To get from Miami to the August fundraiser for Angie Nixon’s primary campaign for U.S. Senate at a Palestinian restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, the fastest route was I-95 to the Florida Turnpike. This is a route along which, during a hazy, 90+ degree mid-afternoon on a Friday at the end of summer, it was possible to see from the car window broad signs of what Florida is becoming. These signs explain State Rep. Nixon’s unprecedented success running as a democratic socialist in what has become ground zero of Republican politics. And they are a warning of what the Republican model of political economy—cited as the successful alternative to blue state, progressive statism—amounts to: an unholy convergence of oligarchic expansion and military growth. This convergence has created an artificial boom powered on the wealth of government contractors; the kind of illiberal arrangement that makes a mockery of the free market, and that generates human collateral which eventually becomes political.
Since Angie Nixon effectively trounced her opponent, Alexander Vindman, in the Democratic primary, Republicans have responded to Nixon’s rise with glee: as proof positive of the Democratic Party’s “radicalism.” Radicalism or no, Nixon is in two polls running dead even with her Republican opponent, incumbent Senator Ashley Moody, in a state where registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats by more than 1.5 million, amid what are reported to be widespread “cracks” in the GOP coalition. The reason is straightforward: though democratic socialists may have some wrong solutions, they’re at least addressing the problem in Florida that Republicans and many Democrats refuse to see.
Having lived in South Florida, which is the heart but not the limit of the state’s military oligarchic boom, for the last several years, I see this problem as a quiet humanitarian crisis. In its security implications for basic liberties, it is, in my view, a potentially dystopic one. The route to the fundraiser I took in August gives some clues as to the factors that have converged to create or reinforce this problem of military oligarchy, and shows why Angie Nixon may ride the problem to a November victory.
On this route there is a billboard for Barry University, the private Catholic college, inviting prospective applicants to “BREAK THROUGH.” The billboard stands next to a citadel-type university building which looks grand from a distance until the surroundings come into view: a rusted rail-link fence and unmowed grass on a mean stretch of land just off the highway, and a metaphor for the gap between collegiate aspirations and working reality. Barry University is where upwardly aspirant locals spend $36,600 a year to send their children; its graduates include Laura Loomer, possibly one of the few to see a real return for the investment in a region where more and more work is dominated by white collar arrivals brought in by the relocation of billionaires. What Barry’s graduates are actually “breaking through” to is a market where the jobs have been vacuumed up by higher-skilled corporate arrivals. “We have never witnessed this kind of relocation of wealth,” urbanist Richard Florida, a Miami resident, recently told The Wall Street Journal: “it’s getting harder and harder for the young professional [from Miami] to enter [the workforce].”
On this route there is also the giant billboard for the law firm of Steinger, Greene and Feiner, one of a few that dot the highways around Miami, announcing in giant green letters a recent “1 MILLION RECENT PAYOUT” and in smaller letters that “results are based on the unique facts of each case.” And there are billboards for the behemoth tort firm Morgan & Morgan (“SIZE MATTERS”): the firm helmed by John Morgan, a major Democratic donor whose firm has been the subject of repeated complaints of unethical behavior. This is the sleaze factor of South Florida, and not just when it comes to Morgan’s double entendres.
Famously for many years a given of the place, sleaze has been inflated by greed thanks to the same growth driving out the locals: the impulse to squeeze every possible cent of profit out of a boom. According to an analysis of FTC data by the Miami-based Capital Analytics, Florida ranked first in the nation in 2024 in Fraud Reports, with 1,682 fraud reports per 100,000 people in the state and 2,142 per 100,000 in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro. Florida “also led in identity theft,” at 395 per 100,000 people, and “the Miami metro had particularly high rates of credit card fraud and loan/lease fraud.” Other common Florida fraud categories were imposter scams, particularly “business/government imposter and romance scams,” the latter of which “drained about $89 million from Floridians in one year,” as well as Medicare/Medicaid scams. Among the top reasons cited for this surge in scams are the “high volume” of new residents, their “transient lifestyles,” and the presence of “new money.”
This “new money” spends it first and foremost on housing, and new developments are as fixed a part of the local scene as the heat, or the anti-communism, or the Cuban coffee sold in Styrofoam cups with plastic thimbles at the Marathon stations. White or grey buildings with matching balconies sprout along I-95 and the Florida turnpike, as, in the words of an article in Bloomberg, “New York Developers Look North of Miami for New Florida Boom.” Few of these developments, however drab, however close to the highway, however cheaply built, are ones that most native Floridians can comfortably afford. According to The Wall Street Journal, reporting this year, “half of all households in Miami-Dade County are cost-burdened—meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing,” and the median sale price for a home in Miami Dade is more than $550,000.
