The Florida Frontier

In the evolving lexicon of the 2024 US Presidential election, Florida has stood for the ultimate “weird” of American politics—a place where legislation and executive action revolve around book banning; state protection of embryonic heartbeats, rather than Medicaid expansion; the growth of private education at the expense of public-school enrollments; and allegations of cultural subversion against not only the public school districts but even the Walt Disney Corporation. Under Ron DeSantis, a contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, Florida has presented a cohesive political identity—one which has oriented the Republican Party nationally in recent years.

In 2023, DeSantis tasked Christopher Rufo, a right-wing political operative, with reforming the state’s higher education system against the “woke” ideologies of critical race theory (CRT), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and “gender insanity.” Rufo was notably one of the masterminds behind the 1776 Commission, the Trump White House’s attempt to reinstitute a “patriotic education” in response to the growing popularity of critical history along with the Black Lives Matter movement. “This malign ideology is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect the core institutions of our country,” reads one of the Trump Administration’s executive orders on education from 2020. 

Thus far, the right’s war on “woke” ideology has found its greatest success in Florida, and it is again contesting power at the national level under a reinvigorated Trump campaign. The state has emerged ahead of the rest in offering a new vision of capitalist society—one that, at the state level, can serve either a second Trump administration or launch a vision of defiant independence following a second Trump defeat. 

In Florida, “the last frontier state East of the Mississippi,” DeSantis’s right-wing ideological project is intertwined materially with the private economic interests ultimately buoyed by state finances. Dominated since the Second World War by a latifundia of large landowners, the structure of Florida’s economy today is a hypertrophied version of national growth patterns: real estate, leisure, hospitality, and healthcare.¹ Low-wage employment in these industries, funded by inflated assets and out-of-state incomes, characterizes the state economy and explains its highly unequal growth. The Economic Policy Institute found that the top 1 percent captured 77.5 percent of all income growth in the state between 2009 and 2015. Since the pandemic, the state has been the largest recipient of US internal capital flight: oligarch donors, including Jeff Bezos, Ken Griffin, Carl Icahn, have fled Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. Unlike Texas, its sister state across the Gulf of Mexico, Florida’s internal power structure appears unusually united in its common project to gain power through appealing to international flight capital and to hold it through the ideological content of public education. 

Culture and education are integral to this beacon of financial and real-estate power, something that the Italian theorist of fascism Antonio Gramsci understood exceptionally well. As the culture wars have grabbed national and international headlines, the rapid growth of government-funded private and religious schools has transferred vast amounts of public money into corporate hands, further consolidating the state’s project of education reform. 

Both the southernmost continental state in the United States and the last to be inhabited en masse, Florida is, in Gramsci’s terms, a classic example of the “Southern Question.” It represents capitalism’s great anti-revolutionary puzzle—a political and economic location where landowners, rentier capitalists, and organic intellectuals play an outsized role in support of right-wing projects. In the case of the US, this southern state may well be a harbinger of what’s to come elsewhere. 

The FIRE economy

Historically an Elba of disgraced and exiled politicians, Florida is and has always been a hub of vice dollars. Until the mid-twentieth century, Florida’s economy was seasonal, barely industrialized, and based on a relatively recent expansion of agriculture and other transient service transactions, such as tourism. As in all southern economies, integrated into the world economy via primary commodity trade, Florida agriculture was hit hard by late-twentieth century expansion of world trade and NAFTA. By the early 2000s, the Florida sugar industry was exposed to a dual crisis: sugar cultivation was causing a massive environmental disaster in Florida’s main supplier of drinking water—the Everglades—while simultaneously experiencing potential reduction in prices. Federal subsidies enabled sugar agriculture to survive, but it was increasingly perceived as an economic albatross by Florida politicians of both major parties. Today, agriculture contributes to the state’s GDP just slightly more than 0.5 percent (see below) and the loss of agricultural land to real-estate development is estimated at 120 acres a day. 

