From the classroom to the clinic, ‘DeSantisism’ is our new fear-drenched McCarthyism

“Remember, it’s not what you say that counts,” went the refrain on TV’s You Don’t Say, a popular game show that aired in the 1960s and ‘70s. “It’s what you don’t say.” That could also be a good new state motto for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida, or for some of his neighbors in the sun-soaked Trump Belt, where a growing climate of fear has everyone from teachers to doctors to drag queens panicked about what they might say — and who is listening.

To find a political precedent for what’s happening in huge swaths of the United States, you would need to summon the “red scare” led by demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, when Hollywood operated under a blacklist and teachers lived in fear that “patriotic groups” would out them (often falsely) as communists. Boomers like me who were born in the shadow of McCarthyism grew up learning, with what can now be seen as the naivety of post-war optimism, that America had learned its lesson from this moral panic.

But today, you can hear the echoes of Joe McCarthy when you read in the Washington Post about a central Florida parent named Barbara Mellon who attended an elementary school open house and casually asked a teacher for book recommendations to excite her second grader about reading. The teacher appeared anxious — school bookshelves have been the latest target of right-wing witch hunters — and then said he couldn’t make one.

Over in Texas, a Dallas woman facing a high-risk pregnancy — one twin fetus was all but certain to die before birth, but the other was healthy — dealt with doctors and nurses who refused to say the word abortion in their consultations, although one doctor told her: “You can’t do anything in Texas and I can’t tell you anything further in Texas, but you need to get out of state.” The woman, who traveled to Colorado to have the unhealthy fetus aborted because of her home state’s strict laws, told NPR about the bizarre experience of “talking in code” with doctors and nurses.

Of course, it could be worse. With Republican-led states targeting the LGBTQ community — especially transgender youth, as well as public events with drag performers — a growing number of Americans live in a fear not just over what they might say but over who they fundamentally are. “My worst fear had come true with no warning and no time buffer or anything,” the Austin, Texas, mother of 5-year-old twins including a transgender girl told NPR last year as she and her husband searched for out-of-state jobs after Gov. Greg Abbott called for state child-welfare investigations of families raising children the way they do.

It’s hardly a secret that Republican governors like DeSantis or Abbott and lawmakers in the 20 or so states with solid GOP control have taken the so-called culture wars — which have been simmering, arguably, since the 1960s — and turned up the heat to new heights. The panic sparked by 2020′s massive Black Lives Matter marches after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd has led to a warped kind of bidding war among these red states over which can adopt the harshest laws to ban discussions of race or punish LGBTQ citizens.

The right-wing’s culture warriors justify their holy crusades by citing a few extreme examples or frequently just making them up — the notion that there are pornographic books in grade school libraries, for example — to imply that the real-world impact of book censorship or edicts like Florida’s much-discussed “Don’t Say Gay” law is actually minimal.

But now that these laws are on the books, the atmosphere of fear and paranoia is what actually affects millions of people. The most clear-cut example is the legion of schoolteachers or college professors across DeSantis’ Florida who are justifiably terrified that one stray comment or homework assignment could end their careers. Then start thinking about all the maternity doctors and nurses who are guarding their every utterance, or all the families raising children who are gay or transgender, and you can see a new, deeply entrenched culture of silence.

One of my fellow columnists, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, has been ahead of the curve in documenting the real impact of the bevy of culture-war laws that have been enacted — especially in the Sunshine State. He noted that the real terror in the laws backed by DeSantis is not their specific targets but their “vagueness” — the ambiguity that causes some school officials to empty entire bookshelves instead of risking getting caught with one or two controversial tomes.

Sargent noted in January that a “recent report by PEN America found many ‘educational gag’ laws around the country are sloppily drafted. That not only creates a larger opening for parents and other citizens to charge violations but also invites them to see plots against their children lurking everywhere. Demagogues are feeding these fears, alleging nefarious schemes to rob kids of their innocence by sexualizing them, or to indoctrinate them into believing their country is inherently white supremacist and evil.”

» READ MORE: The barely hidden fascism of Ron DeSantis makes a Pa. pit stop on a race to ’24

This is McCarthyism 2.0 — with its strong regional focus in the more conservative states of the South and West, and its focus on sex, race, and culture rather than geopolitics. Maybe we should call it DeSantisism (or DeSantism?) after its 21st-century avatar. But what exactly is all this meant to accomplish?

The writer Adam Serwer was 100% right when he wrote during the Donald Trump presidency that “the cruelty is the point” of his grievance-based appeals to rural and working-class voters, resentful of urban elites or others they fear will upend their own culture. But as we near the mid-2020s, we’re moving beyond that. When Trump tells his supporters, as he did earlier this month, that “for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution,” it means that conservatives now want to see their enemies punished, not just denounced.

This is where DeSantis, who seems likely to challenge Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nod, enters the fray. The Florida governor is determined to show that while Trump mostly vegetates up the road at Mar-a-Lago, he is a man of action. His flurry of proposed laws and executive orders that target teachers or professors or protesters or drag shows or even big corporations like Disney are making headlines almost every day. The widespread chaos these vague and increasingly autocratic edicts are causing isn’t beside the point. It is the point.

And now we are seeing that real lives are being affected by all of this — the Florida 14-year-old who confessed to his mother that he’s now afraid to mention his dad’s homosexuality in school because of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, or the Central Florida University professor who, up for tenure, at the last minute canceled two courses that touch on racial issues, declaring, “It wasn’t worth the risk.”

This isn’t exactly the “national divorce” that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene invoked recently, but red and blue America are definitely sleeping in separate bedrooms. The bad news is that by concentrating the cruelty of “DeSantisism” in a handful of states, it can encourage apathy in blue America and a sense of despair among those in red states who no longer feel welcome there.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The muzzled of Florida, Texas, and elsewhere are still American citizens covered by the Bill of Rights and other constitutional freedom. This is not a matter of “state rights” any more than the South’s immoral codes of racial segregation that lasted into the 1960s. Several laws signed by DeSantis have already been tossed out or slowed in the federal courts, and almost all can and should be challenged on First Amendment grounds.

Those of us who live in blue states should also be pushing Congress and the White House to use federal law to protect LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, and academic freedom, no matter where one lives. If we act now, our grandchildren won’t grow up reading about the “red state terror” of “DeSantisism” in their history books.

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