Think about for a second what Donald Trump offers to his common follower. Membership in an enormous nationwide communion of like-minded folks. A paternal determine in a complicated world. The frisson of transgression: middle-aged whites don’t typically in life get to play the insurgent.

Subsequent to all this, what’s the marginal advantage of seeing him win an precise election? What, after that, is the marginal advantage of watching his insurance policies come into pressure? Little question, Trump followers would relatively have these bonus gadgets than not. However he has carried out them a profound emotional and virtually religious service earlier than it ever will get to that.

It’s not clear that Ron DeSantis understands this about populism. Till he does, he received’t displace Trump because the chief of the motion within the US. The governor of Florida trades on his electability and administrative competence. But when both of this stuff was paramount for voters within the Republican primaries, the competition would already be over.

Trump misplaced the midterm elections in 2018. He misplaced the presidential election in 2020. He’s the one president within the 80-odd-year historical past of the Gallup approval-rating ballot by no means to attain 50 per cent. Republican candidates who bear his stamp have a combined electoral file at finest. Even permitting for the widespread and false perception that he was diddled out of a second time period, there have to be plenty of Trump followers who know, deep down, that DeSantis or Nikki Haley would do higher with the nationwide citizens in 2024. Irrespective of. Neither confers on them the sense of tribal belonging that he does. Neither upsets the liberals as a lot.

The governor’s different boast — his govt grip — issues even much less. Simply because liberals have all the time feared the emergence of a reliable demagogue doesn’t imply populist voters have yearned for it to the identical diploma. How a lot of his base did Trump lose after failing to construct that wall on the Mexican border? How a lot of it has gone over to Joe Biden as thanks for passing the largest protectionist invoice in reminiscence?

DeSantis is logical, poor man. He thinks trendy politics is about doing issues. The extent to which it’s about belonging — about changing the group id that individuals as soon as obtained from a church or a commerce union — is misplaced on his rationalist ken. On this one sense, he thinks like a liberal. The left is ceaselessly making an attempt to “reply” populist considerations by reshoring industrial jobs or devolving energy. It is vitally candy, this. And sure, maybe at the beginning, populism was about tangible grievances. However as soon as folks took sides, round 2016, that group membership began to imply extra to them. (As in a long-running conflict whose authentic trigger is misplaced on the belligerents.) Trump perceives this extra clearly than his rivals.

DeSantis believes that politics is downstream of tradition, that tradition is formed in establishments, that conservatives have ceded these establishments to the organised left. The Gramsci of Tallahassee doesn’t simply diagnose the issue. He’s artistic and dogged in putting in a rightwing counter-hegemony. Ask Disney. Ask the tutorial bureaucracies of Florida.

That is extra thought and work than Trump has ever put in to the trigger. It is usually completely inappropriate. I’m not positive that populist voters wish to win the tradition conflict. Simply being in it offers them that means. If something, there’s extra group id in shedding, extra solidarity underneath siege than in triumph. If I’m proper, not one of the governor’s arguments in opposition to Trump — his electoral repellence, his boredom with element — are half as wounding as he hopes.

DeSantis is a case examine within the vibes principle of politics. It doesn’t matter that he’s a honest and efficient populist. He “presents” as a creature of the institution. It’s one thing to do with the Ivy League and navy previous, the dour type of speech, the obvious rectitude (no sexual or monetary scandals) and the dearth of a visible hook in all that neat hair and sober tailoring. Even his file because the chief of a giant state counts in opposition to him. No populist well worth the title could be studying his briefs and enacting concepts with such bureaucratic persistence. “Neeeerrrrd,” you’ll be able to think about Trump shouting at him, à la Homer Simpson, throughout a TV debate studio.

So, a strident rightwinger, from a far humbler background than Trump, is framed as if he had been the newest scion of the Bush clan. He can console himself that he’s in illustrious firm. Rishi Sunak championed Brexit earlier than Boris Johnson did. He subsidised folks to dine out throughout a viral pandemic for which there was no vaccine. His repute amongst populists? Firm man.

janan.ganesh@ft.com