I'm a Brit who lived in Georgia (mostly south Georgia) for more than 20 years. Reading this, I found myself reminded of what a Brit told Anglophile Helene Hanff (84, Charing Cross Road) when she wondered aloud if she would find the England of literature. "It's there," he assured her. She would , in other words, find what she was looking for.
A fellow academic in south Georgia, a man from Pennsylvania, used to joke that our fastest way out of the South was to drive south. I know what he meant. Florida's craziness isn't hard to find, but we found more people there who seemed like non-Southern Americans, more "normal" to us non-Southerners. I can't help thinking from watching BBC travel shows, that finding the weird, ghastly, and laughable in Florida (or in California) is like shooting fish in a barrel. The big cars, guns, Disney, sorted. It's like going to England and doing Beamish, Stratford and Haworth, then possibly Sunderland for balance. The danger isn't in mockery or stereotyping, though. It's in the possibility of false correlation, of assuming that people vote as they do from monolithic reasons, of assuming that cars, guns, Disney, unfounded resentment, racism, or whatever, is sufficient explanation for why so many Floridians, and Americans, vote as they do. But the people I've met in "red states" yes, and especially in Florida are more complicated than that, and their (often reasonable,) concerns about being condescended to and ignored have met with... very real condescension. Trouble is, it's hard to build a coherent narrative from such material, much less an entertaining one.
Yes, I agree with all that, but my counterpoint is that stereotypes and mythology often are something which people themselves embrace, and so it’s legitimate to explore them.
I would love to see more of Georgia—I crossed the state border from Tallahassee and saw Thomasville, which was a very pretty town, but there wasn’t time to go further.
Sorry, Helen, I know comments are no place for debate, so my hope is just too press you to dig deeper. I'm hardly uncritical of Georgia, or Florida. But I know there's a lot more complexity, even among the most stereotyped people, than I ever see reported. Just hoping to get journalists to sit down with people. But this is an inadequate medium for that.
Interesting comments. I was going to write that Florida seems resonant with Millwall Football Club in south east London, whose terrace chant - “everybody hates us and we don’t care” - seems the ultimate rejection of post war suburban values. Oops - looks like I did anyway....but the comments remind me that generalising is a little to close to demonising for comfort. Makes your job verrrry difficult!
I always wonder how unique Florida is in its weirdos. I've heard that the open records policies - "Sunshine" laws - are in part responsible for the creation of the "Florida Man" narrative, and gave people like Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry a lot of material for their stories. Do other states have similarly crazy stories buried in their police reports?
Reading the piece it’s hard to see why so many Republicans think De Santis is the future. Which suggests to me Helen has missed something important. For me it was impressive that he mastered the information on Covid and made decisions based on that rather than follow the herd. And the end result has not been any kind of an outlier in terms of deaths. The bit at the start where De Santis is weirdly blamed/not blamed for an old person not taking the vaccine did nothing to make me think that Helen was going to be doing much in the way of steel manning. I know she writes for The Atlantic but she is better than this!
Thanks for that. I know not everybody wants to take the Scott Alexander approach but I still feel you are missing something interesting about the man. Let me put it like this, without pretending to stuff you don’t actually believe, is there anything admirable about the man? The incidents you mentioned eg the milk thing and what supposedly happened at Guantanamo, well I can understand why his team were sceptical about getting a fair deal. (Anyway, to be clear, I admire your writing hugely and you’re the main reason I have a subscription to the Atlantic. I just thought this was not very illuminating on his strengths).
Most people are not aware that Carl Hiaason's novels are NOT fiction...(speaking of which, his last name would be a good Saturday NY Times crossword puzzle answer.
My bookclub read a murder mystery set in 1920s or 30s Florida, and in the conversation that ensued, so much came out about state history and how the ways in Florida have never been like any other state. This is a great intro and I look forward to reading the entire article.
'and yet now he insists he was a denigrated, downtrodden outsider trapped among the toffee-nosed pinkos in his class.' I have never heard, or seen, DeSantis describe his experience in this distortedly, exaggerated way.
From the piece: "They hated God,” he told Tucker Carlson of his classmates. “They hated the country.” He also said they mocked him for wearing jean shorts.
He's repeated this a couple of times and it's in his book, too: Chapters 1 & 2. "As a rising college freshman, I really had no idea of what I was getting into regarding campus ideology or political culture. Of course, universities in general and “elite” universities, in particular, have increasingly devolved into hyper-leftist institutions concerned less with educating students in the classical sense than in inculcating them with their ideological worldview. [...] Before my time at Yale, I had never seen a limousine, much less a limousine liberal. Those students who were the most strident in their leftism—anti-American, anti–market economics, anti-God—came from some of the most privileged backgrounds."
I'm a Brit who lived in Georgia (mostly south Georgia) for more than 20 years. Reading this, I found myself reminded of what a Brit told Anglophile Helene Hanff (84, Charing Cross Road) when she wondered aloud if she would find the England of literature. "It's there," he assured her. She would , in other words, find what she was looking for.
