Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has launched a “Prescribe Freedom” campaign, which while mostly aimed at prohibiting COVD-19 mask and vaccine requirements, pledges “Permanent Protections Against the Biomedical Security State.” The campaign places DeSantis in the vanguard of the “medical freedom” movement as GOP legislators across the country follow suit.
Some observations:
While anti-vaxxers have been on the fringes of both the left and the right for years, the GOP embrace of medical freedom as a partisan wedge issue vastly increases the number of folks under the spell.
There will be a cost to public health in increased sickness, higher medical expenditures, more deaths, and even the return of serious diseases, from measles to polio, that have been virtually eliminated. Americans who embrace science, who regard mandatory vaccinations as offering freedom from infectious diseases in their communities and their children’s schools, and not just anti-science/anti-government partisans, will experience the downside of this campaign.
As the rhetoric demonstrates, it is part and parcel of the decades-long crusade of the GOP attacking science (as well as scientific and medical authorities and public health directives that rely on scientific evidence) – “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science” in Mann and Ornstein’s classic description of the Republican Party as “an insurgent outlier.” Last August, DeSantis mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci during a “Keep Florida Free” rally:
“I’m just sick of seeing him,” DeSantis said during the Florida GOP’s “Keep Florida Free” rally days after Fauci announced he would be stepping down from government. “I know he says he’s going to retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
This campaign isn't, of course, based on a review of evidence or a balanced weighing of risks and benefits. The conclusions, which have been reverse-engineered to own the libs, are predetermined. The belligerent rhetoric is a tip-off. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the governor chose his state's surgeon general based on a reasoned assessment. Instead, Joseph Ladapo was selected for his 'contrarian' views, which have appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall St. Journal.
This campaign is aimed squarely at angry white evangelical voters – chiefly men, whose version of medical freedom does not include reproductive health. Consider Texas – where Governor Greg Abbott is doing his best to top DeSantis in a performative lurch toward the authoritarian right: we can see how abortion bans threaten the lives and health of women and may deny standard of care treatment, thus endangering their ability to have children in the future. The month after the Dobbs decision, DeSantis signed a bill banning abortion after 15-weeks; the governor has pledged to sign a 6-week abortion ban. That intrusion by the state into the reproductive healthcare of women is consistent, apparently, with medical freedom.
Nor have the invocations of freedom inhibited the governor from denying transgender youth gender-affirming care, removing Medicaid funding for gender-affirming treatment of Floridians of all ages, or seeking details about gender-affirming medical care provided to students (of all ages) from healthcare providers at the state’s public universities.
Consider Utah, among the Republican-controlled states rushing to enact anti-trans legislation. The New York Times offers an interview with the rare Republican legislator who has pushed back against the vicious partisan tide. The interview reveals a man who believes in limited government, who thinks that the state has no business interfering with the lives of the LBGT community, and whose work on hate-crimes legislation and suicide-prevention led him to learn that trans kids were especially at risk.
Don’t expect understanding or compassion from DeSantis for any group whose interests and welfare are unlikely to be met with good grace by the MAGA base. Republican attacks on the trans community serve to increase the turnout of evangelical voters. That's the point.
And note that Florida – with the blessing of DeSantis – is among the 11 states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage to people without health insurance. "Nineteen percent of people in the coverage gap live in Florida...." (That percentage is likely to grow if, as some believe, North Carolina ends its holdout status.) The uninsured in Florida have reason to be underwhelmed by the governor's Prescribe Freedom campaign.
For Ron DeSantis, coercive state power is a tool to enforce his will, to impose his cramped vision on others. Many Republicans have gleefully embraced the DeSantis agenda. But invocations of freedom can't hide the authoritarian project that is underway.
When we step back and survey what DeSantis – whose domination of state government can be seen at every level – has actually done in Florida, the picture is hardly consistent with expanding freedom. Politico offered this recap:
DeSantis’ adroitness at positioning himself as a national leader in a series of high-profile culture war issues has helped secure him a spot as one of the country’s most popular governors — and most powerful Republicans.
He’s used funds linked to Covid-19 relief to transport migrants on airplanes from Texas to the liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, traveled to blue states to talk about rising crime, undermined Disney’s special tax status after the company rebuked Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, restricted abortion rights, targeted gender-affirming care and barred high school students from taking a new advanced placement course on African American studies.
This is hardly an agenda that bolsters freedom. This is divisive own-the-libs bullying. It is, as the governor sometimes emphasizes, a war on "woke." DeSantis (with MAGA Republicans across the country), leaning harder into the culture war, is taking up the mantle of strongman to divide the country and batter his opponents.
The Florida governor is riling up white voters who are fearful of change and regard themselves as victims. These are the folks most likely to cast ballots in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. DeSantis has shown them, again and again, that he will not hesitate to use the power of the state to punish those he regards as his (and their) enemies. He is serving up retribution, not freedom.