At one of the other of several events I attended for Angie Nixon in the second half of August (this one was at Ball and Chain, a bar and political gathering spot that is a mainstay of Miami nightlife), I talked to a volunteer, a young Cuban American who taught at a nearby university:
“They’re trying to force me out with an exit package because I use real world examples in my class for the students. They come out of my class knowing they won’t be able to afford their own home anywhere in South Florida. Parents have complained.”
Complaints or no, twenty and thirty somethings have gotten the general memo. Recently The Wall Street Journal reported that Miami-Dade was losing population even as its billionaire residents climbed. This was a fact I experienced anecdotally, in conversation after conversation with people my age leaving the area for Central Florida, or Atlanta, or Kentucky.
For those without the means or mobility to leave, there is the option of multigenerational living. This is another quiet scourge everyone talks about (ten people to a two bedroom house after grandma and grandpa are evicted from their trailer) which only recently made it into the news. But the option is not available to everyone, and on the route out of Miami to I-95 and then on the turnoff to Fort Lauderdale off the Florida turnpike, there were growing numbers of homeless. Here and everywhere in South Florida there is also a corresponding rise of surveillance equipment and of police, who have long been willing to flex their capacities at the slightest provocation.
Since the Second Trump administration began, ICE and Palantir have arrived in the area in force, as Trump’s deportation machine has begun targeting not only people here illegally but those working their way through the citizenship process. According to Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack, writing in The New York Review of Books under the headline “Broken Promises in Cuban Miami,” “since the beginning of Trump’s second term an estimated 45,000 Cubans have received deportation orders”; “many more Cubans have joined countless other migrants in legal limbo as authorities institute travel bans and pause green card applications”; and “the Trump administration’s policies since January 2025 have left at least half a million Cubans vulnerable to detention and deportation.” Young Cuban Americans who are seeing these turns and trends were among the Nixon supporters I met, after I made it off the expressway to the Palestinian restaurant and, later, to the “Chomp the Oligarchy” party at its third relocation.
A Palestinian restaurant is in every way an appropriate place for an event for the Angie Nixon campaign. Nixon, who is 42, has a long history in Florida politics. She is a lifelong resident of Jacksonville, a historically black city in the Northeast corner of the state five hours from Miami by car, where she lives with her husband and five children. She has been employed by the Service Employees International Union and the Florida Public Services Union, as well as serving as a state representative since 2020; and in 2024 she opened a café-bookshop selling black literature that still operates today.
But she broke on the national scene in 2023 speaking on behalf of a ceasefire of Israel’s war on Gaza after 10,000 Palestinians had been killed. This speech occurred in November, when pro-Israel sentiment was riding high. What Nixon said was that “millions of lives are at imminent risk if a cease-fire is not achieved and humanitarian aid is not delivered without delay.” What she got in response were Democrats and Republicans in the chamber turning their backs on her as she spoke, accusations of anti-semitism, and a cry from one Florida lawmaker to kill every Palestinian. Karma, as they say, is a funny thing, and Nixon’s belated reward for a principled stand was support in 2026 from prominent national progressives like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the first Palestinian American in Congress, who headlined the restaurant fundraiser.
Palestine is also extremely appropriate as a launching issue for an insurgent Florida campaign, because pro-Israel intimidation has become a flash point of Republican politics in the state. On the road up to Fort Lauderdale, my phone pinged with notifications from the Nixon campaign about the threatened cancellation of an event scheduled for after the restaurant fundraiser. This event, a “Chomp the Oligarchy” rally, was to be held at The Venue, a popular event space in Fort Lauderdale, until the invite was rescinded after Laura Loomer publicized the presence of Congresswoman Tlaib, whom Loomer accused of anti-semitism. Loomer’s pressure campaign had drawn the attention of Florida Zionists, both Republicans and Democrats, with the result that yet another venue that first agreed to host the rally then cancelled and a third space wasn’t found until late that Friday.
This was not an isolated instance of censorship.