A fellow academic in south Georgia, a man from Pennsylvania, used to joke that our fastest way out of the South was to drive south. I know what he meant. Florida's craziness isn't hard to find, but we found more people there who seemed like non-Southern Americans, more "normal" to us non-Southerners. I can't help thinking from watching BBC travel shows, that finding the weird, ghastly, and laughable in Florida (or in California) is like shooting fish in a barrel. The big cars, guns, Disney, sorted. It's like going to England and doing Beamish, Stratford and Haworth, then possibly Sunderland for balance. The danger isn't in mockery or stereotyping, though. It's in the possibility of false correlation, of assuming that people vote as they do from monolithic reasons, of assuming that cars, guns, Disney, unfounded resentment, racism, or whatever, is sufficient explanation for why so many Floridians, and Americans, vote as they do. But the people I've met in "red states" yes, and especially in Florida are more complicated than that, and their (often reasonable,) concerns about being condescended to and ignored have met with... very real condescension. Trouble is, it's hard to build a coherent narrative from such material, much less an entertaining one.
Yes, I agree with all that, but my counterpoint is that stereotypes and mythology often are something which people themselves embrace, and so it’s legitimate to explore them.
I would love to see more of Georgia—I crossed the state border from Tallahassee and saw Thomasville, which was a very pretty town, but there wasn’t time to go further.
Sorry, Helen, I know comments are no place for debate, so my hope is just too press you to dig deeper. I'm hardly uncritical of Georgia, or Florida. But I know there's a lot more complexity, even among the most stereotyped people, than I ever see reported. Just hoping to get journalists to sit down with people. But this is an inadequate medium for that.
Interesting comments. I was going to write that Florida seems resonant with Millwall Football Club in south east London, whose terrace chant - “everybody hates us and we don’t care” - seems the ultimate rejection of post war suburban values. Oops - looks like I did anyway....but the comments remind me that generalising is a little to close to demonising for comfort. Makes your job verrrry difficult!
Fun piece, even had a tiny bit of gonzo in it and it made me want more.
Hello helen. I have a very simple question for you. Why do you hate right wing so much?
I always wonder how unique Florida is in its weirdos. I've heard that the open records policies - "Sunshine" laws - are in part responsible for the creation of the "Florida Man" narrative, and gave people like Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry a lot of material for their stories. Do other states have similarly crazy stories buried in their police reports?
Reading the piece it’s hard to see why so many Republicans think De Santis is the future. Which suggests to me Helen has missed something important. For me it was impressive that he mastered the information on Covid and made decisions based on that rather than follow the herd. And the end result has not been any kind of an outlier in terms of deaths. The bit at the start where De Santis is weirdly blamed/not blamed for an old person not taking the vaccine did nothing to make me think that Helen was going to be doing much in the way of steel manning. I know she writes for The Atlantic but she is better than this!
Thanks Russell, I think you’re right that the Covid policies were a big draw for many voters — particularly reopening schools. I wrote about that after the midterms: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/desantiss-covid-gamble-paid-off/672063/
Thanks for that. I know not everybody wants to take the Scott Alexander approach but I still feel you are missing something interesting about the man. Let me put it like this, without pretending to stuff you don’t actually believe, is there anything admirable about the man? The incidents you mentioned eg the milk thing and what supposedly happened at Guantanamo, well I can understand why his team were sceptical about getting a fair deal. (Anyway, to be clear, I admire your writing hugely and you’re the main reason I have a subscription to the Atlantic. I just thought this was not very illuminating on his strengths).
Most people are not aware that Carl Hiaason's novels are NOT fiction...(speaking of which, his last name would be a good Saturday NY Times crossword puzzle answer.
My bookclub read a murder mystery set in 1920s or 30s Florida, and in the conversation that ensued, so much came out about state history and how the ways in Florida have never been like any other state. This is a great intro and I look forward to reading the entire article.
'and yet now he insists he was a denigrated, downtrodden outsider trapped among the toffee-nosed pinkos in his class.' I have never heard, or seen, DeSantis describe his experience in this distortedly, exaggerated way.
From the piece: "They hated God,” he told Tucker Carlson of his classmates. “They hated the country.” He also said they mocked him for wearing jean shorts.
He's repeated this a couple of times and it's in his book, too: Chapters 1 & 2. "As a rising college freshman, I really had no idea of what I was getting into regarding campus ideology or political culture. Of course, universities in general and “elite” universities, in particular, have increasingly devolved into hyper-leftist institutions concerned less with educating students in the classical sense than in inculcating them with their ideological worldview. [...] Before my time at Yale, I had never seen a limousine, much less a limousine liberal. Those students who were the most strident in their leftism—anti-American, anti–market economics, anti-God—came from some of the most privileged backgrounds."