What exactly does it mean to be a hardscrabble American?

Presidential candidates do lots of silly things to convince voters they possess that magical quality known as “authenticity.” Some pretend to have blue-collar tastes. Some tell nostalgic stories about their simple childhoods. And some try to appropriate the authenticity of certain American places — whether it accurately represents who they are or not.

That last tactic is particularly irksome. Whenever a candidate — even an undeclared one — tells you they represent the superior values of a particular state or region (almost invariably from the rural, manufacturing or Appalachian heartlands), they’re usually trying to capture the downscale and traditional appeals of those places. They want to convince you their roots are more worthy of national office than those of places supposedly less saturated in realness, even if the latter is where most Americans live.

It might seem as though Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wouldn’t even try to play this game, seeing as he hails from America’s most surreal state, where people throw alligators through drive-through windows and call 911 to get a ride to Hooters. DeSantis (R) grew up in the town of Dunedin, a perfectly ordinary suburb of Tampa. Love him or hate him, there is nothing hardscrabble or poetic about DeSantis’s life story.

Perhaps that’s why he has decided to search elsewhere for the salt-ofthe-earth realness that Florida lacks. In his campaign book, he tells readers that despite a lifetime in Florida, he’s actually from Ohio, kind of:

“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”

Apparently, people in Florida do not work hard, fear God or love America — at least not the way they did in the redoubt of Rust Belt customs that was the DeSantis home.

This rich cultural legacy is also being passed to the next generation of DeSantises. After a recent trip to Ohio, the governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis,

tweeted that “Ohio was where I was raised — the great Midwestern values instilled upon me as a child will hopefully live on in my children.” During that trip, the governor told an audience, “I can stand here representing Ohio values because (of) the two most important women in my life: my mother was from Youngstown, and my wife is from Troy.”

So what, precisely, are these Midwestern or Ohio “values,” and how do they differ from the values of other parts of America? If the spirit of the Rust Belt courses through DeSantis’s veins, how does it manifest itself? Are his decisions different from those of other conservative Republicans who were not raised hearing tales of western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio around the hearth?

The answer is: of course not. Whatever distinguishes DeSantis from other Republicans, it’s not his “Ohio values,” because there isn’t any such thing.

In fairness, it isn’t only Republicans who seek to acquire this ridiculous place-based authenticity. As you likely know if you’ve heard President Joe Biden talk for more than five minutes, he hails from Scranton, Pa. The city is meant to evoke something honest and true — a place where people work hard for modest reward. And if Biden’s bottomless library of wisdom from his elders is any indication, Scrantonites pummel their young ones with a relentless torrent of homespun aphorisms.

Every place has its own identity, but the idea that “values” can only be found in certain locales is repulsive. The truth is that every corner of America contains the hard-working and the lazy, the generous and the selfish, those who struggle and those who don’t.

And even if many people in the Rust Belt today have experienced adversity from economic decline, DeSantis is certainly not among them. He’s part of the contemporary American elite, schooled at the finest institutions as he rode the conveyor belt of success.

It’s not the same elite that produced the Roosevelts and Bushes, the kind of people who used “summer” as a verb and strolled about oak-paneled rooms with snifters of brandy in their hands. Rather, DeSantis emerged from the “meritocracy,” which handsomely rewards characters of uncreative but diligent intellect who are determined to barrel their way to the top.

But we have an odd notion that places are authentic only to the degree their best days are in the past. So to make himself seem more genuine, DeSantis reaches for the only geographic surrogate he has available: the state his parents are from. In so doing, he follows in a long line of candidates telling how they grew up in a small town, or on a farm, or in a oneroom shack with no running water.

Few things are phonier than a politician trying to demonstrate their authenticity. America is a rich and varied nation with a multitude of subcultures, and we’re all shaped by where we’re from. But if you’re trying to say you’re real because your parents grew up in one of our rustier corners, then you’ve only proven the opposite.