We’re all on this factor collectively.
Or so we wish to say. However Ron DeSantis’ hypocrisy simply punched a gap via that supreme.
In 2013, when Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, the then-Florida congressman piously declined to help a invoice offering $9.7 billion in assist to those that had seen their properties broken or destroyed. “I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy,” he declared, however added that it will not be “fiscally accountable” to extend the debt with no lower in spending.
Fortunately, the invoice handed with out his — or 67 different Home Republicans’ — help. In any other case, all these folks worn out by a freak storm would have needed to strive paying their payments with DeSantis’ sympathy.
Now, 9 years later, right here he comes as Florida’s governor, asking Joe Biden — a president he has ridiculed tastelessly and repeatedly, no much less — to offer catastrophe aid for his state, which was swamped final week by Hurricane Ian. Out of the blue, he's singing a really totally different tune, telling Fox “Information” that, “When individuals are combating for his or her lives, when their entire livelihood is at stake, once they’ve misplaced every little thing — in the event you can’t put politics apart for that, you then’re simply not going to have the ability to.”
One suspects any New Jerseyan who stood within the rubble of his life 9 years in the past listening to this man inform him to go fly a kite may have a pungent response to that sanctimonious load of bovine egesta. However DeSantis is not only a hypocrite, he’s additionally a form of secessionist, albeit considered one of comfort.
That phrase is used not within the sense of a authorized breaking away however, moderately, within the sense of an emotional and non secular one, a pulling away from the entire, such that one could be untroubled by smash that falls on one’s putative countrymen as long as one’s rapid environs are unscathed. However once more, DeSantis is a secessionist of comfort: He scorned federal assist till he wanted federal assist. Along with his personal state largely underwater, this most political of creatures instantly discovers a have to “put politics apart.”
President Biden is keen on reminding us, although with an rising fringe of pleading to his voice, that, “We're america of America.” In order that what threatens any of us should concern all of us. To make certain, Individuals stay a folks of heroic generosity, keen to journey lengthy miles, work lengthy hours, contribute massive quantities to assist brothers and sisters in want.
However DeSantis’ hypocrisy, his secession of comfort from the perfect of the bigger us, suggests a unique mannequin of Americanism, one which, whereas it has but to take broad maintain, appears ominously consonant with our divided, schism-ridden politics and, extra to the purpose, with the transactional, what’s-in-it-for-me ethos popularized by his former political patron. That means the man who initially stiffed California and Puerto Rico once they wanted catastrophe aid, the man who, based on “This Will Not Cross,” a e-book by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns of The New York Occasions, required states to “ask me properly” for assist.
Make no mistake: Florida ought to obtain from the federal authorities each dime it must rebuild. That’s what household does for household: It sacrifices. But one wonders whether or not a secessionist of comfort will keep in mind that as soon as the waters recede and rebuilding begins. And one doubts.
It's good to imagine we’re all on this factor collectively. However a few of us don’t maintain with that. They’ll name you once they want you.
Until then, you’re all on this factor by yourselves.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a Miami Herald columnis. ©2022 Miami Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.