Where's the Gipper? Where's the desire to reduce big government, get Big Brother out of your life?
Today's GOP is being inhabited by a bunch of bible-thumping idiots who spend like drunken sailors and want to stick their hands in your business (are you females listening) for your own good. Actually, that sounds like progressives, except they're agnostics.
Next to William Shatner, I think he's the best dramatic actor who ever lived.
Wait. I almost forgot Les.
Republicans need to learn this hard lesson: You can’t legislate sexuality
In one state after another, sex-obsessed authoritarians in the party are proposing laws regulating Americans’ private lives. Basically, they’ve lost their minds.
By Gene Lyons, Suntimes
In the wake of a partisan Supreme Court’s abolition of Roe v. Wade, it’s become increasingly clear that there’s nothing remotely conservative about the Republican Party. In the familiar formulation, today’s GOP is like a dog that has finally caught the car it’s been chasing, seized the bumper in its teeth, and finds itself getting dragged along faster than it can run.
Voter anger over draconian abortion laws has already cost Republicans control of two crucial swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin. But the party at large shows no sign of recognizing what’s going on.
Limited government? Forget about it. In one state after another, sex-obsessed authoritarians have taken charge of the GOP. Groups with downright Orwellian names compete to enact laws dictating everybody’s most intimate personal decisions. Abortion, sexuality or gender, you name it. If it’s called the Alliance Defending Freedom or the Liberty Counsel (sic), then its avowed goal is getting the government into your pants.
Everywhere you look, gender-crazed right-wingers are besieging libraries and school boards. My personal favorite is the Florida organization calling itself Moms for Liberty, which, judging by its TV spokesmodels, might more accurately describe itself as “Sorority Sisters for Censorship.”
The same crowd of mean girls who ran your junior high school now think that they and Gov. Ron DeSantis can dictate what can be spoken, written and read regarding sexuality pretty much anywhere in Florida.
So far, DeSantis appears to be getting his way. Soon, it will be against the law to mention anything relating to LGBTQ life in public classrooms in that state. The U.S. Supreme Court may have recognized gay marriage, but Florida teachers will be forbidden to mention it. It’s the ostrich approach to human sexuality.
Basically, they’ve lost their minds. This is not the way Americans think when they think about freedom. It’s a retrograde fight, anyway. Does anybody really think that public school librarians are leading children into sin? Even during my long-ago youth, I certainly never read anything bawdy that I found at the library. Did anybody? And this was long before the invention of iPhones.
DeSantis appears to be trying to out-crazy Donald Trump, which simply cannot be done. The former president’s supporters basically see him as a kind of TV comic, free to pop off and to contradict himself at will. The MAGA faithful either don’t notice or don’t care.
Call it the Trump Paradox: The more whoppers he emits, the more MAGA followers see him as a truth-teller, unafraid to speak his mind.
DeSantis, meanwhile, keeps doubling down on authoritarian gestures: converting a 15-week abortion ban to a six-week ban while engaging in a public feud with the state’s largest employer over LGBTQ issues. And losing to Mickey Mouse. The angrier he acts, the more ridiculous DeSantis looks: a furious little fellow with a chip on his shoulder, like Elmer Fudd. No, Fudd’s not a Disney character, but how long before people start laughing?
But I digress. It’s the sheer futility of this latter-day puritanism that’s most remarkable. One needn’t be happy about every aspect of contemporary sexual mores to recognize that there’s not a whole lot the government can do about them. Not if we want to retain our constitutional liberties, that is.
Me, I’ve always been one of the lucky ones, in the sense that my personal proclivities have made life easier than it otherwise might have been. I was attracted to my wife from across a crowded room before I knew her name. It felt more like gravity than anything I’d freely chosen, and all these years later, it still does. How fortunate that the individual in that little shirtwaist dress also turned out to be such a high-quality person.
But it was all instinct there at the start. Certainly nothing I learned in a library. You see, people don’t choose their sexuality; it chooses them. The only meaningful question is how to live with its demands. Donald Trump’s just about the last person in America who can tell you anything worth hearing about that, and Ron DeSantis can’t be far behind.
Many Republicans appear to have forgotten what New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen correctly calls “the commonest sense of all: Most people do not want the government making personal decisions for them. People want to control their own bodies. People want the freedom to decide when and how to form families.
”The GOP’s Mickey Mouse Moment
The Trump-DeSantis battle over Disney blurs what the party should stand for.
Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ
April 20, 2023 6:29 pm ET
Mickey Mouse at the Walt Disney World theme park entrance in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., July 9, 2020. Photo: Octavio Jones/Getty Images
The Donald Trump Rapid Reaction Machine primarily serves to produce Twitter and cable-TV drama. In the case of Mr. Trump’s reflexive defense of Disney, it’s providing the GOP an overdue opportunity to rethink its relationship with increasingly woke corporate America.
The surprise wasn’t that Mr. Trump dumped on Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor is angry that Disney quietly stripped his new board of its power to oversee the corporate kingdom. Mr. DeSantis this week escalated, promising more legislation to reassert authority and joking the state might build a prison next to Disney World. The press piled on, as did Mr. Trump—always eager to join a good kicking. An impulsive Truth Social jibe warned that Disney might flee the state, adding that this fight is “all so unnecessary, a political STUNT!”
The surprise is that it took this long for Mr. Trump’s disdain of his rival to land him crosswise with the base. There is a reason Mr. DeSantis is taking on woke Disney—Republican voters love it. So eager was Mr. Trump to join liberals on attack, he put himself on the side of a company that disdains parental rights, axed the words “boys and girls” in park greetings, and just announced it would host the world’s largest LGBTQ+ conference. This is unlikely to sit well with conservative voters, and unlikely to be the only time Mr. Trump puts himself in this spot.
The DeSantis-Disney fracas inspired other presidential hopefuls to weigh in. Chris Christie explained that Mr. DeSantis’s effort to “punish” the company meant he wasn’t “a conservative.” In February Mike Pence criticized the bill stripping Disney of local governing authority as “beyond the scope” of what a “limited-government Republican” should do. The DeSantis team frames its Disney actions not as retribution, but as a principled attempt to reduce Disney’s “special privilege” and create an “even playing field.”
This is a muddle in search of a coherent, updated Republican position on corporate America. The GOP has long been the party of free markets, which effectively allies it with “business.” Yet defending that crew becomes harder as corporate America alienates conservatives with political and culture wars. The Chamber of Commerce backs antibusiness House Democrats. Delta slams Georgia’s election reform. Banks divest from fossil fuels. ESG, Bud Light labels, Gillette’s “toxic masculinity” and Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ads. Big tech censorship.
Not that corporate foolishness is new. These pages in 1979 ran the editorial “Down With Big Business,” scoring CEOs who supported bigger government—given that they could absorb the costs while smaller competitors could not. Corporations chase short-term self interest, not capitalism.
Yet for decades the GOP has failed to articulate a principled GOP position. The party remains incapable of drawing a line between its support for free markets and the ills of corporate welfare and rent seeking. For every Republican who sensibly votes to lower overall corporate tax rates, there’s another swilling dollars on tax credits and subsidies for favored industries. For every GOP legislature that eases regulatory burdens to create a better business environment, there’s a GOP governor bribing companies to relocate with tax incentive packages.
This is called picking winners and losers—and it’s antithetical to free markets. Yet the practice is picking up steam. Republican new-righters (such as Marco Rubio) see popularity in feeding the anticorporate backlash, claiming greedy companies can’t be trusted so Congress must direct the economy via national industrial policy (à la China). That sits fine with GOP spenders, who are salivating to replicate last year’s $280 billion semiconductor giveaway.
This is a dangerous trend, leaving the GOP in a confused space with voters and at risk of economy-damaging policies. Republicans have tried to paper over their lack of a cohesive approach with loud condemnations of this or that firm (a trend Mr. Trump pioneered in office). Mr. DeSantis went further with his Disney legislation, but even this amounts to an isolated fight—unmoored from a broader philosophy of how a free-market GOP handles politicized corporate America.
An enterprising presidential aspirant might see the benefit of filling that space with a simple proposition: The GOP is cutting the corporate cord. It won’t weaponize government against business—yet neither will it coddle business. It will support broad-based free-market reforms, if primarily to support American’s millions of small businesses. But the days of lobbyists and elite corporate welfare—subsidies, tax credits, handouts—are over. The Fortune 500 never needed this help—and certainly don’t deserve it now. Just think of the taxpayer savings. Just think of the clarity.
Republican politicians who feel the need to do more might remember that—as in everything—real America does things better than government. Consumers are already punishing woke corporations—see Bud’s desperate new pro-America ad or Disney’s operating losses. Maybe the party of free markets can trust the free market to work.
Americans celebrate entrepreneurship; they despise special corporate treatment. Republicans might try joining them in what is a quite straightforward—and refreshing—position.
Write to kim@wsj.com.
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