DeSantis and Disney

Florida's government showed Disney the back of its hand for the company's choosing sides in the culture war that spawned the Parental Rights bill, mendaciously dubbed "Don't Say Gay." Disney's brass either fell for the mischaracterization or figured that everyone who mattered to them did, so they chose to run with it. No surprise - the current trend in Corporate America is to side with "woke."

I believe that this trend has more to do with political calculus than principle. Fear of the cancel power of Twitter's packs of braying hyenas suggests a deflective strategy, as in 'be woke enough so that they turn their attention elsewhere.' In the words of Full Metal Jacket's Animal Mother, "better him than me."

This tactic relies on the notion that the Right will grouse about corporate woke, but won't really do anything about it. Consumers will still buy the products, or at least the Left will embrace more than the Right will reject. That's just business math.

Unfortunately for Disney, the bosses fell prey to the classic generals’ mistake: fighting the previous war.

The landscape has changed. The Left went too far - or allowed its extremists too much free rein - and the rest of the country finally started saying 'Enough!' In Virginia, the woke-educrats looking to cram CRT into grade school curricula woke (pun obviously intended) one of the sleeping giants of electoral politics: suburban parents. The Democrats lost a governorship in a state that has been steadily trending blue (as the Beltway plague spread further and further south). Concurrently, the matter of female sports got churned into a frenzy by the Lia Thomas controversy.

On top of those two inflection points, we can overlay the rift between the increasingly censorious and authoritarian leftists whose cultural dominance has been growing and the genuine liberals who recoil at their former comrades-in-arms growing illiberalism. That the Democrats who are running the federal government have proven disastrous in their governance is the icing on the cake.

Disney's leadership didn't take any of that into account, nor did it recognize that Governor DeSantis has been seeking to build his bona fides as a populist conservative ahead of an extremely probable White House run. They assumed invulnerability as they pretty much dared DeSantis to do something.

So, he did. He ended a big fat dollop of cronyism that Disney has been enjoying for half a century. He did so in retaliation, something that government shouldn’t do.

None of the actors in this bit are walking the high moral road, and we can acknowledge that this action by Florida lawmakers is fraught even as we nod our heads over the elimination of a carve-out that runs contrary to level-playing-field and free-market principles. The 'payback' is both unseemly and troubling, but Disney deserves no tears, either. While the motives are discreditable, the outcome aligns with a more libertarian and egalitarian perspective. So, I'll take it.

Disney stock hasn't been doing that well of late, and commentators on the Right have suggested it's at least in part due to cultural backlash. Netflix stock recently took a giant hit as well, after reporting a loss of a couple hundred thousand subscribers, and a predicted loss of 2 million next quarter. That both Disney and Netflix have been aggressively going woke into their original programming is no secret, as have most other big entertainment companies. Whether this correlation is truly causation is arguable, but if it quacks like a duck…

The shame of it is that, culturally, the nation is better poised than ever toward acceptance, but the ham-fisted and over-the-top rush to make sure every new show is a cultural Benetton ad is so in-your-face and condescendingly preachy that good people are being turned off by it. Already, network television is unwatchable because of this, and it is spreading into streaming. It'd be tragic if the progress made in cultural acceptance is undone by their excess, but with each passing day I see more likelihood of the pendulum over-swinging rather than simply correcting.

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An addendum. Some have argued that this will actually hurt Floridians, who will have to pick up the tab for services currently managed by Disney. That’s a “devil in the details” bit that’s actually irrelevant to principle. The “level playing field” is a fundamental, not a utilitarian perspective, nor should it be limited to best financial benefit. Would we think it right if DeSantis slapped a big fat punitive tax on Disney, the way Elizabeth Warren wants to tax oil companies during a period of high prices? Hardly.

It remains to be seen how the dollars shake out from this change. But, as to principle… no, it’s not upright for a governor to slap payback on an entity within his purview, and no, it’s not upright for an entity to hold special privileges that others do not enjoy.

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