DeSantis is taking on woke corporations. Good.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is seeking to bar financial intermediaries, such as banks, from discriminating against customers on the basis of their political, religious or social views. That’s a great idea – and an excellent reason why he’s surging among Republicans nationwide.

The concept is a sound one: Financial institutions are the bloodstream of private enterprise; a business or an individual cut off from them is economically helpless. Preventing banks and other financial entities from using their market power to force compliance with their views maintains everyone’s freedom.

Imagine if you couldn’t set up a bank account because of your views. You couldn’t open a credit card or deposit your paycheck. You would be consigned to the cash economy, which is an increasingly shrinking space as more and more stores go cashless. Yet some companies have already taken steps toward that horror. During the mass trucker protests in Canada, GoFundMe decided to withhold funds donated to the Freedom Convoy and return them to donors. You may disagree with the views of those protesters, but why should a company such as GoFundMe determine whether they are worthy?

People who worry that DeSantis’s proposal would infringe upon the freedoms of financial companies ignore how we already circumscribe corporate liberties to maintain individual freedoms. Businesses used to send political messages in worker’s pay packets; that’s now illegal, even though it directly limits political speech. Labor unions can have access to corporate property under certain circumstances as courts seek to balance the business’s property rights against the employee’s right to join a union. DeSantis’s measure would simply extend this old principle to a new problem.

One can even argue that this principle – that private economic power can be regulated to preserve individual freedom and autonomy – is at the heart of the modern state. The early economic regulations of the Progressive Era, such as minimum-wage laws and the regulation of monopolies, were often opposed as infringements on the freedom of corporations and their owners. The New Deal’s extension of that principle is what gave rise to the modern regulatory-welfare state and was vociferously opposed by groups such as the American Liberty League as unconstitutional infringements.

Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected their argument clearly in his fifth fireside chat. “The toes of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on,” he told Americans.

But it was right, he said, to curtail liberty for “the comparative few” whose improper exercise of that freedom was “harmful to the greater good.”

That principle was the foundation for the 1960s-era civil rights revolution, which made it illegal for private companies to discriminate on the basis of race and gender. The entire point of that movement was to prevent private economic power from being wielded to push a disfavored minority to society’s sidelines. A person’s ability to participate in our democracy is perhaps the core freedom that any citizen has. The Florida proposal seeks to protect that and should be applauded by anyone who genuinely values robust free speech and political debate.

DeSantis’s embrace of FDR’s principle is political gold because conservatives increasingly fear that “woke corporations” are wielding their considerable power to deny them their core political freedom. The social reformers and labor advocates at the turn of the 20th century suffered from that era’s corporate-establishment abuse of power, too, so they organized to curtail an employer’s power when they had the chance. That’s exactly what conservatives today want from their leaders.

This allows DeSantis to stand out from his potential competitors. As a governor, he can act to protect conservatives. Others, such as former vice president Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, can only talk. DeSantis also often leads rather than follows public opinion, pushing his competitors to trail behind in meek imitation. Even former president Donald Trump seems to have been caught flat-footed by his former protege’s emergence.

Liberal reaction to DeSantis’s moves against woke corporations merely betray how much the left has become beholden to the corporate establishment. Would they oppose corporate efforts to deny people access to bank accounts because, for example, they support the Green New Deal or Black Lives Matter? Of course not. They worry about DeSantis because they believe that large business is now their cultural ally. That’s exactly the stance pre-New Deal Republicans were in, defending establishment privilege against popular anger. Look how well that worked for them.

Successful American political leaders have always defended the powerless many from the powerful few. DeSantis understands that woke corporations are simply the latest powerful threat from which the people need protection. History suggests he can ride this horse to the political bank.