Walt Disney: Our Rare And Wonderful American Conservative Utopian

Charles C.W. Cooke has a fine article in the May 28 issue of National Review. The subject is the great American "imagineer," Walt Disney. Even in the early and often shaky days of his cottage industry, Disney stayed focused on planning bigger and better experiences for his audience. Over time, the imagination and scale resulted in Disneyland and later in his very own "World" in the wetlands of central Florida. Today, his "Worlds" are indeed all over the world and, though he left us nearly fifty years ago, a huge portion of what we choose as entertainment still bears his imprint.

What is so interesting about Cooke's article is his description of the evolution of Disney's public politics and persistence of his utopian philosophy. Unlike virtually all of his fellow utopians who built their worlds on leftist, collectivist concepts, Disney chose to build his new world on traditional American values. The tipping point was a single event in the late 1930s that threatened those values and changed him into a conservative activist for the rest of his life. Here is your link to the rest of the story.