Which brings us to the second answer, the Ron DeSantis solution, which manifested itself in the Florida governor’s recent war with Disney. You tell companies that if they decide (or are internally pressured) to get involved on the liberal side of the culture wars, their special deals and business breakdowns could suddenly be threatened or withdrawn.
From one perspective, this is no more scalable than the Musk solution, because as direct action as DeSantis’s is potentially unconstitutional, an attack on corporate freedom of speech. And the Florida governor himself may expect his move to be crushed in the courts, to reap political benefits without actually having to deal with the fallout from what, frankly, seems like a pretty ill-conceived policy change.
But there is a conservative case for the principle of what he does – a case which, although the government cannot select you for special disapprove for your political speech, which is withdrawn in Disney’s case, is a special favor, coupled with the bipartisan and even suprapartisan position that the House of Mouse has long enjoyed in Florida.
Interestingly enough, this argument feels like an adaptation, from the cultural right, of Elizabeth Warren’s argument from ten years ago. Not with the same policy conclusion, of course, but with a similar starting point. She argued that no one builds a business alone, and now conservatives are embracing a variation of that cause — not to justify progressive taxation, but to suggest that if your business or institution accepts special favors from the government, the public becomes a stakeholder in your success. and it has the right to withdraw that special treatment if you then become a partisan or ideological actor.
“Almost every institution controlled by the left and armed in the culture wars,” conservative writer and editor Ben Domenech argued this week, “was created by and relies on special, favorable treatment — even funding — from all Americans.”
This is true of public entities, public schools and universities, where there is currently so much controversy, but it is also true of the internet giants, beneficiaries of a regulatory system that has largely immunized them from content responsibility (via the famous section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). Or the Wall Street firms were bailed out in 2008. Or the sports leagues that rely on antitrust exemptions and stadium subsidies. Or Disney — because, as Domenech writes, “it is only through the generosity of the American people” that Disney has managed to lobby for decades to extend copyright protection.
All these institutions are protected by the First Amendment against discrimination against, this reasoning suggests. But forms of discrimination that work in their favor—that is, all of their privileges, immunities, and tax breaks—are politically fair game as they enter the arena of the culture war.
