The Parents’ Revolt

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 14, 2022

 

In some quarters of the American Right, it has become an article of faith that when the wishes of conservatives are pitted against the wishes of the progressive movement and its allies in the press, academia, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the S&P 500, the conservatives “always lose.”

 

This isn’t true. Not only is the conservative movement making dramatic strides on abortion, on religious liberty, on charter schools, on the right to keep and bear arms, and on other core cultural issues, but the claim is contradicted by the most recent fight for which we have results. Last year, after the State of Georgia passed a set of modest changes to its voting laws, the entire left-wing establishment threw a concerted tantrum that, after a series of cultural and political escalations, ended with Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. And then? Then that establishment lost. Georgia’s law remained popular — and remained in place; public opinion turned against the agitators, rather than against the governor; MLB came to lament its decision; and, as time passed, even the fiercest opponents of the measure conceded that the protests had been a mistake.

 

Or, put another way: Conservatives won.

 

There is no reason to believe that things will go differently with the fight over adding gender ideology to the K–3 curriculum in Florida. Consider the playing field, as it now stands. In my estimation, there are three key factors that make this fight unwinnable for Disney, the curriculum’s main opponent.

 

First, Disney has picked an extremely dangerous topic on which to stake its reputation. When described neutrally, the bill that Disney opposes is not only popular among a majority of Floridians (and of Americans), it is popular among a majority of Floridians of all parties. In some circumstances, one might imagine that this wouldn’t matter much to the eventual outcome; were this a complicated tax dispute, for example, the public’s eyes would probably glaze over. But this isn’t a complicated tax dispute. It’s a dispute over the education of children. And, both directly and indirectly, children are Disney’s target audience.

 

In March, a leaked video showed an executive at the company talking about her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and her habit of “basically adding queerness” to children’s programming “wherever I could.” Why does this matter? It matters for the same reason as it would matter if videos leaked from the Coca-Cola corporation revealed that it was putting secret ingredients into Diet Coke: because, all of a sudden, it makes the company’s core offerings seem somewhat shady. If AT&T started making statements about school curricula, its customers, who do not associate AT&T with children, might simply shrug. But the Walt Disney Company? Too much more of this, and it might find that it went to bed as Uncle Walt and woke up as Philip Morris.

 

Second, Disney’s opponents are extremely strong at present, and they have every incentive in the world to dig in. The political party that passed the bill Disney opposes through the Florida legislature has been in charge of the state since 1999 and is expected to pick up more seats in November. The man who signed the bill Disney opposes, Governor Ron DeSantis, has an approval rating of around 55 percent, has raised nearly ten times as much money as either of his likely gubernatorial opponents, and may well be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. Per NBC, Disney’s lobbyists in Tallahassee have not only found themselves “in disbelief over the falling out,” but are aware of how badly they are losing. “This was a total sh**show response by corporate,” NBC’s Marc Caputo has quoted one as saying. “DeSantis is just a different animal and no one around here really knows how to deal with him because they know they’re going to get run over.”

 

Third, Disney has next to no political leverage, is internally divided, and probably did not plan for this crisis in the first instance. In explaining why the corporation was initially quiet about the bill, Disney’s CEO, Bob Chapek, suggested that the company had started its push by lobbying behind the scenes, and felt the need to make a more public statement only when the clandestine entreaties failed. But, as National Review’s Isaac Schorr has reported, this doesn’t seem to be true. Instead, Disney’s former CEO, Bob Iger, seems to have fired off an ill-considered tweet, some of Disney’s staff seem to have followed suit, and Bob Chapek seems to have jumped in with both feet.

 

Had Chapek taken the time to plan, he would presumably have seen how weak his position really is. Not only is Disney’s investment in Florida effectively permanent — one cannot move Disney World, and to reconstitute it would take decades and a hundred billion dollars — but the company relies upon a host of legislative carve-outs that are available to no other company in no other place in the world. In my view, it would be a profound mistake if the Florida Republican Party began changing Florida’s laws out of revenge (while there is nothing sacred about Disney’s carve-outs and perks, they shouldn’t be rescinded in a tiff over its speech), but the power dynamic here is clear nevertheless: Disney needs a friendly state legislature more than that friendly legislature needs Disney’s approval.

 

Since this contretemps began, certain high-profile conservatives have expressed their desire to “destroy” Disney completely. This is silly. Successful institutions take a long time to build up but only a short time to destroy, and, once destroyed, they can prove extremely difficult to replace. (See: the ACLU.) A successful conservative response to Disney’s stance would involve making sure that the law Disney opposes remains in place, conveying to Disney that its position on the issue is extreme and counterproductive, and making Bob Chapek and his colleagues understand that if they hire and promote radicals who believe that it is their job to politicize (and damage) his company, those radicals will eventually do just that.

 

Those Walt Disney Company lobbyists who were shocked by their boss’s strategic incompetence? They ought to recognize that their bosses are no longer fully in charge. Per “Ethan L. Clay,” the pseudonym of a Disney “Imagineer” (theme-park designer) who wrote recently for Quillette, “the DEI department within the company” — DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, which sounds innocuous but in fact implies every absurd progressive idea about gender, race, and history rolled into one — “expanded by an astonishing 633 percent in 2019–21, at the same time that nearly every other department was contracting by 25–75 percent.” Of course Disney is being hijacked; it has made the conscious decision to bring a bunch of hijackers into its fold. Sure, Disney is big and old and profitable. But there is nothing about the company that inoculates it against the predations of fashionable ideology. Personnel is policy. If one’s personnel are absurd, one’s policy will follow. Et après cela, le déluge.

 

Given the importance of large institutions to the modern world, conservatives are correct to focus on the spread of bad ideas — and bad staff — within their ranks. But they should not do so at the expense of promoting good ideas, which, over time, will tend to win out against even the most determined and concentrated opposition. The key reason that Disney is losing the fight against Florida’s much-maligned education law is that “Don’t teach small children about gender ideology” is a popular and necessary sentiment, and, deep down, almost everybody comprehends that.

 

Even Disney. Early on in the movie Finding Dory, the 2016 follow-up to 2003’s smash hit Finding Nemo, the amnesiac titular character misunderstands the situation in which she finds herself, and, to the horror of the audience, begins to teach a class of six-year-olds about the birds and the bees.

 

Dory: “Mommies and daddies. Right. Why are we talking about mommies and daddies? Oh. Oh! That class. Uh-oh. Why me? Okay. You guys seem a little young, but, um, okay. You see, kids, when two fish love each other . . .”

 

Mr. Ray: “And we’ll stop right there. Climb aboard, explorers. I feel a migration song coming on. Oh . . . migration, migration, let’s learn about migration. It’s nature’s inspiration to move around the sea.”

 

This joke made sense in 2016. It would have made sense in 1976, and 1926, and 1756. And, to most people, it will make sense in 2026, and beyond. Its general applicability is unlikely to be changed by political hyperbole, or by elite pressure, or by the intervention of the Walt Disney Company. Conservatives who care about winning this fight ought to open their minds to the possibility that they are, in fact, going to win it — and, moreover, that they are going to win it by taking a clear, strong stance on the right side of a popular issue, and acting within the realm of ordinary political reality, not by burning everything down or by adopting tactics that they have traditionally abhorred.

 

And when they do, they ought to remember why.