The Banality of Evil
Ron DeSantis is a thoroughly unexceptional man. He just managed to get to the heights of politics in the most powerful country in the world by ruining the lives of the most visible and vulnerable among us.
We know exactly why Ron DeSantis commands so much attention — he’s supposedly Trumpism without Trump. He’s the alternative: a “respectable” man who offers big policy wins for a Republican Party in the thrall of unnecessary malice and wanton hatred towards anyone who isn’t a white, cisgender, heteronormative man on the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company.
But how did this positively dull, completely average empty suit win a governorship in the third most populous state in US and remake the place in the image of a GOP obsessed with culture wars? How did he become a contender for the Republican nomination for president?
Ron was born to a middle class family and he started off promising — his parents even gave him Dion for a middle name, after the guy who sings The Wanderer. He excelled in baseball and managed to get into Yale for his undergraduate degree and went on to Harvard after that, becoming a Navy JAG officer while studying law.
He was a promising young man. But we can’t get too excited about him from this point on.
