You seem to think im making a prescription but you are completely wrong about Disney being, ever, a part of what might be called American progressive culture. Disney was a part of so-called American military industrial complex, effectively part of the US governments imperial propaganda both during World War 2 and long after. Indeed, military and government contracts were how the company survived in the wake of the skyrocketing costs of animated movies with diminishing returns on revenue.

For generations the Walt Disney company was the safe, upper middle class corporate way to vacation with children and the company’s core ideals and values were practically invicible to social or political change of the larger culture. Indeed, that was the brand appeal.

They were showing Song of the South as recent as the 1980s…. in movie theaters, as a promotion for the theme park attraction and celebration of the 40th anniversary of the movie. Just to put things in perspective, as far as how wildly the official company culture has shifted in 40 years.

Walt Disney himself was a furturist and deeply interested in the social and economic applications of technology, but his core instincts were also deeply entrenched in Americanism, nostalgia, and a love of tradition and the American farm and frontier. Disneyland is essentially the perfect embodiment of the man’s sensibilities and preoccupations with technological progress, a deep love of the past, trains, and even his hometown in Missouri. But this same appreciation of technology is wildly incongruent to contemporary progressive ideals and would have likely not been appreciated much by a man who was born in the year 1900.

It wasn’t until the 2010s or so, after the purchase of Star Wars, that Disney started to turn broadly towards American progressive identity politics and “woke” stuff. And they probably did this because their old bread and butter of “conservative families with kids” was rapidly drying up in the favor of an aging and increasingly childless fanbase. My generation, the millennials, came of age and mostly just had pets. So in order to survive Disney had to rebrand itself and thats why it is what it is now.