rulings opposed by conservatives, such as a 1962 decision against school-sponsored prayer.In a statement last year about the training, the Florida Education Department told The Herald that “every lesson we teach is based on history, not ideology or any form of indoctrination.” But Mr. Corcoran was more direct while speaking at Hillsdale. Education, he said then, is “100 percent ideological.”George Pierson placed signs before a town hall with Mr. DeSantis last month in Osceola, Iowa.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesDeepening InfluenceWhatever the fate of his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis’s influence over Florida schools seems likely to expand. Last summer, as he ramped up his re-election bid in Florida, he became the state’s first governor to campaign in local school board races, endorsing a slate of 30 candidates — many of them also backed by Moms for Liberty — “committed to the student-first principles of the DeSantis Education Agenda.” The normally sleepy, officially nonpartisan races became pitched ideological battles, awash in money. Most of his candidates won, placing new pro-DeSantis majorities in a half-dozen coastal boards previously controlled by more liberal members. Last spring, Republican lawmakers placed on next year’s ballot an amendment to the state constitution that would make such elections formally partisan. Mr. DeSantis, like Republicans elsewhere in the country, supports such efforts, though they defy a long American tradition of nonpartisan public education governance.One of the new Republican-majority boards is in Pinellas County, where Mr. DeSantis grew up and where he began his climb into the American elite. In January, Pinellas school district officials yanked Toni Morrison’s classic novel “The Bluest Eye” from high schools after a parent complained about a two-page rape scene. (In a YouTube video, the parent, who herself taught at a private Christian school, described Pinellas schools as “Marxist indoctrination camps.”) The officials cited new state guidelines, crafted with input from Moms for Liberty volunteers, to “err on the side of caution” when evaluating what books to make available to schoolchildren. Soon after, an administrator blocked one local elementary school from showing the Disney film “Ruby Bridges,” about the 6-year-old Black girl who integrated New Orleans schools in the 1960s. The removal came after a different mother, who had already declined permission for her daughter to see the movie in class, demanded that no one else’s children be allowed to see it.Both decisions were later reversed — months later, in the case of Ms. Morrison’s novel. “Activists file blanket complaints against hundreds of books, and in many school districts, that triggers the books’ automatic removal pending review. And very often, those reviews can take months to complete, effectively banning the book in the meanwhile,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a scholar at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies academic speech policies. Mr. Diaz disputed that the new state policy was to blame for such delays. “I think the onus is on the district to make that process speedy,” he said.Elements of Mr. DeSantis’s education policies have been blocked in court, and others remain under legal challenge as his presidential campaign unfolds. But in counties like Pinellas, his policies and rhetoric have already had what his critics believe is their intended effect. “Before the pandemic, I felt like what I call the ‘swirl of Tallahassee’ just lived up there,” said Laura Hine, a Pinellas school board member who is not registered with either party and is among the board candidates Mr. DeSantis’s operation has targeted for defeat in next year’s elections. “The weaponization of political rhetoric around education, and the associated policies, have now reached our classroom teachers.”Two years ago, a Pinellas parent named Renee Chiea — also warning of “Marxist indoctrination” in county schools — filed a complaint against Brandt Robinson, a teacher at Dunedin High School. She objected to parts of the syllabus Mr. Robinson had distributed to his class on African-American history, which her son had briefly enrolled in. In a written complaint, Ms. Chiea argued that one book Mr. Robinson planned to assign, “Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present,” by the Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, distorted history by painting America as “inherently racist” — violating new state rules, passed earlier that year at Mr. DeSantis’s urging, banning from classrooms any material that espoused the idea “that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems.” In an email to The Times, Ms. Chiea, an activist with the Pinellas chapter of Moms for Liberty, also argued that the book was based on “the same theories” as “The 1619 Project,” a Times examination of the legacy of slavery, which Florida had also banned from classrooms.A review panel ultimately rejected her complaint. “I don’t stop my class and ask my white kids, ‘Hey, how are you feeling?’ What kind of teacher would do that?” Mr. Robinson said. “It’s not my job to tell you what to think. It’s to help you become a better thinker.” People identifying themselves as Moms for Liberty activists began leaving comments on Mr. Robinson’s TikTok account, where he posts daily videos about history. In January, someone reported Mr. Robinson for a TikTok mentioning that he had taught students in his Dunedin sociology class about the Black thinker W.E.B. Du Bois and the concept of “double consciousness” — how racism forced Black Americans to always imagine how they might appear through white people’s eyes.According to Mr. Robinson, whoever reported him claimed that he was indoctrinating his students. “Some of the people who make these assertions are just grossly undereducated. In their minds, critical race theory is all kinds of things,” he said.Ms. Chiea said she felt that the school district had mishandled her own complaint against his course, and believed that Mr. Robinson was still trying to circumvent Florida’s new rules. “I am positive he has not changed the content of what he teaches in his class,” she said. “And until there is some honesty and transparency in that, it will remain under scrutiny by me.” More

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    The Education of Ron DeSantis: 5 Takeaways

