Floodwaters in Crystal River, Florida, August 2023
Chris O’Meara/AP PhotoFlorida Is Everywhere
And we’re all out of time.
A certain expression crosses people’s faces when you tell them you’re from Miami—a mixture of surprise and intrigue and pity. They’ve been there on a short beach vacation, or to see their great aunt, or they missed a connecting flight en route to somewhere farther south and found themselves stranded. They thought it was fun in a kitschy way, or super weird, or sort of boring. They want to know: What was it like to grow up there?
You struggle to answer this question. Every story sounds like a bit—the minor heists and major conspiracies, the brushes with celebrity or the law. You tell them that at your public high school undercover cops posed as kids and the security guards slept with students. You tell them that everyone was high on something all the time, and you often held the drugs because you were white—a reality never discussed in these terms but accepted as a matter of course. You tell them about bar mitzvahs of salsa and merengue and Miami booty bass. You tell them that everything really did look like a rap video, all hot tubs and half-naked girls; that no matter how poor a lot of your friends were, there was always one kid with absent parents and a mansion where you could all play at Scarface. You tell them about crazy Jews and crazy Cubans and crazy Russians. By “crazy” you mean reactionary, you mean fascist—words you didn’t learn until years after you left. You tell them about alligators in swimming pools, lizards in living rooms, iguanas in the parks. You tell them that sometimes it rained so much that cars would float down the street and collect in cul-de-sacs, knocking against one another and the houses like rubber duckies. You tell them it was fun as hell. You tell them a lot of your friends are dead. You tell them a lot of your friends are addicted to something, or raising children with bad men, or running Zionist propaganda outfits, or thinking about getting a gun. You call it an abyss, a trap, a pit of despair. You work yourself up relaying how you arrived at college exhausted from partying with no idea how to think, and about to spend the next dozen years unlearning the hatred of women, the dehumanization of Palestinians, the suspicion of leftists that you absorbed while growing up in Florida.
Suffice to say, I tried to talk my colleagues out of this issue theme, even as I recognized its relevance. Throughout these pages, it’s repeated again and again how, under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has become a laboratory for the multifarious designs of the right. Indeed, what makes DeSantis remarkable is not the blatant viciousness of his program—anti-queer and -trans, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-poor—which appears par for the course in Donald Trump’s GOP, but his demonstration of how easily the democratic process can be commandeered in order to enforce it. Riding a wave of popularity for his refusal to shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic, DeSantis has remade the state in his image. He has intervened in school board elections and replaced the boards of public universities. He has degraded the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression laws—including legislation that curtailed the reach of a 2018 constitutional ballot initiative re-enfranchising most people with felony convictions, followed by highly publicized arrests of those who didn’t get the memo. To enforce these and other repressive laws, DeSantis has created his own election police force and revived the long-defunct Florida State Guard as his own personal militia, which has attracted violent extremists, and which in at least one instance he has deployed out of state, to the border with Mexico. He has made a habit of crushing local initiatives, preempting lower levels of government from enacting policy on everything from heat protection for workers to rent control to ranked choice voting.
Who will stop him? At every turn, DeSantis has revealed our vaunted system of checks and balances to be mere suggestions, uttered too late, in a quiet and trembling voice. He has fired two prosecutors who challenged his agenda and stacked the courts with cronies prepared to uphold his decrees. The Florida Democratic Party—incompetent and disorganized, ruled by corporate consultants, and in total denial about who their opponents are and what they are willing to do—puts up no fight whatsoever. Those who do understand the threat are often scared into silence. As progressive state representative Anna Eskamani said last year in an ad hoc congressional hearing focused on anti-democratic abuses of power in Florida, “Whether it’s the Florida High School Athletic Association, or some of our local expressway authorities, [or a] college board of trustees, no entity feels safe operating and expressing their opinions in Florida today unless it aligns with the governor.” Dozens of Florida activists, journalists, educators, and culture workers we spoke with for this issue echoed this sentiment; even among those tasked with public advocacy or seemingly too small-fry to be targets of state backlash, few would go on the record.
Many of the Floridians I spoke to wondered aloud: Has Florida really gone deep red? Is this highly orchestrated cruelty actually the will of our people? It’s hard to say, especially since the people themselves are changing. Hundreds of thousands have left the state over the last two years—including some of the contributors to this issue—fleeing the political situation, yes, but mostly the skyrocketing cost of living, a byproduct of DeSantis’s handouts to developers and insurance companies. They’ve been more than replaced by a wealthier cohort of ideological émigrés, among them such right-wing personalities as Charlie Kirk, Baked Alaska, Ben Shapiro, and Michael Flynn. The Gulf Coast city of Sarasota, in particular, has become a haven for white nationalists with a penchant for gun rights and what anti-vaxxers call “medical freedom.” And it’s not just the American right that finds the state hospitable: Jair Bolsonaro, the “Brazilian Trump,” roams the aisles of an Orlando Publix and Yair Netanyahu, son of Benjamin, hangs out by the pool in South Florida. I am reminded of a line from Miami, Joan Didion’s still perspicacious 1987 book about Cuban exile politics, where “meetings at private houses in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences.” In the past several years, there have been three right-wing coups with ties to Florida: The January 6th insurrection and “Operation Gideon,” a 2020 attempt to depose Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by native dissidents and American mercenaries, were at least partially planned from the state, and Bolsonaro’s failed January 2023 attempt to remove Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took place while Bolsonaro was in Orlando.