Jewish Floridians, until recently known for their contribution to arts and culture and the vibe of Miami Beach, have been overwhelmed by an influx of Zionists from New York, to the point that the Jewish Zionist magazine Tablet now calls Miami “The New Jerusalem” and Palm Beach County recently invested $1 billion in Israel bonds. Miami Beach’s Jewish Zionist mayor recently sicced police on a resident over anti-Zionist remarks made online, and last year tried to prevent a venue from showing an Academy Award winning documentary about Palestine. Legislation has been passed by the Florida legislature censoring certain speech against Israel as anti-semitic, and targeting attempts to boycott Israel. These actions often come at the expense of younger Jews. The movie the Miami Beach mayor tried to ban was co-directed by Israeli Jews; one of the headliner participants in the Nixon “Chomp the Oligarchy” rally, Elijah Manley, is Jewish; and I was told several times that Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, cannot find synagogues in South Florida to host its events.
And the Palestine-Israel question is itself an appropriate central issue for a Florida campaign, because, in the connected politics of the state, a politicians’ stand for Israel is one in a set of stands that link an assortment of groups and positions. This is what happens in an area where interests have replaced issues: to believe in one issue links a politician to groups which dictate his or her stances on a series of other issues, no matter how seemingly far afield from each other they may be.
Stephen M. Ross, probably the most powerful philanthropist in Palm Beach and a prodigious political donor, is professionally a real estate developer and ideologically a Zionist. Ken Griffin, the hedge fund manager who moved his operations to Miami and is remaking Brickell, Miami’s financial center, with the aid of Stephen M. Ross, is a pro-AI, pro-Israel donor to Miami-Dade Democratic Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and to Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Rosie Cordero-Stutz, the Sheriff of Miami-Dade County, came into office off the support of President Donald Trump via an intervention from Carlos Gimenez: the former Mayor of Miami-Dade turned Republican U.S. Representative who is staunchly anti-communist, anti-Iran, and pro-police, sometimes at the expense of his own constituents. Thirteen of the top sixteen donors to Miami-Dade’s Board of Commissioners, which along with Levine Cava govern the county, are tied into big real estate interests which have a lock on big development contracts; and most of the commissioners owe their election to support from the Cuban exile community, the majority of whom support the city’s development.
The rhetorical architecture that supports these interests is equally sprawling. In the months after October 7, 2023, around the time Angie Nixon made her speech for a ceasefire, Hialeah, a city just Northwest of Miami which has the largest population of Hispanics in America, hung a giant Israeli flag against the city entrance to express its unequivocal support. Almost three years later, in the wake of Angie Nixon’s primary victory, Ron DeSantis referenced Hialeah’s population, many of whom came to the United States from Cuba, to indirectly accuse Nixon of communism. This is the tenuously connected propaganda scaffolding that Angie Nixon has set out to dismantle. Her campaign agenda is a mix of traditional leftwing priorities (Medicare for All, free childcare for all, anti-militarist, anti-Zionist) and laser-targeted emphases on the issues most Floridians face each day: rising home and medical insurance premiums as well as rising rents and gas prices. In any imaginatively symbolic sense, her two opponents, first Alexander Vindman and now U.S. Senator Ashley Moody, are ideal foils for her project.
Vindman, a Ukrainian-born Jewish Zionist, made his career in military intelligence. He first served on the White House National Security Council and then, famously, “whistleblowing” on the White House in what erupted into the first impeachment of Donald Trump. What Vindman received from this stand was not, as with Nixon’s stand for the Palestinians, ostracism and accusations. It was positive coverage in mainstream media and from Democrats, followed by appearances on an HBO series and the election of his brother Eugene, who also functioned as an anti-Trump whistleblower, to the U.S. House of Representatives from Virginia.
He also made money. A Ukrainian-American who had played the role of National Security Council gatekeeper for Ukrainian-American relations to the point where he was offered the position of Ukrainian Minister of Defense three times, Alexander Vindman effectively cashed in on his relationships once he was out of government by setting up a security contracting business focused on Ukraine. Eugene Vindman, who is a partner in the business, is also a member of the House committees and subcommittees which allot funding for the weapons the Vindmans’ security business is paid by Ukrainians to maintain. Alexander Vindman moved to Florida in 2023 and ran a campaign for a Senate seat from which he could exercise still more influence over foreign policy, representing a pipeline of illicit military oligarchic influence of exactly the kind that is distorting Florida in the first place.
Ashley Moody, formerly Florida’s Attorney General, made her career in the era of the governorships of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, which meant supporting corporate growth using subsidies from Tallahassee. Interestingly, Scott, DeSantis and Moody have all been hoisted on the same political petard: accusations of healthcare fraud or misallocation of health insurance money via nonprofits and corporations tied to political power in Tallahassee. But what Moody represents more broadly is an exhausted form of Republican politics propagated by the DeSantis administration.
