Ron DeSantis’s Conservatism

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 

‘Fighting for freedom is not always easy,” Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida argued in his second inaugural address, “because the threats to freedom are more complex and more widespread than they have been in the past.” Among the threats to freedom that DeSantis went on to identify were “entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and corporations wielding public power.”

 

At almost any point in the modern history of the GOP, one would have expected a conservative politician to publicly name entrenched bureaucrats and Davos-bound jet-setters as their foes. But “corporations wielding public power”? That one is a touch unusual. What does it mean in practice? And does it present a problem for limited-government types who are considering backing DeSantis for president?

 

As governor, DeSantis has taken three major actions that might best be described as pushing back against “corporations wielding public power.” He has moved to rescind Walt Disney World’s 1960s-era “special district.” He has forbidden businesses that operate in Florida to confirm that their customers are vaccinated. And he has signed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which, inter alia, limits what employers may say during workplace training sessions that deal with race, sex, national origin, and other innate characteristics. These moves — especially DeSantis’s fight with Disney — have yielded some criticism from the right. Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas, proposed that DeSantis had used “the heavy hand of government to punish a business,” which is “not what a conservative is about,” while Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, went one step further. “I don’t think Ron DeSantis is a conservative,” Christie told Semafor. “As a conservative, the job of government is, in the main, to stay out of the business of business.”

 

Have DeSantis’s most controversial actions been “in the main”? That is the question. Personally, I would say: No, Maybe, and Yes.

 

First, the No. When defending his feud with Disney, DeSantis is adamant that, rather than undermining the working of the free market, he is in fact protecting it. Until he spearheaded his change, DeSantis insists, Disney

 

was enjoying unprecedented privileges and subsidies. They controlled their own government in central Florida. They were exempt from laws that virtually everybody else has to follow. That’s not free enterprise, but it’s certainly even worse when a company takes all those privileges that have been bestowed over many, many decades and uses that to wage war on state policies regarding families and children. 

 

Which is half-right, but which is ultimately unconvincing. Disney did, indeed, enjoy a set of privileges that have not been made available to, say, Universal Studios or Sea World. It did, indeed, enjoy “unprecedented” powers therein. And, in a vacuum, there is nothing much wrong with the State of Florida’s having decided to rescind a special arrangement that was contrived in 1967. If, as a policy matter, that system was not working for the government, it could have been altered in the same way as any other law, scheme, or initiative. But that is not what happened — and, if we’re being honest, we all know it. What happened, as DeSantis himself implies, is that Disney decided to “wage war on state policies regarding families and children,” and, in retaliation, DeSantis decided to take away its special district. Can he do this legally? Yes, he can. Did he do it in a neutral manner, as a result of a consistent fealty to free-market principles? He did not — and for that he deserves to be roundly criticized.

 

Now for the Maybe. Taken in context, Florida’s regulation of businesses during the Covid pandemic is a little more complicated. In a perfect world, governments at both the federal and state levels would leave most health-and-safety questions to private enterprise. But, during the worst outbreak of disease in a century, the United States was far from that perfect world. Covid brought with it all manner of emergency rules, and, irrespective of what the governor of Florida did or did not do, there were going to be emergency rules governing businesses during Covid. Policy merits aside, there is nothing intrinsically more “interventionist” about a rule that prohibits businesses from checking their customers’ vaccination status (as 20 states did) than there is about a rule that mandates that businesses check their customers’ vaccination status (as many cities and states did for indoor facilities, and as the federal government did for travel). One can certainly argue that Florida’s approach should have been to leave the question completely up to private enterprise — or, for that matter, that the laws that the state legislature passed should have contained exceptions for unusual businesses such as cruise lines. But, either way, the circumstances in which this decision was taken were unique. Outside of the pandemic, DeSantis has not shown a great desire to interfere with the health-and-safety rules that govern businesses in the state, and what steps he has taken have not been applicable to everyday life but are preparation for the next emergency. Is that ideal? No. Is it forgivable? It is.

