Florida is the laboratory for MAGA — and American autocracy

Over the past decade, Florida has shifted from swing state status to becoming the center of the Trumpist universe. The state has led the way in trumpeting — and sometimes originating — some of MAGA’s most infamous policies.

But Florida’s rightward shift has been decades in the making. Like other parts of the South and more conservative regions of the country, the Sunshine State has been a laboratory for illiberalism and authoritarianism. In that way, the Age of Trump and the country’s ascendant authoritarianism are American-made, and not something imported or imposed from abroad.

Donald Trump has now been president for six months. But in that time, he and MAGA Republicans have consolidated near-total control over almost all of the power centers in the federal government, including Congress, the courts, the military and national security state, and the bureaucracy and regulatory state as a whole. Their goal is to dismantle America’s multiracial, pluralistic democracy and replace it with a permanent right-wing regime. So far, their efforts have been very effective.

In his latest book “American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives,” journalist and historian Robert W. Fieseler details a lost and hidden history of the anti-freedom regime that existed in Florida during the 1950s and 1960s — a time that, in retrospect, serves as a terrifying preview of the Age of Trump. 

With what he calls “unprecedented access to a secret trove of primary source documents,” Fieseler “reconstruct[s] the story of a largely forgotten inquisition that, for nine years from 1956 to 1965, held Florida citizens ransom to an extrajudicial committee with the power to declare Black integrationists or closeted queers [to be] communists and enemies of the people.”

I recently spoke with Fieseler about “American Scare” and the stunning parallels between past and present.

I always start with emotions, given our worsening national disaster. How are you feeling? Do you have any advice for the average American who may be confused, afraid and feeling powerless as the America they thought existed changes around them in horrible ways?

I feel spiritually called to be a counter-voice to this era of American crisis. My earliest memories involve thinking “The world is wrong” when middle-class family members tried to explain why the triumph of Reagan and capitalism made homelessness an acceptable phenomenon. From a young age, even in the glitter of 1990s excess, I lived at odds with the cruelties of empire. In other words, I was never built to be a peacetime queer who plays make-nice in a Stepford Americana. My destiny as an adult to oppose the Trump regime feels invigorating, urgent and necessary every morning. 

As for advice? The American people need to put down their damned phones and get out of doomscroll mode, and do the deep work that is required to discover what you are truly meant to be doing with your rare energy and gifts.

What is the relationship between Florida and what’s happening in the Age of Trump? 

There are presently two major political power centers in the United States: Washington, D.C., which is basically being run by Floridians, and Tallahassee, where the Trump administration’s wildest ideas get incubated and perfected. Our current attorney general is a former Florida attorney general. Our current secretary of state is the former junior senator of the Sunshine State. And what is Trump 2.0 but a superego on spin in the Florida machine? In a horrible sense, we’re all Floridians now and subject to Tallahassee rules.

Donald Trump became more himself, not less, when he became a Florida resident, and the state system catered to his comeback because his personality so grooved with the archetypical values and behavior of a Tallahassee strongman: Spoils, revenge, gerrymandering, scapegoating, exploiting constitutional loopholes and ruling through the news cycle. As Florida State Sen. Lauren Book once explained to me, “When you get power in Florida, you can use it to pick on anyone.”

Florida and red states are often laboratories for autocracy. But as you show in “American Scare,” the rise of Trumpism and American authoritarianism is mostly treated as a top-down phenomenon. 

Florida is the third-largest state by population in the United States. It’s also the fastest-growing, and it’s been a political kingmaker since the 1990s. The state of Florida, and by proxy our country now, can be a king’s court. Post-Reconstruction state constitutions were drawn in Dixieland to facilitate apartheid-level tyrannies that advantaged white people, and in many regions of the South, there’s still very little a white man with an office can’t do in the name of the law… 

Trump’s Washington and Tallahassee have embraced a kind of valueless imperiousness that pulls on these deep historic currents to rile up hysteria among their mostly white base of support, who are simultaneously terrified and screaming for red meat. In other words, what our body politic is facing today is not substantively new; it’s only perceptually new to those who’ve never before been subject to the whims of a place like Tallahassee.

There are many examples of the convergence between Florida and the Age of Trump. “Alligator Alcatraz,” the right-wing war on education and free speech, discriminatory laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, the systematic harassment of Black and brown people, attempts to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement. “The past isn’t even past,” as William Faulkner observed. 

Very little of DeSantis-ism, or Trumpism even, is original. The Florida breed of fear politics, the good old “American Scare” as I call it, was perfected during the post-World War II red scare years by a segregationist faction called the Pork Choppers, of which a powerful state senator named Charley Johns was leader. Johns made Pork Chopper politicos take a Klan-style blood oath in the 1940s to preserve the post-Reconstruction white power base of North Florida against Black integrationists who wanted social equality. They also wanted to keep power in places like Miami against “newcomers.” The seeds of his political style took root very deeply.