This began in 2020 over blue state overreach on climate and tax regulations, COVID lockdowns and forced vaccinations, and LGBTQ+ issues. Florida, which under DeSantis took the opposite stand, seemed a Mecca for conservatives and business interests, and growth proceeded accordingly. Moms for Liberty, the pro-parent group which worked against progressive indoctrination of their children in schools, got its start in Florida. Donald Trump relocated there and set up his power base at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, from which he ran for a second term. Most of all, billionaires relocated their businesses and homes there en masse. This relocation built on movement since the 2010s, when cities like Miami deliberately positioned themselves as destinations for capital by, among other tactics, changing zoning and permit laws to make development easier.
This growth off corporatism is the defining force of contemporary Florida, what Republicans like Moody and Democrats like Vindman have benefited from together. It has been justified with references to the “free market,” and to some extent this is correct: the state is being deregulated. But on even cursory examination the label doesn’t fully hold, because deregulation is not all that is occurring. Popular politics of the kind that has existed in this country since its inception is also being curtailed. The Miami 21 Project, the 2009 zoning code overhaul passed by Miami’s government to make it a “global city,” encouraged measures “intended to sensitively guide large-scale development…through negotiations between developers and city planners.” In practice it allowed for development without feedback and oversight by giving developers and administrators carte blanche. This was to the benefit of big real estate players who today disproportionally dominate political donations in Miami-Dade. The 2023 Live Local Act, DeSantis’s and the Florida legislature’s much-hyped effort to encourage affordable home building, was nonetheless stuffed with giveaways to these big developers that allowed them even more routes to bypass communal input like public meetings for new construction.
And it is not just an erosion of representative government that is creating this new normal in Florida. The state has spent $573 million on immigration enforcement, “including millions to equip agencies with radios and high-tech cameras,” since 2023 when DeSantis declared a “state of emergency”: a militarization operation that expands government power and spending at the expense of ordinary citizens. And then there are the state’s variety of cut-outs and incentives for defense operators, the wealthy and corporations passed under Republican leadership. These are living examples of Thomas Eddlem’s critique of Republican economic orthodoxy in the Libertarian Institute last year. “Whenever a subsidy or a tax break for a particular politically-connected company or sector is proposed,” Eddlem wrote, “the predictable response from Reason, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation is always, essentially, ‘If it lowers taxes, I’m for it.’” Eddlem’s description of what this leads to is also a description of Florida:
“This billionaire-funded ideological complex favors the tax breaks even if it only lowers taxes for one politically-favored company and does nothing to lower government spending (implying that taxes, debt or inflation on everyone else must rise). That’s why America and the West are in the situation they’re in, where the billionaires always have the roulette wheel of finance magnetized to favor the house.”
For anyone familiar with Florida’s current government, the words “billionaire-funded ideological complex” strike a chord. Politics, already the game of the wealthy and connected in the state, has been locked down in recent years by oligarchs linked to defense, technology, and finance networks in Washington, Silicon Valley, and New York. New South Florida arrivals who either bring their residences or their businesses or both include Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel; Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; Oracle founder Larry Ellison; and, thanks to lobbying from Donald Trump, the Saudi Public Investment Fund. All of these operators have relied for much of their initial and expanded wealth on government contracts, particularly defense contracts with the United States and Israel. Many are intimately tied, as I have reported in the past, to American commercial and military ventures in Latin America and the Middle East. And, as they have arrived in Florida and reshaped it in their image, populist conservative forces have retreated from the state.
The result of the new arrivals in South Florida, according to The Wall Street Journal, “is a glittering urban center that is richer, smaller and built to cater to upscale living” where “new establishments catering to a rich clientele crop up regularly” even as “property taxes levied by Miami-Dade County rose 66% to $3.43 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year.” On the street in South Florida, especially Miami, the signs of this change are everywhere. Helicopters have become common sights as helipads have become the new “amenity” for the ultra-wealthy to avoid traffic. In Brickell, the city’s financial center, and in Coral Gables, a city southwest of Downtown Miami which has been a heart of wealthy Cuban exile life, it is increasingly hard to find a small business and increasingly easy to find a high-end steakhouse chain or boutique four-star restaurant: Fleming’s, Capital Grille, Morton’s, Baires, Perry’s, Ruth’s Chris, Nsur-Et, Claudie, Salty Flame. Targets and Chases have replaced Cuban grocers and community banks. The few bars and restaurants in Coral Gables that have survived the area’s chain-ificiation play jazz music and show old movies as couples mingle outside bathed in blue or yellow lights from the closed offices of Chase Bank or the Saudi-backed FIFA. This is not a booming free market. It is a market skewed by government-backed oligarchs and corporations riding a pool of mounting public debt off war and domestic spending.
