How best to fight Mickey Mouse?

There are two schools of strategy for making war with the Burbank-based Walt Disney Company.

One strategy, from Florida, is making national news because it is driven by the culture war and the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The other strategy, from Southern California, is little-known because it’s grounded in local concerns in the city of Anaheim, whose residents have spent decades being outmaneuvered by Donald Duck and friends.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which says that the best defense is a good offense, it’s the Anaheim strategy that is more likely to succeed.

This is, in part, because Florida’s fight resembles nothing so much as Pickett’s Charge, the suicidal, uphill attack that cost the Confederate Army the Battle of Gettysburg.

DeSantis launched media, legal, and political warfare against Disney after the company opposed his legislation, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, that restricts teachers from talking about sexual orientation and gender in Florida classrooms. The bill is part of the governor’s campaign messaging hostile to “woke” progressivism and gender non-conforming people.

The governor seemed to think that a war against Disney would help in the Republican primary polls. Instead, he’s collapsed there. Why? Because he’s launched a cultural attack on the world’s most sophisticated producer of culture. In other words, he took Disney on at its strongest point. Worse still, DeSantis, while seeking the nomination of the party of business, attacked a revered American business.

Meanwhile, DeSantis’ rival, former President Trump, has criticized the governor’s attacks on Disney as excessive. Instead of changing course, DeSantis has revealed himself as a political amateur by digging the hole deeper—moving to strip Disney of control over a local government entity that controls the area around Disney World. Predictably, Disney, one of the world’s richest companies—with better lawyers than the state of Florida—is winning its legal battle with the governor.

But DeSantis’ attacks have been so ham-handed that he has made Disney seem sympathetic, a victim of state persecution.

True to form, Disney, an opportunistic multinational corporation, has moved to exploit that sympathy here in California—and specifically in Anaheim, by seeking to advance an expansion plan called DisneylandForward.

Disney has all but owned the city since the theme park opened there in 1955. Today, it is responsible for one in five jobs and a sizable plurality of general fund revenues. The company has used gifts, investment promises, philanthropy, and raw lobbying and political power to secure a suite of tax rebates and protections, bonds, and public benefits too long to list here. In 2015, the Los Angeles Times estimated the value of Anaheim’s support for Disney over the previous two decades at $1 billion.

But in the previous decade, some civic leaders—most notably former Mayor Tom Tait and former councilmember Jose Moreno—managed to get elected despite Disney’s political opposition to them. And in office, they slowed, and in a few cases reversed, giveaways to Disney. As a result, Anaheim has limited Disney’s geographic footprint to where it stood in the 1990s.

The Anaheim strategy most closely resembles Foreign Service Officer George Kennan’s approach to global communism—containment. Politicians avoided frontal assaults or hot rhetorical battles with Disney. In fact, they tried to deemphasize Disney controversies—and emphasize the needs of local neighborhoods, prioritizing the “children of Anaheim” over the “children of tourists,” in Moreno’s formulation.

In the process, they managed to quietly contain Disney’s more aggressive expansion ideas. (In this, Anaheim may have saved Disney from itself, especially considering that its most high-profile addition to Disneyland, “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge,” has been called a flop.) Indeed, when the House of Mouse first proposed DisneylandForward in 2021, it went nowhere, with city officials unwilling to prioritize it.

But the door to expansion has been reopening. City government has been in turmoil and transition because of an FBI corruption investigation, involving the proposed sale of Angel Stadium that ensnared “a cadre” of political leaders, including Mayor Harry Sidhu. At the same time, Disney-backed candidates have been winning recent elections.

Now, DeSantis’ culture war has made the company politically sympathetic, offering an opportunity to revive DisneylandForward. Even Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has come to view Disney as an ally in his own rhetorical war against DeSantis and other culturally conservative governors, has publicly supported the venture.

Newsom’s logic here is clear—the enemy (Disney) of my enemy (DeSantis) is my friend. But the governor’s support of Disney (he’s even touting a company-funded economic study) is a mistake, one that may make it harder for Anaheim leaders to negotiate a fair deal with the theme park.

DisneylandForward would give Disney far more control over what happens inside the resort area. That would allow it to squeeze in new attractions like “Frozenland,” a theme park rendition of Zootopia, or a TRON rollercoaster.

But the plan is modest in other ways, reflecting the company’s recognition that it no longer has the sway it once had in Anaheim. DisneylandForward specifically rules out any additions to the company’s Anaheim footprint, for example. The plan is also full of detailed promises of what the House of Mouse will do for the city and its workers—union contractors for future development, local hire rules, a new workforce development program focused on Anaheim’s young people, and company support for affordable housing projects (which Disney has opposed in the past).

To win support, Disney is doing far more than internal lobbying—it is appealing directly to the community. This summer, Disney is hosting community meetings in city parks—the free kind, with green space and playgrounds and pools—all over Anaheim.

