Teasing DeSantis – and a Call for Questions

An upcoming exploration of the American Founding according to Ron DeSantis, a massive thank you, and a summer mailbag

I’m hoping to send out my next proper essay over the weekend. Until then, I wanted to share three quick points to keep you posted about how things have been going and what’s next here at Democracy Americana.

Ron DeSantis believes the Founders would want him to go after Disney

I have been spending a lot of time with Ron DeSantis this week – and I have to tell you, it’s been rather unpleasant. For several days now, I’ve been making my way through the two books DeSantis has published: The much-discussed The Courage to Be Free that came out earlier this year and the almost-forgotten Dreams From Our Founding Fathers from 2011.

Sometimes, I do question the choices I’ve made that have led me to this point in my life.

I’m reading Dreams From Our Founding Fathers for work – and there is really no other reason to spend time with it, as it is a bad book. But it is interesting: On more than 300 pages, a young Ron DeSantis, about to run for Congress for the first time, outlines a peculiar version of the American founding – and why he is convinced his beloved Founding Fathers, particularly James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, would have hated Barack Obama. That’s what the book is all about: An attack on Obama and his progressive allies who, according to the self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative” Ron DeSantis, are pursuing a political project that is fundamentally at odds with everything the Founders wanted America to be.

This weekend, I’ll be discussing Dreams From Our Founding Fathers at a panel organized by my colleague and friend Seth Cotlar – whose fantastic newsletter Rightlandia you should all read – at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. I’m really nervous about this, because this is certainly not my natural habitat. I am very much not an expert on early America, and I fully expect every single person in the audience to know vastly more about that period than I do. I’ll leave the discussion of what DeSantis gets right (not a lot) and wrong about U.S. history to the wonderful scholars Seth Cotlar brought together for this panel: Seth himself, Lindsay Chervinsky, Joanne Freeman, and Sean Adams – proper experts on the 18^th and 19^th centuries, all of them. But the goal of the panel is also to reflect on the uses and abuses of history in the political discourse and on what we can learn from reading this book about not just DeSantis, but the current state of the American Right more broadly. This is where I can, hopefully, make a meaningful contribution.

What I will try to do – and will share here afterwards, in the form of a newsletter – is to historicize Dreams From Our Founding Fathers as a window into a particular moment in the recent history of the Right: the Tea Party moment. From there, I’d like to chart the path DeSantis took from 2011 to 2023, from this first book about the Founders to The Courage to Be Free, from pledging to fight for the Founding Fathers’ vision of limited government and the state never interfering with the private life of citizens and private business to promising to go after marginalized people and “woke” corporations. It’s a path that in many ways mirrors the recent trajectory of the Right: From at least a rhetorical commitment to free-market, small-government libertarianism to embracing the rightwing populist culture war, and from at least pretending (!) to restrain the government in order to protect individual liberty to mobilizing the coercive powers of the state to roll back pluralism. And yet, all along the way, DeSantis wants us to believe that he is a true “constitutional conservative” who relies on the eternal wisdom of the Framers and who defends their vision for America. How he and his brethren on the Right justify that trajectory, and how they invoke a specific version of history – of the founding era, specifically – in order to legitimize their radicalization, is what I would like to unpack over the weekend. So, stay tuned: It’s going to be a wild right that includes not just the two DeSantis books, but also a whole lot of 1776 Commission (remember that?) and reflections on what the current history wars are all about.

Over 5,000 subscribers!

About ten days ago, we crossed the 5,000-subscriber line. I have to tell you that I am more than a little proud of that. And I am very grateful to each and every one of you for taking the time to read and engage with what I have to say. I started Democracy Americana in late November and have since sent out 30 newsletters, or about one per week. And most of them have been pretty long. So far, I have published roughly 70,000 words here, with almost two thirds of the pieces coming in at over 2,000 words and several actually over 3,000. And yet, that hasn’t kept you good people from actually reading: So far, the newsletters have been viewed almost 175,000 times – and Democracy Americana is growing, as we’ve had over 50,000 views in the last 30 days alone. Look, I promise I’m not going to do this often (brag about numbers, I mean); and obviously, these are puny numbers compared to what some famous Substack stars get. But I am not famous, and I literally launched this one late night in November from our couch, with no help from anyone, and no big institutional platform in the background to push it. That’s not nothing.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is and will remain the home base for my public work. I love writing this newsletter. And I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to share my reflections, my attempts to make sense of the world around us, with all of you. Sincerely, I thank you. And I hope we can keep building this together. Onwards!

A summer mailbag

I’d like to do a mailbag post soon. I have never done one of these, but it seems like a good opportunity to hit on a few things that you are interested in, and now seems like a good time, in the middle of summer. I’d like to send the post out before the end of July (and before my summer vacation in the first half of August). Obviously, this only works if you actually have questions you would like me to answer. Please leave them in the comments to this post, send them by replying to this email, or send them over via any of my social media accounts (if you are going the social media route, please indicate that the question is intended for the mailbag). I’d say anything is fair game – certainly any topic or question to which this newsletter is devoted.

I am really excited to hear from you!