The ultimate result has been that Florida Republicans have, in essence, begun to kill their own values: stability, family, the house with the white picket fence. I cannot count the number of times that I have heard Miami Republicans my age bemoan the fact that they would perhaps never be able to afford a home. Here is a comment I heard more than once: “The only way this will stop is destruction like Hurricane Andrew, or if we close down the city.”
This mutilation of the Republican base by elected Republicans has lately accelerated, sometimes in almost absurdly symbolic ways. This summer, news broke that Calle Ocho, the heart of Cuban Miami which houses the Memorial to the Bay of Pigs, has come under developers’ thumbs despite outcry from residents; and that the oldest church in Miami, in Brickell, may share its land with a high rise. News also broke this summer that the craze for luxury building by oligarchs may cost the city the existence of the fuel yard which supplies its port: a gateway to Latin America which ensures the existence of businesses across the city.
Destruction of local communities, organized religion, and commercial lifelines by oligarchy is not many Florida conservatives signed up for when they voted “R.” The same night that Angie Nixon beat Alexander Vindman 56.1-43.9% in the Democratic primary, James Fishback, an upstart candidate in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary, lost with just 10.5% but overperformed with under-30 voters. Fishback, like Nixon, ran against investment in Israel. He also ran against data centers, and for a one-time $10,000 home ownership loan to young couples looking to buy.
On the one hand, Fishback’s successes and Angie Nixon’s are not comparable. Nixon won her primary decisively because she harnessed the issues that Florida voters care about to her own unique political practice and persona. She showed up at any event, no matter how big or small. She courted young voters via the Democratic Socialists, becoming a DSA member in June 2026. And she mobilized the black community and unions using ties built from a lifetime of advocacy on their behalf. She is, win or lose in November, a political phenomenon. But part of Nixon’s success does translate to other candidates. Fishback, Nixon, and the cohort of allied democratic socialists or progressives running against U.S. House Democrats who support foreign wars and are funded by oligarchs all appealed successfully to young voters de facto disenfranchised by Florida’s current regime.
But the Nixon Campaign, a project of unions, black Democrats, young people, and democratic socialists, is not only pitching itself as addressing glaring “bread-and-butter” problems which no other campaign will. It is also attracting people of the class that is benefiting from the boom. These are the prosperous small businesspeople and highly skilled professionals and even corporate denizens who were once the bedrocks of classical liberal societies, who are seeing a rise in demand for their services and the value of their houses thanks to the influx of monied outsiders into Florida. By supporting Nixon, they are putting their and their society’s long-term interest in front of immediate personal gain. They are also functioning as walking rebuttals to Karl Marx’s view that serving monopolist capital is the imperative of the upper levels of the petite bourgeoisie.
At the fundraiser in the Palestinian restaurant that Friday late afternoon in mid-August there were a number of these people in evidence. They included a quartet of white consultants and financial planners; a Pakistani real estate agent whose son works at one of the big five defense contractors; and an older, well-dressed man named Khalid Mirza, the founder and president of a community care clinic now also investing in a startup nonprofit media organization, On-Point Media & Outreach.
After Angie Nixon and Rashida Tlaib took the floor, Mirza, the fundraiser’s cohost, stood up to speak. He talked about driving through Fort Lauderdale the past few years as homeless people began appearing and congregating under bridges. He talked about the unholy trinity of outsourcing, rising medical costs, and rising prices he saw as driving the trend. He talked about what it meant about us as a society that we’d allow this to happen. Here was a language of practical responsibility articulated in a state where the raw power of military oligarchy is masked with hollow paeans to “personal responsibility” and “traditional values.” Here were words from a person in a position to benefit from the military oligarchic boom who was instead reckoning with its cost. Here was a perspective that makes it seem like several recent polls in the Nixon-Moody race are not necessarily outliers—that, for better or worse and thanks to the perversion of corporatism in Florida at Republican hands, a democratic socialist may channel the concerns of those people to a November victory.