[They] took their cues from the federal red scare and weaponized [words] to attack anyone who opposed their schemes of getting and keeping white financial advantage. Leveraging an atmosphere of social panics, Johns pioneered the practice of scapegoating Black, queer and Cuban minority groups — or even targeting and suffocating individual citizens, such as teachers, using all the weight of the state. Sound at all familiar?

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“Alligator Alcatraz” has antecedents in Florida’s historic chain gangs, where Black and queer workers in prison stripes toiled on roadsides and slept in cages often insured by the Charley E. Johns Insurance Agency. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill has antecedents in Johns’ 1950s devotion to the theory of “homosexual recruitment,” or the idea that innocent white children can be corrupted and somehow made queer.

DeSantis’s opposition to the teaching of AP African American history speaks to a state power apparatus that is afraid of a factual recitation of Florida’s real history. This includes Florida’s era of lynching against Black people…Since there has been no “truth and reconciliation” about white violence against Black people and other non-whites in Florida, these cycles continue to play out in [the state’s] public policy and politics.

The Trump administration, DeSantis and the larger right-wing regime are attempting to erase entire categories of human beings from public and private life. Transgender people’s personhood is being criminalized, for example, nevermind what is happening in the military, with passports, job opportunities, education, housing and other civil rights issues more broadly.

Since the end of Reconstruction in Florida, the gifts and benefits of “personhood,” those who are deemed fit to receive first-class citizenship, have largely been limited to the Sunshine State’s hetero-white residents. To channel Hannah Arendt, Florida whites are bestowed at birth the “right to have rights,” which helps explain how white or white-aligning folk can often get out of inexplicable jams that would imprison others in a heartbeat. Casey Anthony walks free after her two-year-old daughter was found dead and suffocated with duct tape back in 2008. Think about how neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman play-acts [at] being an armed policeman and ends the life of a 17-year-old Black teenager with the protection of a state “Stand Your Ground” statute.

I write in “American Scare” that “it’s as if the forces of justice and karma break and break upon the shores of Florida.” Something of the karmic order has shattered. What goes around does not readily come around for Florida elites. Remarkably for Florida’s profound level of diversity, Florida has not had a single Black or non-white governor since “home rule” was reestablished in 1885… 

It’s a wonder that a cultural mecca like Miami holds next to nothing of Tallahassee’s power. But politicos can make a hell of any paradise. To wit: A governor who got married at Disney World later went to war with Disney World to gain swagger points.

What about undocumented people? The administration’s mass deportation campaign has historic origins in Florida too.

I don’t think the average law-abiding white American has taken the mental journey of what it means to be abducted by authorities, which is a commonplace scenario in totalitarian societies. Generally, jackbooted people in uniform will take you out of your life at a purposefully planned “bad time” to foment maximum anxiety and shame and to generate complete psychological surrender. Next, authorities tend to confine and/or cage their abductees, restricting freedom of movement, before having their way with them. 

Johns Committee agents abducted a University of Florida undergraduate student named Art Copleston, a guy in his twenties who’d heretofore had no interaction with state authorities, in the middle of a final exam for his sophomore accounting class.

They humiliated Copleston by turning up in uniform in an auditorium classroom and theatrically summoning him in front of classmates; Copleston complied to avoid publicly being called “queer” at a time when such an accusation would mean that he needed to transfer colleges. Authorities then put Copleston in the back of an idling squad car and, without explanation, drove him to an isolated motel on the edge of town, where they sat him in a chair in front of a state senator, an elected official, and interrogated him for hours on suspicion of his homosexual lifestyle. Throughout that span, he couldn’t eat or drink water or use the bathroom or receive legal counsel or stand up to leave without permission.

I interviewed Copleston numerous times about this episode, and he described to me the sense of being “a cockroach in the spotlight.” This same feeling of helplessness in the hot seat, these same tactics of dehumanization, these same devices of domination, have only been heightened and finetuned by Florida and federal authorities to foment maximum torment for the latest scapegoats: Documented and undocumented immigrants, Black males deemed militant, suspected Venezuelan gang-members, whoever might be branded as a terrorist and/or investigative journalists who refuse to give up their sources.

Can you offer some profiles in courage and resistance?

In Florida and elsewhere, there were individuals of rare caliber who rose up in their day to defeat these right-wing despots. Meet [queer person of color] music professor William James Neal, who sued segregated Florida in 1962 for firing him from his teaching position due to homosexual rumors. Neal won back his teaching credentials in a Tallahassee courtroom, defeating the Johns Committee at their own game, by hiring two white appellate attorneys and fleeing the state so as to obscure his race from racist white judges.

There is also the case of NAACP Florida President Father Theodore Gibson, architect of Miami school desegregation, who Florida State Sen. Charley Johns tried to imprison and pursued all way [to the] Supreme Court, where Gibson emerged victorious and strengthened the NAACP’s freedom of association.

Yes, ordinary Americans defeated would-be emperors in the past through political participation, nonviolent confrontation, decency of comportment — and a few self-evident truths.