Woke Disney

The Walt Disney Corporation has always had a special role as the main propaganda organ to the American people. In recent years, it has shifted towards what is known as woke propaganda. This is an example. Things like this is why Governor Ron DeSantis is ending Disney’s special tax exempt status in Florida. It’s part of his war on wokeness. Disney has gotten too woke, and so must be punished. But is woke Disney really that different from pre-woke Disney?

In its early days it was the internal Magic Kingdom for the American imagination, to offset growing American imperial ambitions in the real world—savage wars in Korea and Vietnam, coups in Guatemala and Indonesia, the crushing of the labor movement, to name just a few lowlights. Those weren’t so magic, and they weren’t imaginary—they were ugly, and real. So Disney provided a light cheerful antidote to this dark reality. That’s why the American people loved Disney—it was an escape from the grimness of the world, a way for Americans to see themselves as the good guys in a world where that wasn’t as easy as it used to be.

America stood less and less for a better tomorrow in the real world, so it needed an internal, magic kingdom where the good qualities that America ought to stand for could be celebrated in an imaginary way. It makes sense that Disneyland opened in 1955, two years after the Korean War ended. There has hardly ever been, at any time in history, a more brutal war than the Korean War of 1950-1953. Ten percent of Korea’s prewar population was either dead, injured, or missing at the end of the War. The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea. For comparison, the U.S. dropped only 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan in all of World War Two.

The American Empire—the real kingdom—was being built, and the Magic Kingdom counterbalanced it. That was the ideological function of Disney—a bastion of purity to offset the increasingly dark function of America on the world stage, as the leading gangster and enforcer of global corporate capitalism. The more suffering the American empire created in real terms, the more important Disney was as a means of turning us away from all of that.

Now with Disney’s woke turn the opposite has happened. Instead of upholding a mythic purity and innocence at the center of America, Disney is focusing on social injustices. Disney has, as they say, gone woke. This is a complete reversal of what it used to do, and it feels like a betrayal. So DeSantis, and the political movement he represents, are trying to make Disney pay.

But woke or not, Disney still serves the exact same ideological function as it ever has. In its golden age, it made Americans feel better about themselves by offering a magical alternative reality that was a refuge from worldly things. Disney’s content turned our eyes away from reality. Now, Disney’s content plunges you into the depths of political, social, and cultural conflict. It turns your eyes towards reality.

This seems like a reversal, but it is really just the same thing. Disney’s fixation on social justice serves the same function that turning away from reality used to—it’s all about making you feel like a better person, enabling you to continue existing in an unjust place, with a clean conscience.

In the past, you could focus on the imaginary world of Disney, and ignore the real world, and feel good. Now, you focus on the ugly realities of the world through Disney content—and you feel good about doing that. In fact, now you can dismiss real world politics entirely—you feel ahead of the curve, like you already took care of it through your entertainment consumption.

This is the whole point of wokeness—not to change anything, but to make sure nothing changes, while making it feel like change took place. To rub your face in the injustice all around you, so you feel good about being aware of it. If you watch a Disney show about anti-racism or whatever, you get to have a clean conscience, feel like a good person, and that’s the end of it. It’s designed to be the end of the something, not the beginning of something—but to seem like the opposite of that.

So the end result of the propaganda—giving Americans a clean conscience—is the same in both cases, woke and pre-woke. Only the path has changed—from intentionally ignoring the world, to focusing on the world. The previous Disney method was to be apolitical and just create entertainment, which made people feel good. The woke Disney method is to be political and make people feel bad about the injustice of the world—and so they get to feel good about feeling bad. It’s the same outcome, but by a different route.

Wokeness is just the kind of fascism we get when liberals are in charge. But Disney has always been fascist—it is just doing a different kind of fascism now. And it’s a whole lot less fun! If we’re going to have fascism either way, can’t it at least be the fun kind?