The Floridazation of America
January 22, 2025
“Florida Man” heading a news story has become a byword for some really crazy stuff going down. Now Bloomberg columnist Mary Ellen Klas writes of this as harbinger for the rest of America.* Our Trumpification being a Floridazation.
Klas gives a chilling review of how Florida’s civic culture has become a travesty of what America’s used to represent — thanks to voters empowering culture warrior Republicans. In Florida it started with Rick Scott elected governor in 2010, despite his business record entailing huge frauds (prefiguring Trump. Now Scott’s a senator; DeSantis is governor).
They’ve radically politicized education policy, with edicts like “Don’t Say Gay,” blocking teaching about, well, reality, hollowing out schools and degrading student achievement. They’ve more broadly assaulted freedom of speech, as in the attack on Disney, banning books, stifling dissent. Florida’s government practically invented Covid nuttiness. And put a big vaccine cuckoo in charge of health care, causing plunging vaccination rates and spikes in preventable dangerous illnesses.
Klas sees Florida veering into autocracy, and fingers root causes: changing demographics combined with economic inequality. The state’s population (foreshadowing our national trajectory) has grown older and less white; half have trouble making ends meet. Spurring the racial anxiety and anti-elite grievance mentality Republicans so manipulate, stoking poisonous disaffection and resentment. Even while their actual policies disserve the voters they exploit.
Klas notes that Florida has many folks coming from elsewhere. “Those shallow roots mean that the cultural isolation and social media echo chambers that are now polarizing America’s politics have long been at work in Florida, effectively undermining any shared commitment to the common good.” While local journalism’s decline makes elected officials less accountable. All this undermines “the connective tissue and shared values that traditionally knit generations together.”
Making for a hotspot in our growing nationwide loneliness affliction. It goes back to Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone. David Brooks too has written much about a disintegrating ethos of community. And look at all those people mesmerized by their phones (what’s so fascinating??) — shredding their connectivity with other actual humans.
This erodes the social trust underpinning community spirit and respect for institutions. Our civic culture could not endure without citizens having some feel for what being part of a cooperative democratic society really means. Nor without a shared reservoir of actual genuine knowledge. Also emptied out by Republicans — and those smartphones (should be called stupidphones).
And so — unthinkable only a decade ago — we get a Florida Man president whose record of lies, felony convictions, adjudicated fraud and sexual assault, just don’t matter. Nor even his deadly attempt to overthrow an election. Morality itself no longer matters. This is our civic degradation.
And his “unity” babble is not wholly absurd. The shock and horror attending his 2016 advent has largely melted away, his return a giant triumphalist love-fest. Greatest comeback ever! A magic wand erasing all the deceit, depredations and depravity. As if a national rejuvenation! With business and tech bros in the vanguard, falling all over themselves to genuflect before the new god.
And why not? All co-opted into rule by an increasingly powerful self-serving oligarchy (that President Biden’s farewell address warned about. To deaf ears).
Greatest comeback? Monster risen from the dead.
Welcome to the new United States of Florida.
* Read it here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-01-12/trump-is-making-america-florida?srnd=undefined