At the same time, Florida has experienced massive population growth, especially since the 1990s, to become the fastest growing US state in 2022. Driven by snowbirds, immigration, and plentiful low-entry jobs, the demographic expansion has profoundly transformed the structure of Florida’s economy, shifting emphasis from agriculture and tourism to finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE). At the same time, employment is concentrated in low-wage sectors (see chart below). While the global financial crisis of 2008 had devastating effects in the last of these—Florida had the second most home foreclosures among all American states—the hit to residential real estate became an opportunity for global capital, primarily from Brazil and Russia. Outside state investment accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, as Florida received nearly four times more in the value ($39.2 billion) from within the US than Texas ($10.9 billion), which ranked second. Most of that capital came from New York, leading to forecasts that Miami might eventually emerge as the US’s largest and most important financial center. 

However, the resilience of Florida’s real-estate market in the face of frequent natural disasters reveals that its public sector is something more than a passive night watchman. With 76.5 percent of its population in coastal areas, Florida is exceptionally exposed to the rising sea levels. Miami is expected to become “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” with billions of dollars in property at risk. One study estimates that a predicted increase in wind speeds may cause $200 million annually in storm damage alone in Miami-Dade County by 2035. Yet rather than flee this imperiled property, passive investors swarmed Florida real estate: it has by far the highest number of properties in real estate investment trusts (REIT) in the United States—more than 60,000. FIRE industries now account for 25 percent of Florida’s GDP, whereas the national share is 20 percent. The sector has been able to expand thanks, in large part, to federal and state subsidies for the insurance industry. Thus Florida’s most valuable real estate continues to be concentrated and built in coastal regions. 

There are no state capital gains taxes on property sales, because there is no individual income tax. Now, in addition, Florida’s financial sector has formal legal protection against any shareholder claims that could be construed as being motivated by the “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) movement. DeSantis was one of the Republicans who promoted the narrative that the collapse of the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank was due to its preoccupation with diversity and social responsibility. This in turn helped him to push through a new law in May 2023 “barring state officials from investing public money to promote environmental, social, and governance goals, and prohibiting ESG bond sales.” The bill that “de-banked woke capitalism” prohibited financial institutions from making economic decisions on the basis of “the corporatist environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) movement,” which he described as “a worldwide effort to inject woke political ideology across the [normally apolitical] financial sector.” “Florida will continue to lead the nation against big banks and corporate activists,” DeSantis said signing the bill, pledging to combat those who “inject woke ideology into the global marketplace, regardless of the financial interests of beneficiaries.”

Finally, Florida’s healthcare industry, which in 2021 contributed 9.7 percent of the state’s GDP, is heavily dependent on federal dollars. Florida had the highest Medicare expenditures per beneficiary in the United States in 2020. This is in part due to the industry’s lax standards: Florida’s hospital chains are notorious for excessive and unnecessary medical testing. The money flows from the state to private providers in other nefarious ways, too. Florida’s former Governor and current US Senator Rick Scott, for example, was fined in 1997 for Medicare fraud when he ran a privately-owned for-profit chain of hospitals. Once in office as Governor, Scott pushed for mandatory drug-testing, introducing by law a permanent increase in demand for the medical product provided by, among others, his wife’s company Solantic. (The Scott family eventually sold their shares of Solantic).

From battleground to Red state

Talk of protecting Floridians from the “woke ideology” of the liberal-corporate alliance is now commonplace among figures like DeSantis and Scott. What exactly is it that needs protection? Ever since the disputed US Presidential election of 2000, when the Supreme Court decision halted an electoral recount in Florida and delivered victory to the Republican nominee George W. Bush, Florida has been on the trajectory toward one-party domination.

Its politics are intimate and cliquish. Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, was famously Florida’s Governor at the time of the contentious 2000 election. The Bush family’s ties to Florida ran deep within its fragmented, fluid polity and small elite circles. As New England Brahmins, the Bushes were at home in frontier states, whether Texas or Florida, where they spun public-private partnerships bridging state and personal interests: defense and oil, national intelligence and special operations, agriculture and finance. Their family fortunes and political careers exemplified the way American capital, which had been concentrated in the East and Midwest, post-1960s latched onto the Sunbelt states to secure its reproduction in times of crises. 

