The Florida governor is right, for largely the wrong reasons, on the importance of taking on monopolies.
I have found one area where I agree with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis:
“If you look at some of these companies, like Google, and look at the footprint that they have, they don’t necessarily offend historical antitrust law because the antitrust law is focusing on jacking up prices on people,” DeSantis admitted. “But I would say they’re exercising way more power than Standard Oil ever did, or any of the trust of the early 20th century. So the question is, is it okay to have a handful of private power centers that really, really dominate our society? And is it appropriate to have something like an antitrust principle applied there? I think it probably would be appropriate.”
It seems DeSantis wound up in this place accidentally, as a kind of convenient way station to make a stand once he found himself in all-out brawl with the Disney Corporation. In an interview with the American Conservative, DeSantis admits that he came late to understanding how DisneyWorld was politically organized. He didn’t know about how the Reedy Creek Reedy Creek Improvement District was created in the 1960’s to give Disney self-governing control of the lands they were developing for their park.
“The interesting thing about that is, as governor, I never dealt with Reedy Creek,” DeSantis said. “I had no concept of all they had, because it just never came up. No one ever talked about it. It was never raised with me.”
This realization seems to have tipped DeSantis into a different ideological lane. It’s not easy to define. In opposing the crony capitalism represented by Disney’s decades-long sweetheart deal, he seems to introduce more libertarian elements to his profile, but his solution is to massively increase the Florida governor’s powers by creating a state-run board to replace Reedy Creek. In this, it’s hard to see a commitment to smaller or local government.
Regardless of how we define it, DeSantis is now looking more carefully at large monopolies and the proper role of antitrust enforcement. That’s a good thing, particularly because he understands that monopolies are problematic even when they don’t drive up prices for consumers. But he’s doing it in the service of expanding state power. And, as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts explains, DeSantis wants to use this power to wage a “glorious” cultural war.
“What Americans writ large are realizing is this is our moment.” Roberts said, commenting on the way DeSantis seems to be leading the charge against the left’s cultural agenda. “This is our moment to demand that our politicians use the power they have. This is the moment for us to demand of companies, whether they’re Google, or Facebook, or Disney, that you listen to us, rather than ram down our throats and into our own families all of the garbage that you’ve been pushing on us. This is our time to demand that you do what we say. And it’s glorious.”
We can’t ask or expect all our political allies to be pure. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party needed the critical support of Know-Nothing anti-immigration fanatics to gain the power they needed to abolish slavery. Quite obviously, DeSantis has similarly bad reasons for wanting to do some good things. If the left decides to be lax in antitrust enforcement because they need friendly corporate boards to be their side in a culture war against DeSantis, they’ll be guilty of making their own ugly tradeoff.
The sweet spot between the right and left really ought to be a realization that the monopolization of the economy is killing entrepreneurial opportunity and killing off small businesses. If the focus remains on consumers, then the mega-corporations win because they can do a good job of satisfying demand at low prices. But what does that do for someone who wants to operate a gardening center or a hardware store or auto repair shop? What happens when communities lose the ability to produce their own business leaders and everyone works for some distant business entity?
The way we treat antitrust enforcement now is that we don’t consider it a problem if there’s only one place in town to buy shoes as long as the shoes are affordable, but there are all kinds of costs to living in a world where an independent shoe store cannot compete. This has absolutely nothing to do with gender roles or any “anti-woke” agenda. It has everything to do with why so much of the country has lost its mind and is the thrall of right-wing nationalist populism.
In many ways, I see DeSantisism as more extreme and dangerous than Trumpism. But it’s interesting to see how this is evolving, because it feels like we’re moving away from the old familiar right/left dividing lines and back into something reminiscent of the late 19th-Century, where strange bedfellows were not only common but necessary for building any effective coalition for reform at all.
I don’t know where this is headed, but it will be a different place than where we’ve been in recent decades. There are fuzzy areas emerging in the strangest places on the ideological spectrum. I suspect the future will bring strange and temporary alliances, and with it the same imperfect results we came to both celebrate and regret in the post-Civil War years.
