“Parasite off of Empire”: It’s Time for Republicans to Act Against Disney’s Attack on America’s Children

Last week Florida’s legislature passed and Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill taking away Disney’s control of the land where Disney World sits and putting it in the hands of a board appointed by the governor. He also spared Florida taxpayers a massive tax hike by allowing Disney to keep taxing itself to service its $1 billion bond debt. Critics have accused DeSantis of caving to Disney by not removing its tax exempt status, but Florida politicians represent Florida’s taxpayers and citizens: it isn’t realistic to expect them, in the name of a political cause, to expose Floridians to higher taxes while pushing against a major employer and tourism generator in their state. Governor DeSantis did his job, which is to keep Floridians in control of their pocketbooks while giving them back control of their land.

Also, the Disney issue isn’t Florida’s problem—at least not Florida’s alone. It’s America’s problem, for all the reasons laid out on this blog in the past, which are bigger and more pervasive than their effects on a single state—Disney’s wokeness, its ties to China, and its control of the entertainment market. Anyone who thinks that these dangers are abstract, or that the Disney issue has gone away now that Florida has taken a stand, should read a recent column by Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ resident conservative-behind-enemy-lines. In his quiet and even resigned way Douthat takes the unique threat of Disney down to the ground, locating it in the everyday. This threat is nothing more or less than the slow, subtle shifting of the way American kids think by a company which exercises control over more than 40 percent of the entertainment market and whose market loyalty is increasingly to China:

The range of prestige movies since 2017…doesn’t [show] a dramatic transformation in [Hollywood movies toward wokeness.] In one place, though, I do think you can see a clear political-cultural shift: in children’s movies, animated and Disney movies especially, which show a real disjunction somewhere in the 2010s. There’s diversification and multiculturalism…but beyond this there are also big thematic changes, which do seem connected to the new kind of progressivism.

For instance, romance is emphatically out; a kind of therapeutic management of family trauma and drama comes in. The antagonists cease to be personal villains and become increasingly structural…conflict is borne out of misunderstanding or accident or environmental degradation instead of jealousy or the will to power. Or else the real bad guy is some authority figure who has misled everyone into unnecessary conflict…

Older Disney movies, especially from the 1990s, often put a liberal-individualist gloss on traditional fairy tale structures, with plucky self-actualizing heroines finding adventure and their soul mates in the shadow of a bumbling or clueless or unsympathetic older generation. In this era’s movies, starting to some extent with “Frozen” and developing more fully thereafter…the spirit of individualism is diminished. The goal is now cultivating allyship, embracing sibling relationships and friendships, rather than falling in love, with the magical adventure a kind of group therapy for the community….

And too much adventuring is somewhat frowned upon as well….2022 brought two major kids’ releases, the Disney-Pixar production “Lightyear” and Disney’s “Strange World,” which were movies about explorers whose message was effectively anti-exploration, teaching their protagonists to stay home, embrace sustainability and be content with diminished expectations. Both “Lightyear” and “Strange World” were also commercial disappointments…But maybe that’s precisely what makes them a useful indicator. Like middling ’80s action movies, this sort of kids’ entertainment is a kind of background music or cultural wallpaper for our moment. Not necessarily what kids want, but what the culture wants for them.

Then, quietly, he sums up the effect of this omnipresent “wallpaper.” He doesn’t use the word “indoctrination,” but that’s what he describes. Disney messages are

not a cinema of wokeness in some grand and obvious way, but an ideological ethos that comes sliding in unbidden on a Saturday afternoon when the whole family is tired and out of ideas — but at least there’s a Disney+ subscription, and the remote is close to hand.

A famous Left-liberal writer once said that America’s indoctrinations weren’t like the Soviets’. The Soviets’ were “sweeping bureaucratic” ones that everyone recognized: names would simply disappear from textbooks as the regime rewrote history. Ours were “softer, more insidious:” they happened in the everyday, in a supposedly free society run by ever-more-distant structures, so that people didn’t notice. She was right, and Disney is a case study of how. This indoctrination isn’t being force-fed. Instead it’s being “suggested,” based on the facts that the average American parents—two working parents or a single mom or a harassed stay-at-home parent of three—will put it on TV because it’s familiar and available. This is what a conglomerate that has marginalized its competitors can do, and it can do it without consequences. Its moves aren’t direct, and people have too many other things on their minds to think depressing thoughts whose outcomes they can’t control anyway. For example: What will it mean if a rising generation believes that conflict with China happens because of a “misunderstanding,” or that “environmental degradation” is so vast that it justifies giving sweeping new powers to national and international structures, or that “individualism” and “adventuring” are impulses to be “frowned upon” not encouraged?

