We’ve been having endless debates about whether we’re threatened by authoritarianism or fascism or something that needs a new word.
However you come down on that issue, all I can say is that if you look at Florida right now you can see whatever it is in action. And you can see that one of its most characteristic features, whatever we want to call it, is deliberate, performative cruelty.
That’s what DeSantis and his allies like Christopher Rufo are carrying over and systematizing from Trump, what they’re making the defining ideology and practice of their new political synthesis.
That’s what distinguishes what they’re doing from culture war around and over the university as an institution over the last forty years.