 

And then there’s the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, on which, as a Yes, I find myself starkly at odds with the views of many of my fellow classical liberals and free-speech activists. Per the Association of Corporate Counsel, the provisions of the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that apply to employers create “legal restrictions and prohibitions on what public and private employers can say or promote in workplace trainings tied to race, color, sex, and/or national origin” and “have potentially significant implications for employers wishing to cover topics like structural racism, white/male privilege and unconscious bias in workplace anti-discrimination and diversity and inclusion trainings.” Critics of the law charge that there are significant First Amendment problems associated with these effects. But, if so, I can detect no comprehensible reason why the line would be here as opposed to across any other part of our current archipelago of employment law.

 

If, courtesy of the protections of the First Amendment, workplaces in America were hotbeds of free speech and free association, I could buy the idea that the Stop W.O.K.E. Act represented an infringement. But they’re not. The National Labor Relations Board is empowered to punish employers for a wide range of statements against unionization — to the point where, until it was told otherwise by a federal appeals court, the NLRB concluded that it could even sanction jokes about that topic. The concept of the “hostile work environment” has become so elastic that governments at all levels now superintend all manner of corporate speech. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives are ascendant — encouraged, in many cases, by incentives in the law. Can it really be that the original public meaning of the First Amendment permits the precise exceptions to its rules that progressives happen to like but bars elected conservatives from taking the principles of nondiscrimination to their logical conclusion? Am I supposed to believe that the Constitution prohibits corporate trainers from making generalizations about minorities or women but not from making them about white people or men? Must I conclude that the Bill of Rights is applicable when the intention is to limit discussion of immutable characteristics but inapplicable when the aim is to discourage unionization? I think not. It is possible — probable, even — that the Stop W.O.K.E. Act will continue to be enjoined in the courts. But I will not blame Governor DeSantis for that. If we are to have overbearing laws governing our workplaces — and I would rather that we did not — they should not run in only one direction. At present, the choice facing conservatives is not whether to interfere in this realm or to stay away, but whether to fight to change the status quo or cede an already crowded field to its existing tenants.

 

As for the rest? Well, as governor, DeSantis has largely been the solid fiscal conservative that he promised to be. In part, this is because Florida has constitutionalized many of the limited-government principles that have made the state so attractive, and thereby taken the issue out of the hands of its incumbent politicians — not only does Florida prohibit taxes on income, capital gains, stocks, bonds, and more, but it requires a supermajority in both houses to raise any statewide taxes or fees. And, in part, this is because DeSantis is a pretty mainstream Republican in his approach toward taxing and spending. Last year, DeSantis signed a billion-dollar sales-tax cut, vetoed $3.1 billion from his own party’s budget proposal, and ended up presiding over a record $21.8 billion surplus. This year, he has proposed another $2 billion in tax cuts. And, while Florida has proven to be a magnet for businesses during his tenure, this has been the product of its generally seductive business environment rather than of cushy ad hoc deals that were designed to attract — read: bribe — particular businesses. According to the Cato Institute’s “Freedom in the 50 States” index, Florida is presently the freest state in both the “Fiscal” and “Economic” categories. As the scores from previous years show, Ron DeSantis did not create that environment. But he did improve upon it.

 

Which is to say that Chris Christie is wrong when he denies that Ron DeSantis is a conservative. Ron DeSantis is, without doubt, a conservative. What remains to be seen is whether, as a presidential candidate, DeSantis will stick to the instincts that have guided him throughout most of his career, or will be seduced by the desire to please his fans and stick it to his opponents that has led him into the interminable quagmire that is his fight with the Walt Disney Company. Being human, politicians will always make mistakes, and they will sometimes provide exceptions to their own rules. Bigger problems tend to arise when, piling up in number, those exceptions become the rule. As it stands, Governor DeSantis’s record on the free market is solid. The jury’s out as to whether it will remain so.