Florida is America’s near-future and is already reflective of its benighted present
Watch: Ron DeSantis’ full 2024 RNC remarks
Watch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ full remarks at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
For his nominating convention this week, Donald J. Trump brought nearly the whole of Florida with him: The convention, just like his rallies, screams Florida – full of kitsch, anger, bad jokes, and grifters. There’s Matt Gaetz striding across the floor to harass the former House Speaker. There’s Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis, two men whom Trump emasculated on the national stage, their hopes dashed but their eyes now laser-focused on consolation baubles, leading a Trumpian vesper service. The once-forceful Trump critic J.D. Vance, now Trump’s newly minted running mate, is a master of personal reinvention — a more Floridian quality there is not. He’ll be a resident here one day.
The judge who let Trump skate on serious federal charges? Floridian. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law? Floridians. Trump’s White House in exile? Florida’s Mar-a-Lago. The birthplace of modern American election lawfare and violence? Florida. That creeping dread, that need to brace yourself for what’s coming, that final note of resignation? The quintessential Floridian experience.
If guns are the sacraments of a deranged American religion, and Trump its messiah, then Florida is its mecca: steamy, angry Florida. The Trump National Convention is in Milwaukee, sure, but it’s really just a bunch of Floridians, actual or honorary, milling around. DeSantis’ impotent presidential campaign tried to verbalize this very idea — Make America Florida — mistakenly thinking it would be broadly popular. His candidacy was a catastrophe, but he was right about that much.
This damp peninsula – this sprawling, tropical spit of limestone, phosphate, sand and dark secrets – is America’s potential future, if it’s not already reflective of its benighted present.
Heat intensifies things, like heart conditions, and it deforms them, like wax candles. Humid Florida is America intensified. Simmering Florida is America deformed. And America is running red hot right now.
There are guns here – my god, are there guns here. There are troubled histories and modern-day Nazis unashamed to walk in the daylight. There are endangered species and invasive species and invading developers. In Florida, extinction is not a phenomenon of the distant past or of a far-off future but a present-day, observable threat. In the hot months, which are legion, flesh-eating bacteria hide in its boiling waters — waters that are ever rising. There are tornados with midwestern power and wildfires with hellish fury and of course hurricanes, which plod across the Atlantic like city-destroying kaiju.
There are suburbs, and suburbs of suburbs, and exurbs, and exurbs of exurbs. There are too many broad roads larded with too much traffic. And connecting them all is the Florida protoplasm, ever-changing and expanding and pulsing: The Villages and Disney, escapism for the young and old.
There are fraudsters, abusers, oligarchs and tech goons, a corrupt judiciary, a corrupt political culture, corrupt corporations, and corrupt bureaucratic systems. Often, those adjectives and nouns intertwine and conspire so deeply that it becomes hard to separate which is which.
Florida is an oasis for people with money; for those without it, Florida is just another miserly Deep South state, pro-life in branding but meh-life in practice: Florida has one of the highest rates of uninsured children in the nation. For the wealthy, Florida is a gilded coastal getaway, a warm respite from northern cold; for the poor, getting to the beach at all is cumbersome, if not entirely impossible.
And casting a shadow over it all, of course, is Florida citizen Donald Trump, the man who was president and could be president again, the most Floridian a figure as there ever was.
And, my lord, it’s hot here.
To say Trump is a threat to American democracy isn’t necessarily to argue he’d become a dictator on day one — his confession of such an ambition notwithstanding. It means the nation might become something a bit more like Florida, which is to say democracy with a side salad of authoritarian rule.
When Florida voters, for example, believe their leaders are not being responsive to their concerns, they can use citizen-driven petitions to change the state constitution. And they’ve done so to the great consternation of the Republican Party of Florida, which has possessed a trifecta rule over the state for more than 20 years.
In response, the Legislature and governor have made citizen-driven constitutional amendments ludicrously difficult to even get on the ballot, and they’re constantly dreaming up new barriers to build. And even when citizens pass such amendments — which is difficult in its own right, given the 60 percent approval threshold that is required — Florida’s elected leaders have shown a willingness to simply veto the changes they don’t like. Court challenges are fraught because the state’s judiciary is stacked against citizens, and none more so than the Florida Supreme Court, where DeSantis has appointed five of its seven members.
To wit: After Florida voters in 2018 overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that was supposed to automatically restore voting rights to most Floridians with prior convictions, the Legislature and DeSantis crafted a workaround. Now, those with prior felony convictions must first satisfy any financial obligations they have stemming from their past legal troubles, an impossible task for some because the state won’t tell them what their outstanding fines and fees actually are. “The uncertainty will cause some citizens who are eligible to vote, even on the State’s own view of the law, not to vote, lest they risk criminal prosecution,” a federal judge wrote of Florida’s disenfranchisement scheme.
This year, there will be citizen-driven amendments for voters to consider on abortion access and recreational marijuana — measures that immediately drew frivolous court challenges from Florida’s Trumpy attorney general, Ashley Moody, hoping to keep them off the ballot entirely. DeSantis’ administration also swooped in to muddy the waters. This week, a state panel decided the abortion-rights amendment must include a disclaimer that it would “negatively impact the state budget,” a state-sanctioned thumb on the scale for opponents of abortion rights.
In Florida, the governor can remove elected prosecutors for virtually any reason, the choices of actual voters be damned. DeSantis’ legislative allies shielded some of his administration’s records from public disclosure, significantly watering down Florida’s once celebrated and expansive public-records law. And DeSantis wants more: His lawyers have crafted novel legal arguments seeking to exempt even more of his office’s records from public disclosure.
A few weeks ago, he signed legislation that would effectively strip local ethics commissions of the power to investigate allegations of corruption, one of the few scant checks on elected and government officials. Public-employee unions that support Democrats get slapped with laws designed to sap their membership and empty out their coffers; unions that support Republicans get exempted from those laws. At any time, state power can be turned against even corporations that step out of line. This current crop of Florida politicians flirts with legislation making it easier to sue journalists and flagrantly flouts the First Amendment with draconian regulations of social media companies and absurd restrictions on what college professors can say. City and county governments find themselves with less autonomy one legislative session after the next, while Tallahassee politicians continue a years-long campaign to take power away from local communities.
This is the Florida way: It’s not not democracy, but it’s not quite democracy either. It’s an immensely powerful state government that views its constituents with suspicion, a kind of soft authoritarianism that sells itself with euphemisms like “parental rights” and rage-bait like “woke college professors.”
Make America Florida: It’s a promise. It’s a threat. And it’s happening right before our eyes.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.
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Publish date : 2024-07-17 12:44:39
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