Thus, in 2000, Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State, a daughter and granddaughter of Florida’s most influential agribusiness families, oversaw the election and the recount. While the recount was underway, Roger Stone, an infamous Republican operative, staged the so-called “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Miami: a group of sharply dressed protestors, all men, broke into the election office, where they screamed, shouted, and jostled, demanding to stop the recount in Miami-Dade County. Twenty years later, political observers would draw parallels between the election chaos of 2000 and the January 6, 2021 insurrection, which was again directed by Stone, but this time with the aid of his old friend and new client, the forty-fifth US President Donald Trump. Florida’s GOP donors, militants, and extreme-right wing organizations played an important role in that attempted coup. Subsequently, the defeated Trump returned to his Palm Beach residence Mar-a-Lago, a “Winter White House” willed to the US government by the heiress to the Post Cereals fortune during the Nixon administration and accepted a month before his resignation. 

In the decades since 2000, Florida politics shifted from an important “battleground state,” to a “swing state,” to a “red state.” In the electoral season of 2018, when all major political offices—state and federal—were won by the Republican party, Florida became a de facto one-party state with a disproportionate influence on American politics. This was the year when DeSantis won the governorship with the narrowest of the margins. 

Christopher Rufo, ideologue of the current Republican assault on higher education and DeSantis’s associate, readily acknowledges explicit influence of interwar theories of fascism, specifically Gramsci’s, on his own political thought and actions. A son of an Italian immigrant to the United States, Rufo spent years in a left-wing village his father had grown up in. His understanding of the Gramscian left, he says, may be a “part of the way I’ve been able to kind of flummox some of my critics, and some of my opponents. In a lot of ways, I know their own language better than they do, and so I bring a different sensibility.” DeSantis’s re-election campaign in 2022, accordingly, built on decades of racism, gender-discrimination, conservatism, and anti-Communism in Florida to define what he called an “anti-woke” platform. In his acceptance speech, DeSantis declared to the cheering audience that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” 

A cornerstone of this politics has been the legal division of the labor market to preserve employer power over a largely immigrant workforce. In 2023, this reached a national milestone with DeSantis’s signing of an E-Verify law to require registration of employment to prevent the hiring of undocumented immigrants. It is on the basis of this apartheid labor market that Florida is consistently ranked as the “top state for construction” by American Builders and Contractors’ Meritshop Scorecard, exceeding both by value and growth rates the US averages. Residential construction is the most significant contributor to that growth, hovering at around 5.6 percent of the state’s GDP and close to $90 billion annually.

Education as the new frontier

In this constellation of political and economic power, public education plays an exceptionally important role. It is a material and ideological nerve of the state. The education sector enables not just ideological repositioning of the state and its capital, but also the siphoning of tax-dollars and their redistribution to private interests, from charter schools to construction industry and real-estate developers who benefit from capital investment projects and housing projects near colleges and universities. This, it is important to note, is not simply a multiplier effect: rather, education serves as a vehicle for other profit-making enterprises. 

After general government, education is the second largest public sector in Florida by the number of employees and budget size. State expenditures on K–12 education are twice the size of expenditures on higher education, which remains more dependent on state funding than comparable state university systems in the US. Tuition rates in Florida are the lowest in the country. The top 10 percent of high school students are also eligible for Bright Futures Scholarships, funded by the Florida Lottery. Since Bright Futures also cover tuition, the state has vested interest in keeping tuition rates low and graduation times short. The symbiotic relationship between K–12 and the university system ensures that local governments provide significant contributions to higher-education budgets by providing college credits via AP, IB, and Cambridge programs, which the university system is obliged to recognize. Since high-school students can use these credits toward their college degree, that too is a way to cut down on their time in college.

Jeb Bush, who led the state from 1999 to 2007, laid the groundwork for major educational reforms and the state takeover of public education seen today. Self-described as the “Education Governor,” Bush pursued the centralization of higher education, now entirely controlled by the Governor’s Office. He championed high-stakes testing in public schools, performance-based pay for K–12 teachers, and a vast expansion of the charter school system. In higher education, Bush and his appointees amplified attacks on the tenure system and perpetually underfunded the university state system, excluding its employees from pay raises granted to other state employees. The practice has been carried on by all Florida Republican governors ever since.

