Ron DeSantis is the Republican party’s best hope

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is shaping up as the GOP’s best hope for next year’s US presidential election. Large parts of his popular appeal are his open attack on (now fairly well-established) left-wing infiltration in education and to some extent in commerce, and his expressed intention to make Florida the state ‘where woke goes to die’. Hitherto his success has been limited. But recently there have been signs that he may be learning from his mistakes.

His troubles started with a failure to grasp that a direct legal attack on left-wing influence, however electorally popular, was likely to be doomed. However fed up Floridians might be with the spoutings of left-wing professors – and a corporate culture where wokery was not so much encouraged as compulsory – you couldn’t just ban them. 

This became clear after the state legislature passed the Individual Freedom Act (otherwise called the ‘Stop Woke Act’) last April. This prevented state universities and schools advocating the need for positive discrimination rather than colour-blind treatment; suggesting that any one race bore guilt for past sins or had racism hard-wired into it; or teaching that race or sex determined one’s status as oppressor or oppressed.