Wayne O'Leary

Florida Is As Florida Does

It’s long been a standing, half-serious joke among conservatives that nonconformist, left-leaning California should be cut loose from the US mainland and allowed to float out to sea. Liberals now have a riposte: Separate eccentric, increasingly rightist Florida from the continent and let it drift off in the opposite direction.

Something like that may happen for real anyway, as a result of climate change. Sea level projections suggest that, barring aggressive action on the environmental front, a good portion of the Sunshine State may actually be under water in the not-to-distant future.

Would we miss it? Heat-and-humidity fans would, no doubt; snowbirds everywhere would have to find a new wintertime destination. But lots of people wouldn’t share their woe. Florida, third largest state in population, has become the home of the strange, the weird and the insufferably right-wing. Democrats, mesmerized by its cache of electoral votes, continue their efforts to capture it in presidential elections — more and more an exercise in futility resembling the quest for the Holy Grail.

Let’s see what distinguishes present-day Florida, politically. First, it’s the adopted home of Donald Trump, fourth worst president ever (a generous ranking), according to a recent poll of historians. His digs at Mar-a-Lago, a budding Graceland-like shrine for the Republican right, is the closest Florida can come to Mount Vernon or Monticello.

Next in political prominence is Gov. Ron DeSantis, voted most likely to succeed the Donald by Trump’s base. DeSantis, best remembered as the COVID denier who kept Florida beaches open to overflow crowds at the height of the pandemic, has emerged lately as a crusader against vaccine passports, face-mask mandates and school closures; he also favors voter-suppression laws and “anti-riot” (that is, anti-protest) legislation.

The latest in a string of GOP governors — Florida has not elected a Democratic chief executive since Lawton Chiles in 1994 — photogenic Ron is whipping an amenable, deep-red legislature to enact Trump’s cultural agenda at the state level.

It’s not been altogether smooth sailing. In mid-July, wide-open Florida led the nation in the spread of the coronavirus Delta variant, with one in five new infections recorded in the Sunshine State. Even The Villages, retirement mecca for rich Republicans, was reporting a surge in active cases. Couldn’t be Florida’s reluctance, urged on by its governor, to vaccinate and mask-up, could it?

Worst of all is that DeSantis knew better from the start. He’s one of the new breed of post-Trump Trumpsters operating as faux populists of the right, highly privileged, well-educated cynics with Ivy League degrees (Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is another) who’ve chosen to manipulate their followers by appealing to a blend of ignorance, biases and prejudices. It’s a pitch that works especially well in Florida, because of its multicultural factionalism and bizarrely unconventional political history.

Florida, remember, produced the counterrevolutionary “crazy Cubans” of Watergate notoriety, oddball members of the post-1959 influx of political refugees fleeing Fidel Castro’s leftist revolution. Losers in an ideological struggle, this wave of ex-elitist émigrés introduced a right-wing revanchism to the state. Their descendants now run Miami politics, pushing Florida further rightward.

The Florida Cubans have been joined by other displaced supporters of authoritarian Latin American regimes — from Venezuela, El Salvador, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. They add a volatile, rigidly conservative and potent political force perfectly in sync with the anti-government Florida style.

The Florida political style has deep roots, and it was indirectly on display recently in the Champlain Towers condominium collapse at Surfside near Miami Beach in the center of the state’s Gold Coast. Without minimizing the human tragedy, it’s not an understatement to say Crockett and Tubbs of “Miami Vice” fame would have had a field day investigating this prime example of the Florida free-market ethos at work.

A series of post-collapse exposés by enterprising New York Times reporters has revealed high-rise disasters waiting to happen, the end result of several decades of overdevelopment, dismissal of ecological considerations, deferred maintenance, faulty design and construction, lax regulation, and government corruption, including bribery. Climate change and global warming meet boosterism and the main chance.

Starting in earnest around 1970, rapacious businessmen and developers, backed by compromised political leadership, determined, in the great state tradition, to wring every dollar they could out of South Florida’s coastal resource of land and water, climate and sunshine. Ignoring the porous, unstable geology, driving rains, hurricane winds, storm surges, and salt-laden air common to this swampy, semi-tropical environment (all exacerbated by climate change), they built and built and built some more.

No fewer than 270 high-rise buildings of 10 or more stories (Champlain Towers, which rose in 1981, was 13 stories high) were erected a stone’s throw from the ocean in Miami-Dade County in the 1970s and 1980s alone. Many have never been subjected to mandatory safety inspections. Now, the bill is coming due in the form of settling or sinking buildings, underground leaks, metal corrosion, and cracking or crumbling walls — a virtual panoply of structural problems.

The South Florida condo boom is just the latest expression of the state’s get-rich-quick land-rush mentality. (“Materialism baking in the sun,” Norman Mailer called it in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” as he viewed the “white refrigerators” resembling ice-cube trays on edge that lined the Miami Beach shoreline.)

The destruction of paradise began in 1881, shortly after Florida, a slave state that had joined the Confederacy, was readmitted to the Union. Almost its first post-Reconstruction initiative was to sell four million acres of the public domain to land speculators. An unfortunate precedent was set.

Then, in 1906, the draining of the Everglades to accommodate agricultural interests got under way, setting off another development mania. The most famous of the boom-and-bust cycles of uncontrolled growth followed by financial collapse began after World War I and peaked in 1925. Its Wild West aspects were chronicled memorably by Frederick Lewis Allen (“Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”), who summed up Miami in the Roaring Twenties this way: “The whole city had become one frenzied real-estate exchange.”

In the very beginning, Florida’s discoverer, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, who stumbled upon it in 1521, was said to be looking for a mythical Fountain of Youth. That probably makes him the quintessential dream-seeking Floridian — and explains a lot.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2021

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