Bob Neal

While Republicans agonize over whether to return to being a political party after six years as a cult of personality, we’re beginning to hear the phrase “Trumpism without Trump” as potential candidates dip their toes into the orange water.

The “without Trump” part sounds pretty good. “Trumpism” not so much.

Most pundits and early polls give the nod to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the most likely to unseat Trump as chief conservative. DeSantis is one of few Republicans who overcame the Democrats’ mini-wave in November and swept to re-election.

Five-Thirty-Eight, the poll aggregator, puts Trump’s lead over DeSantis at 15-20 points and holding among Republicans likely to vote in the 2024 primaries. That’s a lot for DeSantis to overcome, but he has time. And he doesn’t carry all Trump’s baggage. Yet.

DeSantis’s pitch for attention hangs on two pegs, race and gay-bashing.

Race first. Most Democrats recognize Black Americans as a key constituency. Republicans recognize that, too, and seldom miss an opportunity to suggest or even say outright that Blacks get favored treatment or that Blacks and Browns want to replace the white majority.

This is right out of the Patrick Buchanan playbook. Buchanan, a keen political analyst, put the Republicans on the front line in the culture wars. His American Conservative magazine has written glowingly of DeSantis. And Buchanan wrote in 2011 that minorities will soon outnumber whites and that the country “is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.”

Along those lines, DeSantis pushed the Stop WOKE law through Florida’s legislature. The law sounds banal enough if you read his office’s summary, but its implications are pretty scary.

Teachers may come to fear even teaching that slavery existed because it might make some non-African-American kids feel guilty. But slavery is our original sin, and kids need to know about it.

To be clear, no one today bears responsibility for slavery. Yet all Americans bear responsibility to be aware of how the aftermath of slavery affects Black people. Well into the 20th century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was actively helping rich white farmers take land owned by poor Black farmers. It lent Black farmers more than they could repay, then foreclosed and sold the land to white farmers.

And a New Deal outfit, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, routinely drew red lines around Black neighborhoods, rating those neighborhoods as “hazardous,” to discourage lending to would-be homeowners or even to flat-out deny loans. The vestiges of redlining remain. Today, 64% of the neighborhoods HOLC labeled “hazardous” are mostly Black.

DeSantis also championed a law to ban teaching “critical race theory” in schools and business training. CRT isn’t taught in any public or undergraduate school. It’s a way to look at discrimination built into the culture and it’s used almost exclusively in graduate and law schools.

I have no problem with trying to remediate these carryover discriminations. If no one teaches about it, no one learns about it. If we don’t learn about it, where do we get the will to do better? The result wouldn’t be much different from the official silence in Turkey about the Armenian genocide in 1915. Turkish kids don’t know about it.

Our history has huge pride to pass on to us. And in recent years we have had reason to be proud of dealing with our racial sins. As my late boss at The Montreal Gazette, no fan of the U.S., said, “No other country has seriously tackled racial issues as the United States has.” So we should teach our history, warts and all.

DeSantis may be just beginning his gay-bashing. His bill, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classes, according to the Associated Press.

“Don’t Say Gay” prohibits any sexual instruction before age 10.

(Of course, teaching about sex should begin only at an age when kids can deal with it — we don’t teach algebra in kindergarten, do we? — but I’m not sure that age has been tied down yet. Most likely, it varies from kid to kid.)

But, as Stop WOKE blinds us to our racial history, “Don’t Say Gay” may lead teachers to act as if the subject doesn’t exist. Already, schools have taken all books out of classrooms in Duval County (Jacksonville) and Manatee County (Bradenton), The New Yorker reported on Tuesday.

What scares me perhaps most about DeSantis isn’t that he’s Trump redux. It’s that he’s clearly smarter than Trump and may be less narcissistic. Both have degrees from Ivy League schools — Penn for Trump, Yale and Harvard Law for DeSantis — and DeSantis likely actually went to class.

On the other hand, DeSantis’s public presence is reputed to be less than dynamic. I haven’t seen any presentation by him, so I can’t judge how he comes across.

Here’s hoping he lacks that edge of grievance that helps Trump appeal to whites who feel cheated by the system.

Bob Neal remembers, when living in the South, that poor whites and other whites talking about poor whites would say, “Life may be hard, but at least you’re white. You’re not one of them.” Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.