    Mr. DeSantis, the Republican governor and presidential candidate, leaned heavily on his Ivy League schooling before using it as fodder in the culture wars. Here are key findings from a Times examination.As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he has molded his campaign and political persona around a war on the country’s supposed ruling class: an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other “experts” whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish. Despite his struggles on the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has become captain of a new conservative vanguard that views public schools and universities as the chief battleground of the culture wars — and his Florida education policies as a model for red states around the nation.Yet Mr. DeSantis is both a member of the ruling class and a critic of it. Educated at Yale and Harvard Law, he spent his early adulthood energetically climbing into the American elite. An examination by The New York Times reveals how Mr. DeSantis, genuinely embittered by his experiences at elite institutions, also astutely grasped how they could be useful to him. He now offers voters a revisionist history of his own encounters with the ruling class to buttress his arguments for razing it — and for remaking public education itself.Here are five takeaways from the Times article.He reaped the benefits of an elite education.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis often describes his years at Yale and Harvard Law as a period behind enemy lines, painting both institutions as places where students and teachers were anti-American. But his overall experience was more mixed than he acknowledges.At Yale, he joined St. Elmo, one of the school’s “secret societies,” long known as breeding grounds of future senators and presidents. Though he says Harvard was gripped by left-wing “critical legal studies,” the doctrine was long on the wane by the time he arrived, and the school provided entree to the power brokers of the conservative Federalist Society.When he went into politics, his elite résumé helped him court wealthy donors, raise money and garner introductions to prominent Republicans. As he acknowledged in a panel discussion back in Cambridge, Mass., shortly before he first ran for governor, “Harvard opens a lot of doors” for aspiring politicians.His fraternity brothers recalled hazing rituals and an early comfort with power.Echoing Mr. DeSantis’s own account of culture shock at Yale, former classmates recounted the future governor, who hailed from the middle-class, suburban Gulf Coast city of Dunedin, as bewildered and soon alienated by the more cosmopolitan, diverse Yale campus.He found his tribe on the baseball team and in the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, where he participated in the frat’s brutal hazing rituals — an early illustration, in the view of some former frat brothers, of his comfort with power and bullying.On one occasion, Mr. DeSantis and other brothers played a prank that involved turning on a blender between the legs of a blindfolded pledge. During the frat’s wintertime “hell week,” Mr. DeSantis required a pledge to wear a pair of baseball pants with the back and thighs cut out, exposing his buttocks and genitals, former brothers and pledges said. Mr. DeSantis denied these accounts through his spokesman, who called them “ridiculous assertions and completely false.”He was a latecomer to the culture wars.Mr. DeSantis is now indelibly associated with policies that take on what he considers left-wing ideology in Florida’s public schools and universities: his takeover of the liberal arts school New College; efforts that make it easier for parents to challenge books available in elementary and high schools; a law prohibiting classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity that are not viewed as “age appropriate”; and bans against teaching ideas like “systemic racism” in core classes at public universities.Yet his emergence as his party’s chief culture warrior was anything but preordained, The Times found. For much of his political career, including his early years as Florida governor, he was neither closely identified with education policy nor deeply engaged in the debates over race and gender. (When a Florida lawmaker first proposed abolishing New College entirely, Mr. DeSantis replied, “What is New College?”)It took the coronavirus pandemic — and the intertwined backlashes against mask mandates, school lockdowns and the spread of “anti-racist” and “equity” curriculums — to both awaken Mr. DeSantis to the political power of education issues and cement his suspicions of academic and scientific experts.He’s found common cause with a new crop of conservative academics.As he battled against critical race theory and bureaucratic elites, Mr. DeSantis became entwined with a rising movement of conservative academics and activists outside Florida, notably at Hillsdale College in Michigan and the Claremont Institute in California.At a recent donor retreat, Mr. DeSantis featured a Claremont panel intended to “define the ‘Regime’ which illegitimately rules us” and lay out a strategy to “make states more autonomous from the woke regime by ridding themselves of leftist interests,” according to planning emails obtained by The Times.In a report calling for Florida to abolish diversity programs, one of the experts — who argued in a 2021 speech that feminism makes women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” — urged Mr. DeSantis to “order civil rights investigations of all university units in which women vastly outnumber men” and root out “any anti-male elements of curriculum.”His policies have changed course on academic freedom.In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has turned sharply away from an earlier commitment to academic freedom. Even as he calls to dismantle “woke” orthodoxy, he has imposed another, with a sweeping ban on the teaching of “identity politics” in required classes at Florida’s public colleges and universities. In the name of “parental rights,” DeSantis-backed policies have given conservative Floridians a veto over books and curriculums favored by their more liberal neighbors.One DeSantis appointee, the conservative activist Chris Rufo, has argued that “the goal of the university is not free inquiry.” In court, lawyers for the DeSantis administration have argued that the concept of academic freedom does not apply to public university teachers, whose instruction is merely “government speech,” controllable by duly elected officials. More

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    Why Would John Eastman Want to Overturn an Election for Trump?

