FLA, GROOMER:

Let's take a look at the elements of the Orbán model.

It begins with economic controls, which is one of the things that differentiates the nationalist model from old small-government Reaganism. The key to this model is not to oppose government subsidies and regulations, but to harness them. Orbán, for example, spends a lot of time railing against the European Union--and then makes sure that he gets to distribute billions in EU subsidies on which the Hungarian economy depends, directing the money to his political supporters and, for example, arbitrarily denying energy subsidies to cities run by mayors in the political opposition.

As H. David Baer, a contributor to The UnPopulist, recently pointed out to me, Orbán offers much the same terms Vladimir Putin extended to Russian businessmen 10 to 15 years ago: "You can live a normal life, so long as you keep your head down," either by staying out of politics or by playing along with the regime.

This is precisely the deal DeSantis has been attempting to impose on one of his state's big employers, the Walt Disney Company. It is hard for a governor to squeeze a company that can easily move its economic activity across state lines. But Disney has one big, fixed asset that DeSantis can use as leverage: its giant resort in Orlando. So as Reuters reports, he just appointed his own hand-picked board to control the local district that provides Disney World with its infrastructure:

The bill, which DeSantis signed into law in February, authorizes the governor to appoint five supervisors to operate the quasi-government entity, overseeing municipal services, such as fire protection, public utilities, waste collection, and road maintenance. ...

But DeSantis' agenda reaches beyond operational minutiae. "Leaders must stand up and fight back when big corporations make the mistake, as Disney did, of using their economic might to advance a political agenda," DeSantis wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece. "We are making Florida the state where woke goes to die."

By corporations "advancing a political agenda," DeSantis means opposing his agenda. This is a transparent attempt to make businessmen subservient to their political masters, as I have argued elsewhere.

Notably, this is stated very specifically in terms of threatening Disney over the supposedly "woke"--i.e., left-leaning content--of its media enterprises. As one of the new DeSantis-appointed overseers of Disney World put it, "My hope is that Walt Disney's vision will be restored and the woke ideologies will be removed from Disney forever." This echoes another element of Orbánism: control of the media. Orbán used harassment and starvation--depriving independent media of government advertising--to force a takeover of Hungarian mass media by a foundation run by his cronies.

DeSantis' conflict with Disney began with the company's opposition to his so-called "Don't Say Gay" law, which harnessed a gay panic to impose broadly worded controls on what can be said in schools and what books can be carried in school libraries. Ditto for Hungary, where Orbán has also passed laws against so-called "homosexual propaganda."

But it doesn't stop with the excuse of protecting children. In Hungary, Orbán has attempted to exert control over higher education as well. Five years ago, the Orbán regime harassed and forced out the Central European University, a world-class academic program. In its place, Orbán has used billions in government funds to prop up the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, an academic program that is less impressive but has a curriculum built around nationalism. All of this is money that is not going into Hungary's existing universities, nor into its notoriously underfunded primary and secondary schools.

DeSantis seems intent on copying this with his takeover of New College, a small liberal arts school within the Florida public university system. He has stacked the board of trustees with conservative culture warriors who quickly fired the university's president and talked about firing much of its faculty. A particularly revealing comment came from trustee Chris Rufo--a conservative activist who made his name crusading against "critical race theory" as a catchall for left-of-center views:

We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we'll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.

It is a frank admission that the college will now have an explicit ideological mission, and students will be expected to align themselves with it.

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