The people who should be thinking these thoughts are the ones Americans elect to protect them. When it comes to Disney, Democrats have abandoned their responsibility to protect Americans: they’re in the company’s pocket to the point that its CEO, a major supporter of the Paris Climate Accords, considered running for President on the party ticket and President Biden considered appointing him ambassador to China. This means that, if Disney’s “ideological ethos” isn’t the way Republicans want American kids to think, Disney is the Party’s problem, and it’s too big to be solved by a single state.  The vehicle has to be the national Republican Party in the House and the Senate; possibly an alliance of states Attorneys General; and 2024 presidential contenders taking up the issue.

But the most direct way for the Party to tackle Disney is something new for Republicans, and they might not be entirely comfortable with it: breaking up the company to stop its ideological dominance using antitrust legislation. This is a meaningful shift in Republican politics generally, but especially since the 1980s, when Republicans became known for pushing back antitrust regulations and allowing corporations to merge in the name of efficiently producing goods and lowering consumer costs. Their logic was the opposite of twentieth century antitrust crusaders, who were mostly Democrats and mostly thought that any big corporation would inevitably capture the market and squeeze competitors out. Instead, Republicans said that bigger wasn’t always bad, that it could actually be better, and that consumer benefits were the metrics to decide. At the same time, they signed a host of free trade agreements, and along with Democrats pushed to give corporations more power to copyright intellectual property for longer periods. This was all part of an effort to make America’s economy more efficient and innovative: increasing benefits to shareholders and consumers so that more wealth got created, more investments got made, and the American Empire could out-produce the Soviet Empire and win the Cold War.

These moves worked, but in the last twenty-five years they’ve been taken advantage of by a new kind of company. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Disney, among others, have become parasites off of empire: profiting from the moves America made to win the Cold War when the threat is long past. They’ve used lower antitrust bars and lower tariffs to buy up competitors at home, dictate terms to smaller vendors, and push into the Chinese market abroad. Sometimes, as with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, they’re explicitly guaranteed by the government to be Too Big to Fail. With Disney, the support is quieter: it has the fifth largest lobbying operation of entertainment companies in Washington, D.C. and is linked to the first largest lobbying operation; and it has 38 lobbyists in Tallahassee alone.

These shifts mean that antitrust issues are different than they were in the 1980s. Then Republicans may have pushed against antitrust in the name of the free market, but today even the most anti-regulatory Republican can make the claim to voters and backers that this market isn’t free. And when it comes to Disney, the consequences aren’t just too-big-to-fail corporations: they’re too-big-to-fail corporations which “suggest” their values to American children. This top-down ideological push is no different than government-funded public schools recognizing transgenderism among adolescents, or donors pushing government-funded medical schools to suggest gender transitioning for minors.  Possible presidential contenders who oppose arbitrary power like DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, and even libertarian Rand Paul can oppose this government-backed conglomeration while staying true to free market principles and Republican support of business.

Some Republicans have pointed out routes for how. Florida Rep. Greg Steube and Missouri Senator Hawley have taken an incremental approach by trying to limit Disney’s copyright reach. Others, like Dan Morenoff, the Executive Director of the right-leaning American Civil Rights Project, have made broader antitrust proposals that could apply to the company. They’ve argued that state Republican attorneys general should bring suit against America’s biggest investment firms on the grounds that they bring lower returns to shareholders in their push for environmentally friendly investments. Disney, whose recent woke productions and movies targeting the Chinese market have disappointed at the box office, can possibly be targeted for harming shareholders on these grounds. Also, since Disney releases just 12 movies a year compared to 24 in the Nineties, before the wave of mergers that made it into a conglomerate, it can possibly be targeted for harming consumers as well. Finally, there’s always the more direct logic, the old Democratic Party approach: break up Disney off the belief that bigness is always bad because it encourages arbitrary power.

There’s one more advantage in making antitrust an issue for Republicans—a political one. President Biden has gotten a certain amount of mileage off of his appointment of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has pushed back against mergers in the publishing industry and generally made mergers harder, to the point where Amazon’s CEO cited a negative political environment discouraging the conglomerate from making more acquisitions. This is good news, but others of Khan’s moves are murkier. For example, she’s encouraging the jettisoning of non-compete clauses across a wide range of businesses, which might not empower workers against corporate conglomerates so much as squeeze small and mid-sized businesses by diminishing their bargaining power with employees. Republicans should get in on the antitrust game, compete on Lina Khan’s turf, and show that conservatives aren’t for corporations but for freedom. In the process, they’ll be standing up for ordinary Americans who want to give their kids something to watch that will lift them up, not scare them into servility.