    The figure of John Eastman, a constitutional theorist, former law professor and legal adviser to Donald Trump, looms increasingly large in retrospectives on the events of Jan. 6, and for good reason: Out of all the characters who floated through the White House in the aftermath of the 2020 election, only Eastman appears to have been fully serious about keeping Trump in office.Other people certainly imagined themselves to be serious, figures like Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame, but really they inhabited a fantasy world and mostly just invited Trump to live there with them. Then another set of figures — including various White House advisers and United States senators — lived in reality while pretending to believe the fantasy, either in the hopes of managing the president’s moods until his term ended or for cynical political reasons of their own.Only Eastman seemed to partly bridge the divide. True, his belief that Trump ought to remain in office depended on many of the same voter-fraud speculations — mutable, adaptable, an assumption in search of confirmation — that the outright fantasists embraced. But his legal plan of action was intended to be as plausible as possible, linked to interpretations of election law and the U.S. Constitution that were radical but not purely fanciful, and devised to exploit points of tension or contradiction where a constitutional crisis might genuinely be forced.Trump didn’t have the cooperators or the capacities required to reach that destination. But Eastman, unlike the clowns and cynics, actually drew up a road map for getting there, devoting real legal and constitutional knowledge to the goal of throwing the American presidential succession into crisis.John Eastman in Colorado in 2021.Andy Cross/MNG/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesIn this, he embodied in the strongest form a tendency shared by others in his intellectual home base, the Claremont Institute — a conservative institution with many mansions, but one known lately for its hospitality to the reactionary internet and its enthusiasm for a politics of crisis.That enthusiasm first took shape in the “Flight 93 Election” essay, published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, in which the future Trump administration official Michael Anton made the case that the American Republic was in such dire shape that it would be preferable to elect a man who might literally crash the plane rather than to allow it to continue in its current course. Eastman’s eagerness for a constitutional crisis was a kind of bookend to that essay, infused with the same spirit but applied to a presidential transition rather than the presidential vote.This tendency has made Claremont an object of special fascination to hostile interpreters of Trump-era conservatism. At this point, you can read a wide range of critical essays trying to tease out how an institution formally devoted to the genius of the founding fathers and the ideals of Abraham Lincoln ended up harboring so much sympathy for a demagogue like Trump.I have my own interpretation, which goes back to my personal experience as a youthful “Publius fellow” at Claremont 20 years ago, when along with a brace of other young right-of-center nerds I was given a summer crash course in the thought of Harry Jaffa, the Claremont eminence (then living, now deceased), and his various disciples.The Jaffa school offered an interpretation of American history that might be described as Inception, Consummation and Corruption. Its Great Consummator was Lincoln, who restored the promise of the founding by fully establishing the “all men are created equal” absolutism of the Declaration of Independence. Its villains were John C. Calhoun and the progressives of the early 20th century, the former for defending slavery and inequality, the latter for replacing a constitutional republic with a bureaucratized administrative state, and both for displaying a philosophical and moral relativism that Jaffa despised (and that, as his intellectual feuds multiplied, he claimed to discern in many of his fellow conservatives as well).But one thing you noticed hanging around with Claremont folks was that while they were obviously interested in the good and bad of each American regime change, from the original founding (great) to the Lincolnian re-founding (even better) to the progressive re-foundings of Woodrow Wilson (their great villain, the “Lost Cause” sympathizer turned arrogant technocrat) and Franklin Roosevelt, they were also just really interested in the idea of founding itself, when moments of crisis bring new orders out of old ones.At one point, as a break from reading founding-era texts, we were treated to a screening of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the great John Ford western whose theme is the Old West’s transition into political modernity, passing from the rule of the gun (embodied by John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon) to the rule of the lawbook (embodied by Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard).In the movie, the transition can’t happen without a dose of chaos, a mixture of violence and deception. Lee Marvin’s outlaw, Valance, challenges the peaceable lawyer Stoddard to a