Ron DeSantis credits ‘Rust Belt’ values with surviving Ivy League liberalism

Gov. Ron DeSantis may be the pride of Dunedin, but when it came to surviving the liberal crucibles of Yale and Harvard Law School, so-called “Rust Belt” values were what got him through.

The Governor offered that insight during an appearance on the Fox News Channel‘s “Life, Liberty, and Levin,” which is set to air Sunday evening.

“My father’s from western Pennsylvania, my mother’s from Northeastern Ohio. So that is like steel country. That is like blue collar salt of the earth and, as you know Mark, Florida’s very eclectic. People kind of come from all over, we do have a culture and so I grew up in that culture, but really it was kind of those Rust Belt values that raised me.”

Rust Belt values weren’t all that he took to Yale, however. He also found that Florida’s informal dress code was a poor fit for undergraduate studies up north.

“I show up my first day and in Florida we would wear things like jean shorts, flip flops, and a t-shirt. So I show up my first day wearing that and you’ve got kids from Andover and Groton and I was a fish out of water and it was a major, major culture shock.”

That sartorial difference underscored a philosophical one for young DeSantis as well.

“I wasn’t like a refined conservative in terms of politics, because I was mostly into sports and things like that. But you start sitting in some of these classrooms and even though one of Yale’s mottoes is ‘For God, for country, for Yale,’ sit in the classroom attacking religion, attacking God, attacking the United States. I’m sitting in class and they’re saying that the U.S. was to blame for the Cold War,” DeSantis lamented.

“I had never experienced that because growing up in Dunedin, I didn’t know if people were Republican or Democrat. You know, you had both of them, but everyone kind of believed in the core American principles and so that was my exposure to the left and I think what it did for me was it was so different from what I thought was appropriate that I wasn’t influenced by it in terms of it, pulling me in that direction, I rebelled the other way.”

Ultimately, DeSantis was able to overcome the handicaps of an elite Ivy League education and frame it as a positive to conservative Primary voters when he ran for Congress in 2012, telling them “I got through Yale and Harvard and came out more conservative than when I went in. The swamp’s gonna have nothing on that and they appreciated that.”

The “swamp” term, of course, was popularized by former President Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign, years after DeSantis first ran for Congress. But we assume the Governor’s point stands.