The 'anti-woke' agenda is going to cost taxpayers big bucks

The Week

Ron DeSantis Photo by James Gilbert/Getty Images

Anti-woke politics is great for GOP voters, but it also makes for lousy governance.

Please take Florida. The governor signed a bill that revoked the special tax district that gave Disney control of its theme park land. Whatever you think about that longstanding arrangement, the new law was clearly an act of revenge, a thuggish (and probably unconstitutional ) bit of Republican retaliation for Disney's opposition to the controversial.

The First Amendment rights of businesses have been lost.

The anti-Disney law was signed by the governor, who said that he viewed it as a provocation.

The state government's commitment to fighting back probably means hurting Florida taxpayers. The revocation of Disney's tax district puts area residents on the hook for more than $1 billion in bonds the company used to pay for things like water service and new roads. Local homeowners could see their taxes go up.

Oops.

Maybe not. Disney and the state might work out some kind of compromise by June 23, 2023, when the law undoing Disney's tax district takes effect. The whole thing might end up being a showy, performative in-kind contribution from the Florida Legislature to Ron DeSantis.

A question is raised. Can states and their citizens thrive when Republican leaders are only interested in owning the libs?

Maybe not. Florida is not the only example. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott locked up his state's border with Mexico with secondary inspection of trucks entering the country to try to stop the flow of drugs and migrants. The busing of unwanted migrants to the steps of the U.S. Capitol was an obvious stunt. The inspections halted traffic, bogged down the flow of goods in an economy that is still facing supply chain snarls, and cost Texas more than $4 billion in economic activity. Drugs and migrants were not found. The whole thing was a failure.

Abbott had to make his point in a theatrical way. The people of Texas paid for it.

In recent months, anti-woke, anti-Democratic governance has dominated the agendas of Republican-led state governments. Several have come up with bills that allow parents to file lawsuits against schools for teaching critical race theory or mentioning gender identity in the classroom, or for stocking books on those topics in school libraries. Texas and Florida have taken steps to limit tenure protections for Marxist professors at public universities.

Public universities are not just places where students party for four years before moving on to real life, they are engines of research and economic growth for their states. According to a report, technology created at the University of Florida alone generated over $2 billion and 10,000 jobs in the state. K-12 schools are important for making citizens, but also workers, as most Americans learn the basic skills they will use in their offices, factories, and other workplace over the course of their lifetimes. Will teachers and professors want to work in red states if they have to worry about lawsuits and job security? What would that mean for those states? Will corporations want to do business in states that will bully them for having bad politics?

We might find out.

Republicans used the culture wars to distract voters from their economic agenda of making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. The culture wars seem to be the point these days. It is not clear if the GOP's anti-woke governing agenda will make red states better places for their residents to live and prosper. It is not clear if Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis care.

The governor of Florida signed a bill that stripped Disney of self-governing authority at its parks in the state because of the company's opposition to the new law. The bill, which was approved by the legislature on Thursday, will remove the special governing jurisdiction that allows the company to operate as its own city. Four theme parks, two water parks, and 175 miles of roadway are within the 25,000-acre tract.
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