This GOP about-face is far worse than ‘cancel culture’

The GOP no longer argues that free markets, rather than government, should choose “winners and losers.” In today’s Republican Party, the primary economic role of the state is to reward friends and crush political enemies.

Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham expressed the new ethos in a monologue threatening companies that advocated for LGBTQ rights, ballot access, racial justice and other political stances that are anathema in today’s GOP.

“When Republicans, they get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table,” Ingraham warned. “Your copyright, trademark protection. Your special status within certain states. And even your corporate structure itself.”

This punitive approach to economic policy is hardly unique to Ingraham. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is furious that Disney has publicly criticized his new law regarding classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. He has threatened to cancel Disney’s half-century-old special status that enables the company to effectively govern itself on the grounds of its theme parks. Similarly, last year, DeSantis signed a (likely unconstitutional) law to punish tech companies for privately determined content-moderation decisions, and another law that fines companies that attempt to set vaccination requirements in their workplaces.

In other states, GOP politicians have punished companies for taking supposedly “woke” stands on issues such as gun violence. Republicans in Congress have tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies wjpse public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike.

This approach was expertly modeled by President Donald Trump, who used the power of the state to reward friends and punish perceived political enemies. He did this through tax law, tariff policy and other proposed subsidies that chose winners and losers according to their political allegiances. And that’s not getting into all the times he tried to weaponize his presidency to prosecute or otherwise punish politicians and private citizens (rather than companies).

These behaviors might have seemed like an aberration from standard GOP rhetoric and policy. Occasionally his fellow Republicans even called Trump out on these command-and-control, Soviet-style efforts to intervene in markets and curb free enterprise. Theirs, after all, is a party that spent years complaining about how Democrats had too often tried to rig marketplace rules to favor particular outcomes.

Now Trump’s instincts have infected the rest of the right.

This is far scarier than the “cancel culture” phenomenon Republicans so often decry. Cancel culture, however ill-defined, generally refers to the use of voluntary social pressure to punish those whose views are deemed somehow unacceptable — through public rebukes, boycotts, shunnings, firings or other refusals to engage with someone in the public square. Republicans (like Democrats) have of course engaged in all these behaviors and worse: Trump himself frequently called for boycotts and firings, including over the peaceful expression of political speech.

But now his party is attempting codify these responses into law, using the power and weapons of the state against those who disagree with them.

Democrats should take advantage of this and position themselves as the new party of political and economic freedom and the rule of law, and to embrace the prosperity that such values can engender. Instead they have been letting their own populist instincts guide them toward rhetoric and policies that emphasize their own punitive treatment of disfavored companies.

It’s not too late for Democrats to correct course. Someone has to.