duel; Doniphon saves the lawyer by shooting the outlaw from the shadows — and then the killing is mistakenly attributed to Stewart’s character, who is lionized for it and goes on to be a great statesman of the New West while the cowboy and his vigilante code recede.The not-so-subtle implication of the Claremont reading of American history is that this kind of fraught transition doesn’t happen once and for all; rather, it happens periodically within the life of any nation or society. Whenever change or crisis overwhelms one political order, one version of (in our case) the American republic, you get a period of instability and rough power politics, until the new era or the new settlement is forged.But it doesn’t happen without moments like Doniphon shooting Valance — or Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, say, or Roosevelt threatening to pack the Supreme Court — when norms and niceties need to be suspended for the sake of the new system that’s waiting to be born.When I try to understand what Eastman imagined himself doing in serving Donald Trump even unto constitutional crisis, this is where my speculations turn. I don’t think this is the necessary implication of Claremont thought; indeed, you can find in the latest issue of The Claremont Review of Books an essay by William Voegeli critiquing conservatives who seem “enthused about chaos” and overeager to re-found rather than conserve. But I think it’s an understandable place for the Claremont reading of American history to turn at a time when the American republic does appear sclerotic, stalemated, gridlocked and in need of some kind of conspicuous renewal.Nor is it a coincidence that Claremont conservatives would turn this way at the same time that their adversaries on the American left nurture plans to expand the Supreme Court, add new states to the Union and abolish the Senate and the Electoral College. Both right and left are reacting, in different ways and with different prescriptions, to the sense of crisis and futility in our politics, the feeling that surely some kind of revolution or transformation is due to come around — that God in his wisdom is overdue to send us a Lincoln or a Roosevelt and that the existing norms of our politics probably won’t survive the change.What makes this sentiment particularly understandable is that the Claremont history of America’s multiple regime changes is generally correct: Our country really has periodically transformed itself, for better or worse (sometimes both at once), through the actions of strong leaders and strong movements that risked crisis to overturn and transform and even, yes, re-found.The problem — well, on the right, there are three problems.First, the part of the right that imagines a re-founding can’t agree on what shape its imagined new American regime should take. (Are we demolishing the administrative state or turning it to conservative ends? Restoring lost liberties or pursuing the common good? Building a multiethnic working-class majority or closing the border against future Democratic voters?) Which is one reason the Trump presidency, infused by these conflicting impulses, ended up being such a shambolic mess.The second obvious reason it was a mess was just the character of the president himself. It’s here that my attempt to imagine my way into Eastman’s crisis mind-set collapses: I just can’t fathom the idea that it could be worth pushing our constitutional system into chaos when your candidate to play the role of Lincoln or Roosevelt is Donald Trump.To cast a vote for Trump as a defensive measure against Hillary Clinton is one thing. But to nominate yourself to play Tom Doniphon in a political shootout so that a decadent order can give way to something new, when your candidate to lead the new order is a sybaritic reality-television star who shambled through his first presidential term … no, there my attempt at imaginative sympathy fails.But then finally, even deeper than the folly of risking so much for Trump himself is the folly of doing so without democratic legitimacy and real majority support. At past moments of American renewal or regime change the leaders of the emergent order have been able to claim a popular mandate for their project. Yes, Lincoln’s case is exceptional: He was a plurality president in 1860 and won a big majority in 1864 with the South still in rebellion. But he obviously won both elections, the outcomes weren’t particularly close, and the other transformative presidents in our history, from Andrew Jackson down through Roosevelt to Claremont’s own beloved Ronald Reagan, won a clear or resounding mandate for a second term.No complaints about a rigged election can change the fact that Trump did not — that despite ample opportunities for statesmanship, he never persuaded a majority of Americans to support whatever his project was supposed to be.And this is where the various indictments of Claremont Trumpism draw the most blood. If your intellectual project champions Lincoln over Calhoun, but you end up using constitutional legerdemain to preserve the power of a minority faction against an American majority, then whatever historical part you imagine yourself playing, you have betrayed yourself.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More