Why is Florida’s governor picking a fight with one of the state’s biggest employers and one of the country’s most beloved corporations?
Ron DeSantis vs. Disney: Explained
The war between Disney and Ron DeSantis more or less started last year.
Disney publicly pushed back against the “Don’t Say Gay” law that Governor DeSantis championed in Florida.
Rather than backing down or simply ignoring Disney, Ron DeSantis determined to punish the corporation by changing the terms under which it did business in Florida.
Disney had long enjoyed special rights in and near its Florida properties. This arrangement was supposed to ensure comity between the state and the company and make administration of Disney’s extensive properties more efficient and convenient.
For its part, the House of Mouse is waging a complicated legal battle at the state and federal levels, contending that it has been unfairly and illegally targeted by the state government.
Most recently, Disney announced that it would not go ahead with a massive development office that would have brought 2000 high-paying jobs and considerable tax revenue to Florida.
There’s no indication that Disney wants this fight, although there’s also not much evidence that it’s suffered in any meaningful way from the Florida governor’s attacks.
Disney is obviously committed by geography and infrastructure to remain in Florida long-term, although the extent of its future investment is in question.
Disney also serves a customer base that sits astride the political divide, and thus has little interest in partisan politics.
Sources of Corporate “Wokeism”
In this, Ron DeSantis (and other critics of corporate cultural messaging) probably mistakes cause for effect.
Disney and the great number of other corporations that have adopted messaging that reflect modern diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) thinking haven’t done so because they want to change the national culture or intervene in tense political debates.
Instead, these corporations (and governments, and universities) have generally undertaken these internal reforms because of pressure from their own workforces.
The United States is increasingly diverse on numerous axes, and workers (especially in knowledge and creative industries) have come to have expectations about the conditions under which they labor and the public face the corporation puts forward.
“Wokeism” is less about satisfying critics on social media than it is about ensuring that firms don’t face unpleasant internal revolts and retain access to the increasingly diverse labor pool.
Indeed, Disney struggled to make the case to its own workers that the new facility in Florida was a good idea at all, notwithstanding the massive tax breaks that the corporation would enjoy.
Modern creative workforces generally don’t want to live in states with the kind of politically enforced culture that Ron DeSantis and his compatriots favor.
Building an Anti-Corporate Case
There’s an argument for Governor DeSantis’s action against Disney, but it’s rarely been made on the political right.
Corporations are, after all, legal fictions, and as legal fictions they serve the public good. If they begin to act contrary to the public good, their rights can and should be severely curtailed.
Calls to discipline (or even abolish) corporations have long had a home on the political left, which has favored strong government action against corporations in a wide array of fields.
Typically, though, these calls have involved safety standards, excessive profits, monopoly concerns, or labor relations issues, and not intervention in the Culture War.
Ron DeSantis is not alone in the GOP in adopting anti-corporate language, but his attacks on Disney are among the most visible and aggressive examples of the phenomenon.
Indeed, some on the Left have been hesitant in their critiques of DeSantis.
However, the prospect of state governors using government power to enforce cultural homogeneity is hardly the kind of pressure that critics of corporate power have sought.
Ron DeSantis Wins?
Ron DeSantis believes at least one of two things. On the one hand, maybe he’s taking a principled stand against the manufacture and appropriation of culture by major American corporations. On the other, he thinks that what he’s doing will look good in front of the voters, either in the GOP Presidential primary or the general election.
At the moment both of these look sketchy; the principle that corporations should bow before government is not one that has typically held in American economic history, and it seems unlikely that many voters will give him much credit for waging war against the Mouse.
Ron DeSantis may know what he doing, or he may simply be desperate to rescue a Presidential campaign that looks, at the moment, to be flailing badly.
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A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.