Florida was also one of the early adopters of “performance funding,” which has gained national importance over time. The state university system’s Board of Governors distributes hundreds of millions of dollars to its universities based on the “measurable outcomes, ”including the percent of bachelor’s graduates employed, average wages of graduates, degree costs, and the six-year graduation rate. The metrics do not include any of the usual assessments of faculty research productivity—grants, publications, or reputation. Instead, they reward “diploma mills” and potentially work against research universities, which often have higher degree costs. Indeed, in Florida performance evaluations, the highest ranked institutions are often Tier 2 schools rarely mentioned in other national rankings.

The push to online teaching after 2008 demonstrates how public money is transferred into private hands. In 2013, the University of Florida (UF), the state flagship university, was required by state legislators to trade its hard-fought pre-eminence status for a commitment to establish a series of low-cost and strictly online baccalaureate programs. The reorientation to online education was propelled by what Diane Ravitch has called the “Educational-Industrial Complex”: a mix of Silicon Valley start-ups, venture capitalists, tech giants, and textbook publishing behemoths looking to profit from the sale of educational hardware and software, as well as state legislators interested in slashing budgets for public education. The legislature mandated that the Advisory Board for UF Online also include one member with “expertise in disruptive innovation” appointed by the state Speaker of the House. 

Allegedly forced into a corner by pressing deadlines, the university contracted with Embanet, an Orlando-Florida based subsidiary of Pearson, to create online majors and boost recruitment. Though the contract was terminated in 2015, had it been seen through, it would have earned Pearson-Embanet as much as $186 million over ten years. Fast-forward to 2020, when instead of promoting online education amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Board of Governors ordered a return to in-person teaching. This shift was likely driven in part by the concerns of real-estate developers, over-represented on university boards, that their housing units near colleges and universities would be left empty if online instruction continued for too long.

Revelations that Ben Sasse, DeSantis’s pick as the former UF President and former Republican Senator from Nebraska, spent nearly four times more public dollars in his eighteen months in office than his predecessor shocked even the Governor’s office. According to the UF student newspaper, Sasse “channeled millions to GOP allies,” hiring his former staffers from Washington, doubling their salaries, and allowing them to work remotely. But in the context of Florida politics, Sasse’s extravagance may be just the tip of an iceberg. Indeed, says the latest Florida TaxWatch Budget Turkey Report, “any sheepishness about attempting to ‘bring home the bacon’ seems to have disappeared in the last legislative session.” Meanwhile, state and local contributions—despite buoyant revenues due to the booming economy—have dwindled to just 6.5 percent of the GDP.

The Florida model

The past two decades of state economic transformation have put forward the notion of a distinct “Florida model”: the FIRE economy anchored via healthcare and education, with continuing growth dependent on population expansion. But this model may be starting to crack. Miami is now one of the least affordable cities in the United States, and Miami-Dade County is only second to New York in terms of the gap between the haves and have-nots. According to the Tax Inequality Index, Florida has the most regressive tax system in the United States. This may be a magnet for the rich—Florida is now home to 10 percent of US households worth $30 million or more—but it is also a major driver of inequality, which is further compounded by gender and race: an already low labor participation rate in Florida is even lower for women and African American workers.

The state’s own Office of Economic and Demographic Research fears that the population growth will slow down. Boomers are retiring, birth rates are declining. Climate change, despite denials, is driving insurance prices through the roof. Since 2017, Florida has been hit by no less than 10 catastrophic hurricanes, prompting even Florida Republicans to consider them the focus of their future politics. The state’s wager that Florida will always be a safe haven for fleeing capital may not continue in perpetuity. 

None of this, however, means that the state’s attempt to mold education to the ideological and material needs of speculative capital will come to an end. Education remains central to elite and capital reproduction. The interventions by investors and hedge-fund managers into Ivy League institutions clearly demonstrate that once heralded pillars of the knowledge economy are now perceived as woke enemies, far beyond Florida. Education will remain a key frontier for the Right in years to come. 

Big capital has publicly proclaimed its future in the Florida model. Regardless of the election results, the new Right in Florida has planted a flag signaling the future direction of US politics and business. This is a future in which the private oligarchies of corporate America and speculative capital will be unencumbered from public authority, which they have maligned as a “woke” attack on the white middle-class, a progressive and radical “anti-family” ideology.