Too Much Nuance For the Press

There’s an interesting story at CNN.com about Ron DeSantis getting heat from “conservatives” about his policies in Florida. I find it interesting because I have difficulty finding the conservatives in the piece.

The center-right divide is just too nuanced for too much of the press. It is very much like when the media confuses mainline Christianity and mainstream Christianity. The former consists of the dying churches of the upper-income white establishment, and the latter consists of Southern Baptists, charismatics, and evangelicals.

I don’t mean to pick on CNN, but when it lists the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as a conservative group, it has lost all semblance of understanding the right. There are conservatives, populists, libertarians, and others on the right. FIRE is libertarian, which CNN uses in a story about conservatives opposing DeSantis while labeling FIRE “a right-of-center First Amendment group.”

Likewise, the headline is “Ron DeSantis’ use of government power to implement agenda worries some conservatives,” and it includes this quote:

“I’m a genuine libertarian; I’m kind of a live-and-let-live kind of girl,” [Club for Growth board member Frayda] Levin told CNN. She said she has no problem with candidates espousing strongly held personal beliefs on social issues but said she objects to DeSantis “putting the power of his state behind his socially conservative views.”

That’s a nuance not really given a distinction with the headline. Within the GOP, there has always been a divide between the fiscal folks, who are libertarian-oriented, and the socially conservative folks. In fact, the Club for Growth, has always been defined as fiscally focused, not socially focused.

“DeSantis is always talking about he was not demanding that businesses do things, but he was telling the cruise lines what they had to do,” former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a fellow Republican, said of DeSantis last year. Hogan has remained critical of the Florida governor as he weighs entering the mix for the Republican nomination.

There too, Hogan is a reliably moderate Republican who is not seen as a conservative by anyone on the right, just in the press.

I don’t mean to nitpick, but the article's headline would be fine if it read, “Ron DeSantis’ use of government power to implement agenda worries some on the right.” Instead, using the word “conservatives” puts the headline in dispute with the article itself.

This is a basic problem with the national press corps when it delves into intra-party divides on the right. There is more nuance than the press understands about the divisions, and in trying to capture those divisions, it too often paints a picture that does not conform to reality while so often failing to appreciate the historic tensions on the right between the fiscal and social sides of the conservative movement and the GOP as a political party.