By Chris Satullo
As he tries to romance the anti-elitist MAGA mob, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn’t often mention that he attended that ivied bastion, Yale, for his bachelor’s degree, followed by a stint at Harvard Law.
I can’t know for sure, but I’m just guessing that, while he was an Eli, Gov. Ron never studied the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Or if he did, that class clearly left no imprint on his mind.
Kant was a 5-foot-2 German intellectual giant who formulated the influential moral principle known as the categorical imperative.
In English, it says this: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity…never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” In other words, every person has intrinsic worth that must be respected; it is always wrong to act in pursuit of your goals without regard for another’s dignity or well-being.
Why am I invoking the name of an 18th-century Teutonic thinker alongside that of a 21st-century Floridian wanker?
It has to do with a speck of an island that sits in the Atlantic due south of the bent elbow of Cape Cod – and about 1,300 miles further south from the Tallahassee office where DeSantis ceaselessly plots his path to another office, the one with an oval shape.
Yes, the name that connects ambitious Ron to old Immanuel is the quaint one of Martha’s Vineyard.
How to describe DeSantis’ recent decision to trick a couple planeloads of Venezuelan asylum seekers into flying to the Massachusetts island in hopes of finding jobs and help, only to dump them there without support, concern, or any warning to the island locals (or their Republican governor)? The words evil stunt leap to mind.
This was a blatant transgression of Kant’s categorical imperative. DeSantis manifestly had no concern for anyone on either side of his trumped-up transaction. Not the Venezuelans who’d fled conditions in their native land which even DeSantis (when pursuing other political goals) has called “horrific.” And surely not the people of the resort community of the Vineyard, who woke up one morning to find a humanitarian crisis dumped randomly in their lap. A crisis not for them, but for their baffled, anxious visitors.
Florida’s chief executive treated the migrants solely, and brutally, as means to an end. And the end was itself silly and morally worthless. DeSantis wanted to scarf up airtime on Fox, cater to nativist MAGA anger and, most of all, play catchup with a political rival, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’d already scored headlines by sending busloads of migrants from his state to New York City and Washington D.C.
Apologists for DeSantis and Abbott say they were just making a needed point:
Instead of looking south with a gaze of an elitist judgment, Northerners who support immigration to America should pitch in more to deal with the challenges and problems, instead of dumping them primarily upon Sun Belt states.
It’s a fair point, up to a point. Immigration is a national issue, and its challenges should not be contracted out only to a few unlucky states.
But you could hardly find a worse, less convincing, more unethical way to make the point than what Abbott and DeSantis chose. Instead of talking in advance to governors and mayors in the places they targeted, so that services and support could be lined up by the time the asylum seekers arrived, they pulled a stealth stunt. Their goal was to make those Northern cities and towns look bad, no matter what stress and hardship it caused the Venezuelans who were only trying to escape another situation where egotistical politicians glibly inflict pain on their constituents.
(Remember: These people were not illegal border crossers; they had followed our rules for presenting themselves upon arrival on our turf to claim asylum due to a dangerous situation in their home nation. A dangerous situation which DeSantis and Donald Trump decry loudly when it suits their partisan purposes.)
Abbott, at least, slightly mitigated the moral turpitude of his stunt by sending people to cities that have jobs and support services. DeSantis chose the Vineyard, an isolated, posh summer resort community where many businesses were shutting down and social services are scant…why?
For no other stupid reason than to “own the libs,” to send these poor pawns he’d duped into his scheme to an island where the Obamas and other progressive potentates like to summer. Apparently, he got the idea from a smug, chortling rant by none other than Tucker Carlson.
Even after the first bursts of outrage at his stunt, reporting has revealed more aspects to DeSantis’ utter failure of the Immanuel Kant test. He “borrowed” the Venezuelans from Abbott’s state, Texas, because his own really doesn’t have any glut of asylum seekers. Reporting has revealed that his agents flat out lied to the migrants about where they were headed, the availability of jobs, and the scope of services that they would be offered. A sheriff in Texas says he’ll investigate the “abuse of human rights” involved.
Here’s the great, and satisfying, irony: Tucker Carlson – and his Ivy League-educated governor friend who should know better – were gleeful at the prospect that people who live on the Vineyard would respond to his stunt by being baffled, indignant, incompetent, and transparently hypocritical.
Instead, while being justifiably pissed at DeSantis, they banded together to give the Venezuelans shelter, food, kindness and a communal welcome. They stepped up in precisely in the way you’d hope Americans, a nation composed almost entirely of immigrants and their descendants, would.
(And, no, despite lies from lying websites like Gateway Pundit, they didn’t “deport” the migrants with 48 hours. Gov. Baker mobilized to offer the Venezuelans transport to mainland Massachusetts, where they could more easily connect with jobs and services – and make plans to move to parts of America where they might know someone.)
DeSantis must not have ever met any of the people who live on the Vineyard if he thought they would treat the people whom he put on that plane in the way he and the lickspittle pundits of Fox News hoped.
This points to a great, sad truth of our polarized nation. On each side, conservative and progressive, people seize upon examples of awful behavior and lame rhetoric by the other side. They wield them to weave an elaborate narrative about how utterly, unredeemably ignorant, biased, awful and…come to think of it…evil the other side is.
In 2018, a “Perception Gap” study by the group More in Common found that both Democrats and Republicans believed people on the “other side” held “extreme views” at nearly twice the rate that they actually do. (The numbers are probably worse today.)
Both sides use the dark portraits they’ve concocted to justify their consciences – citing whatever violations of Kant’s categorical imperative they can to flatter their egos, demonstrate their superior righteousness, win a policy battle, or triumph at the polls.
They do all this while actively shunning any contact or independent information about what the other side actually thinks or does, because Why bother? We already know those people are evil.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not asserting a false equivalence. I believe the Republican party, as a political organization, has lost its mind and is actively seeking to destroy the Republic. By contrast, I think progressives, trapped in their own mental silos, sometimes do self-defeating, misguided, harmful and hypocritical things. But the damage they do pales next to what’s being perpetrated these days by the MAGA Man, his clones, and their cultists.
That said, I don’t assume every Republican buys that whole package, or even major parts of it. I assume the best about every voter I meet, giving them multiple chances to prove me wrong.
Here’s the main thing: Kant’s categorical imperative, that brief but stern test, doesn’t give you a free pass for your failures simply because the other side maybe did something worse. Kant provides the antidote to whataboutism. His ghost says to us: We’re not talking about them right now. We’re talking about you. Are you going to do the right thing, or not?
The people of the Vineyard did the right thing. Let’s emulate them, not the DeSantises, Abbotts and Carlsons of the world.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia