Military Oligarchy’s Ground Zero: Why A Democratic Socialist Is Surging In Florida
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.
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.
To finish this article, go to The Libertarian Institute.