So, why Florida? What can I tell you about the idiosyncrasies of my home state that might explain how it has become such fertile ground for American autocracy and a vibrant campus for international fascisms? I can only really speak of Miami—and even then, only tentatively. Like many tourist cities, it is notoriously difficult to know. When you leave, it risks closing behind you like a trick door; where there were tunnels, only walls—painted by street artists at the behest of developers to seed an arts district where now no one can afford to live. What I do know is that South Florida is a place resentful of imported liberal pieties. A majority-nonwhite city will not entertain facile fantasies about the nobility of the oppressed, or scolding directives from white people about what constitutes permissible language. Working-class solidarities are undercut by a committed aspirationalism—the money may be out of reach, but it’s only a deal away. In a place where, as Didion writes, it’s “possible to pass from walled enclaves to utter desolation while changing stations on the car radio,” even some of the shabbier neighborhoods have guard gates, just for show, with arms that lift reflexively for everyone who approaches.
But perhaps more than anything, Miami is a city defined by the condition of exile and diaspora—that is to say, a city never fully real to its inhabitants, because it is animated by the superimposition of elsewhere. It was sometimes confusing growing up in so many places at once, living among not just my own “here” and “there” but others’ as well. And yet, I understood intuitively the shape of these layered encounters—the ways the eternal specter of the other place demanded fealty and structured affiliation, the way it raised the temperature of every interaction, injected existential passions and world-historical stakes into an American idyll intent on leaving history behind. I understood the intermingling of religion and secular nationalism in the chapel on Biscayne Bay that faced Havana, with murals of angels carrying the Cuban flag heavenward; after all, we prayed facing Jerusalem under stained glass windows featuring the tracks of Auschwitz and the Israeli flag. I recognized the deliciousness of communal grievance, the belonging it afforded; I noted the warning in the way Miami Cubans blew up their own for going off script. I saw the ways that trauma was made a fortress, with enemies always at the gate, whose supposed savagery or tyranny could only be defeated with that of our own.
I don’t know that any of this adds up to an explanation. All I know is, right now, the vibes are bad. In the harbor near my mother’s apartment, the cars in the parking lot sport QAnon bumper stickers, and there’s a “Trump Burger” on the menu at Levy’s Shawarma. When I visited in February, I saw Israeli flags everywhere—hanging in store windows and strung in plastic garlands across apartment balconies. From my mother’s own balcony on the bay, the boom and jackhammer of construction drowns out all other sound, as they build a few more feet of seawall and hope to God it’s enough. In the kitchen, my mom offers hamantaschen to a guy there to fix the blinds—a new transplant, he tells her—who has a mélange of militant white nationalist tattoos: a three-percenter emblem on his forearm and a Nordic knot on his neck. My father’s house is beset by another kind of darkness entirely, since he took his own life in January. Perhaps that has nothing to do with Miami, and yet I cannot help but note that a few years ago the family three houses down lost their father to suicide, and the house catty-corner to ours lost a son—a former classmate of mine—the same way. Is there not some particular brutality and immiseration at work?
But when I look up the national average, I find that Miami’s suicide rate doesn’t even crack the top five. In truth, I’ve had this experience several times while working on this issue: In attempting to make an argument about what makes Florida exceptional, I’ve discovered that it isn’t. Last September, we sent journalist Max Freedman to report on the extremism of my home Jewish community, but after October 7th—with the rabid retrenchment of tribalist and eliminationist sentiment all around—it seems much less of an outlier than it did before. If Miami’s conservative minorities were once an object of national fascination, now, if recent polling is to be believed, Trump’s national share of both the Black and Latin American vote has jumped to over 30%. And the rest of the country may soon experience the shock-and-awe campaign that Florida has been battling the last several years: Trump’s vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance, has not been shy about his fondness for DeSantis-like methods. “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” he has said. To counter progressives, he has proclaimed, the right needs to “get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” The left—abandoned by liberals, fragmented by infighting, and scrambling to build amid rising repression—does not yet have a credible answer to this threat.
This was the warning we received repeatedly from Florida’s embattled left-wing organizers: This isn’t just our problem. Your state could be next. Florida is everywhere. If there is any hope in this bleak picture, it is to be found in those people who are already facing the onslaught, who are making homemade hormone therapy and providing mobile services to the unhoused; the organizers going back to basics—reaching out one-on-one to every member of the union to ensure it can withstand attacks, building difficult and unlikely coalitions on narrower issues in hopes of expanding from there. We must regroup, to the fullest extent we are able. Florida is everywhere—and, as is clear from the water lapping at our ankles, we are all out of time.
Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents.