Even with all this effort, DisneylandForward is no sure thing. Patient containment is a winning strategy. And Anaheim is much tougher than Ron DeSantis.

The post Anaheim Shows Ron DeSantis How to Build a Better Mickey Mousetrap appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These questions might seem strange, but they’re not. Gov. Gavin Newsom broadcast his first re-election TV ad not in California but in Florida, appealing to Floridians to either join California’s fight against the policies of Florida Republicans, or move to California. In response, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted California policies and accused Newsom of treating Californians “like peasants.”

The tussle has been dismissed as partisan trolling, and evidence of both governors’ presidential ambitions. But its import is broader than that. Unwittingly, Newson and DeSantis are opening the door to a novel democratic idea with global implications.

The idea has been called “reciprocal” or “consociated” representation.

The dictionary definition of “consociated” is “brought into association.”  In democracy, “consociated representation” would give people the power to vote for representatives in places with which they might feel association, but are not their own cities, states, or nations.

The idea should have appeal because, especially in a hyper-connected world, the decisions of governments other than our own can have profound effects on our lives. Consider how trade and manufacturing policies in Mexico or southeast Asia have changed the economies of American communities. Or think of your home region, and how the decisions of a big city government can have profound effects on the economic prospects, transportation options, or safety of those who live in surrounding suburbs.

Or—in the context of the Newsom ad, which says that Florida’s educational and health policies threaten basic freedoms—consider how the politics and policies of big states like California and Florida can affect each other, and other states’ and national policies as well.

Florida under DeSantis has led a nationwide attack on teachers’ freedom to say what they want in classrooms. The state has also limited the rights of women and transgendered people—so much so that California is changing laws and starting programs to make itself a sanctuary for people who must leave Florida—and other states—to exercise their rights. Meanwhile, California routinely uses its size and leverage to try to shape laws elsewhere, on matters from climate change to immigration.

In such a context, Californians deserve to have more of a say in what Florida does—and, yes, vice versa.

But how? A smart and coherent proposal for consociated representation comes from Joachim Blatter and Johannes Schulz, political scientists at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, writing in the European Journal of International Relations.

Blatter and Schulz argue that globalism has allowed international corporate elites, powerful national leaders, and unaccountable international organizations like International Monetary Fund to have undemocratic influence over people in other countries. This, in turn, has inspired populist backlashes that polarize politics, threaten the unity of federal systems like the European Union or the United States, and undermine democracy.

Their answer to this major threat is to expand democracy, and link voters in different nations and states. Specifically, Blatter and Schulz argue that governments whose policies overlap should “mutually grant their citizens the right to elect representatives not only in their domestic parliament, but also in the parliaments of ‘consociated democracies’.”

Under their proposal, these “foreign” voters could not elect many representatives in other places—only a handful, a tiny fraction, of your parliament or Congress or legislature would represent people from other places. And they say legislatures should expand to accommodate these new “consociated” representatives—no one would lose representation in the process.

It’s a modest step, but one that could “channel popular dissatisfaction into productive lines” including actual conversation and collaboration between states, Blatter and Schulz write. Systems of what these two scholars call “horizontally expanded and consociated democracies” could offer at least a little defense both against internal authoritarianism and against external enemies (like Russia and China) that seek to exploit divisions within democracies.

Consociated democracy would be a natural for California, which sees itself as a future-shaping nation-state. To start, it would be easier for California to negotiate with other Western states that are already political allies—Oregon or Washington—to form a consociation of democracies. A harder step would be to form another consociation with other large states with which it sometimes quarrels—imagine California, Texas, Florida, and New York agreeing to allow their citizens to elect representatives to each other’s legislatures.

But such arrangements, while novel, are not entirely new. Blatter and Schulz note that as more people have multiple national citizenships, it’s become more common to vote in multiple countries.

Elements of consociated democracy are already present here in California. The city of Los Angeles allows people to vote in local neighborhood councils even if they don’t reside in that neighborhood—having even a tiny interest in a place (even if it’s only stabling a horse there) gives you democratic rights. And the state of California allows people and groups from other states to sponsor and qualify ballot initiatives that enact laws and amend our state’s constitution. California’s legislative term limits and animal rights protections were brought to us in this way by non-Californians.

For California, it might be easiest to introduce consociated representation at the local level.

Your columnist, for example, feels strongly that he should be able to vote in Los Angeles city elections even though he lives in a small city that borders L.A.

Here’s my logic: The media non-profit where I work is based in Los Angeles. I spend most of my leisure time in L.A. (shopping, eating, enjoying sports and other entertainment), and pay local sales taxes. And for transportation, I depend on roads and trains overseen by L.A. officials.

So why shouldn’t Los Angeles empower me—and residents of other surrounding cities—to vote for a couple of additional members to represent us on the L.A. city council?

The post Is It Time for Californians to Vote in Florida and Texas? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.