#intelligencer

In the New York Magazine article, “The Future of Trumpism: The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP comes from Ron DeSantis, who may be more MAGA than the MAGA king himself,” Jonathan Chait discusses some of Ron DeSantis’s more disturbing beliefs about the U.S. Constitution and wealth.

Basically, DeSantis seems to believe that the Constitution was designed to protect elite wealth from being redistributed to the working classes. If DeSantis were to be elected president, there’s a good chance he would try to undo every progressive social safety net program we have created since the New Deal, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, SNAP, and TANF.

Below are some excerpts from DeSantis’s 2011 book Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First principles in the age of Obama:

[Benjamin] Franklin and other Founding Fathers believed that respect for individual property rights was the sine qua non of a free society, and regarded the so-called “leveling spirit,” which seeks to equalize property through government action, as a danger that American institutions needed to check…. How to craft a government based on popular consent that did not devolve into popular majorities voting themselves the property of others was one of the main concerns for Madison and his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention. [...] Madison pulled no punches about specifying the particular types of faction that a republican form of government needed to guard against. “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project”…. Madison…also viewed these “wicked projects” as inimical to fundamental notions of justice and individual liberty. As a matter of first principle, the republic needed to be constructed to prevent such projects from ever coming into being.

[emphasis added]

--Ron DeSantis (2011, pp. 123, 128-129)

If Ron DeSantis wins the White House in 2024 and has a GOP Congress, and a Federalist Society dominated Supreme Court, he will be able to dismantle the social safety net in the U.S. with impunity. We cannot let that happen.

[edited]

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