Why don't Republicans hate Disney's America?

• Author: Allen, Charlotte
• Position: Neo-conservatives

On a whole range of issues, conservatives and liberals should be standing together

In late December, the Walt Disney Company announced a plan to build an American history theme park in Haymarket, Virginia, a rural town of 500 just beyond the cordon of fake-farmhouse tract developments, glass-towered office parks, and shopping strips that make up the suburbs of Washington, D.C. "Disney's America" is scheduled to occupy 3,000 acres of land and has a certain grotesque irony about it--not the least of which is the fact that the Washington area burgeons with landmarks of real American history, including the Civil War's Manassas battlefield a few miles away. Disney promises that the park's attractions will generate as many as 19,000 new jobs--of the low-paying, transient-attracting, tourist-service variety. But far from needing the work, the Haymarket area is already prosperous on a modest scale, and metropolitan Washington in general has the nation's highest per-capita living standard. Worst of all, Disney, a multibillion dollar corporation that almost never fails to turn a profit, expects the commonwealth of Virginia (that is, its taxpayers) to underwrite part of the theme park's costs, shelling out $163.2 million to build roads, train employees, and even advertise the attraction.

Big spending, government entwinement in private enterprise, and the certain destruction of all that is left in Northern Virginia of a traditional, family-and-church-centered, rural way of life--sounds like political liberalism at its overbearing worst. However, Disney's America's biggest booster is no liberal but Virginia's new Republican governor, George Allen, who ran for office in 1993 on a conservative platform of oldfashioned morality and fiscal restraint. When Allen talks about Haymarket, though, he doesn't talk about anything resembling conserving. He talks growth. He talks progress. "Disney's America can and will be the first step in Virginia's renaissance," he told state legislators early this year.

Allen's rhetoric is typical of those whom we call "conservatives" in America these days, or at least of the conservatives who figure prominently in politics and the media. Conservatives are supposed to stand for a love of tradition--hence their name--and also for a suspicion of government.

Protecting the environment, for example, ought to be a conservative cause. The Republican can president and WASP aristocrat Theodore Roosevelt practically invented the word "conservation." But most conservatives nowadays call conservationists "tree huggers" and make fun of endangered species. Conservatives ought to champion propriety and good manners. Yet The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial writers have taken up the cause of Ewart Yearwood, the Swarthmore College student in...