“No One Is Coming to Save Us” (2024)

What came first? The desire to be in Miami—the strange, sinking city; an outpost of empire near the Caribbean—or the desire to join those trying to change Miami, to bend its sparkling capital, even if just slightly, toward the needs of the US-meets-Global South people who work, live, and linger here? What, I thought, could be more important for a leftist than to go and build the movement in the place we are most despised; where the distinction between the fascist elite and the rest of us is so stark, so obvious, without the hand-wringing and pretense of wealthy liberals anywhere in sight? So I drove down to Florida from North Carolina, U-Haul in tow, hoping my years of working on campaigns like the Fight for $15 would guide me to movements I could contribute to here. It was the fall of 2017, exactly one year before Ronald Dion DeSantis would be elected governor by one of the slimmest margins in recent US history.

I joined the election night party at a bar called Gramps, together with a number of other organizers. We had all knocked thousands of doors for DeSantis’s opponent Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee and the first Black nominee for governor in Florida’s history. But as the night wore on, it became clear that DeSantis—the aggressively racist, anti–gun control Republican whose campaign ads showed him teaching his toddler about building a border wall—was going to eke out a win; the final margin was 0.4%, around 32,000 votes out of more than 8 million cast. The mood at Gramps was somber. For some of the younger activists, this had been their first electoral campaign; many held each other and cried.

But even in our grief, we couldn’t have known just how many calculated, aggressive, and innovative right-wing attacks were on the horizon. Today, the prospect of autocratic governmental overreach during a second Trump term rightly inspires alarm; Florida under DeSantis is the workshop where this kind of total power has been honed. Under the right-wing legislative majority animated by the MAGA bump, just since 2018, Florida has: passed legislation to decertify public sector unions that don’t meet arbitrary membership thresholds, causing 42,000 union members to lose their representation; mandated that businesses with 25 or more employees use a software called E-Verify, which is designed to discriminate against undocumented workers; required healthcare providers working at hospitals that receive Medicaid funding to inquire about a patient’s immigration status and then pass that information to the state; banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy in a state that was previously the fourth-largest abortion provider in the country; banned any funding for programs that support diversity, equity, and inclusion at public colleges and universities; empowered a tiny minority of conservative parents to object to certain books being available in classrooms; dramatically expanded charter schools while siphoning funding from public education; banned any local regulation to protect workers against extreme heat; passed a law to delete the words “climate change” from state statutes; restricted gender-affirming healthcare; criminalized drag shows; banned trans girls from school sports; and expanded the collaboration between local law enforcement and immigration authorities.

This rightward shift is felt everywhere in the dispatches that follow, which features an electoral organizer, an abolitionist doctor, a farmworker leader, a public sector unionist, a trans activist, a climate advocate, a reproductive justice campaigner, and a socialist city council member. These progressive leaders have been watching the ground shift under their feet. “[It] has felt like a never-ending battle,” said Brittany Frizzelle, the reproductive justice organizer, who works with the nonprofit Power U. “You’re always fighting the latest bad bill and the 15 others that came before it.”

Despite such assaults, collectives of people dedicated to the protection and dignity of their communities have not succumbed in Florida. Instead, activists are responding to the hostile political terrain with both new and established strategies. For instance, one of the key challenges of organizing under a right-wing legislative majority is “preemption,” the legal doctrine under which a higher level of government can restrict, limit, or withdraw the authority of a lower level of government to act on a particular issue. Most recently, the state legislature has used preemption to kill the ability of cities and counties to mandate protections for workers in extreme heat, blocked protections for tenants, and undermined local living wage provisions. Some advocates are responding to this preemption by recommitting to grassroots pathways to policy change. Specifically, they are using Florida’s arduous process for amending the state constitution, under which proposals can be placed on the statewide ballot based on verified petitions from at least half of the state’s congressional districts, and totaling at least 8% of the number of votes cast in the last presidential election. If these proposals then go on to win at least 60% of the vote, they can be added to the Florida constitution. Organizers turned to this strategy for a 2018 initiative to re-enfranchise voters with prior felony convictions who had been previously stripped of the right to vote for life, and for a 2020 bid to raise Florida’s minimum wage. And, an initiative to enshrine the right to abortion in Florida’s constitution is going to be on the ballot this November.

Organizers are also building power outside of the legislative arena. As Caitlin MacLaren, a nurse and union leader with SEIU 1991, underscores, the hostile attacks on organized labor in Florida have forced unions like hers to “do some really deep organizing. You’ve got to go back to basics and engage every member about the importance of the union, which has the potential to strengthen unions as well.” As many in the labor tradition remind us, power comes from workers acting together to transform their conditions—whether or not the boss, the governor, or the state legislature supports their unity—and Florida organizers, both within and outside of formal unions, have long lived by this maxim. Geraldo Reyes Chaves, a former farmworker and a longtime leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, explains that farmworkers have undertaken collective action even though they are technically barred from unionizing. “The Coalition has never sought change through legislation or policy,” he stresses. Instead, they have leveraged their distinct worker-led model to directly pressure corporations, resulting in the transformation of supply chains across the Florida agricultural industry and the adoption of their model around the world.

Still other organizers are acting through direct service provision, recognizing the need to take matters into their own hands when the dehumanization of their communities translates into the organized abandonment of people’s most basic needs. This is why Armen Henderson—a physician organizing with the youth-led movement organization Dream Defenders and the founder of the street medicine group Dade County Street Response—explains his practice of creating free medical care, trauma response, and emergency social services for victims of gun violence and the unhoused as a form of abolitionist praxis. Similarly, Ashley Mayfaire, founder of the trans mutual aid group TransSOCIAL, notes that their organization is focusing on “setting up sustainable networks for trans care outside of government systems.” For these organizers, the way to respond to the conservative crusade against them—which makes funding and implementing services more difficult—is to provide for their communities what the extreme right seeks to deny. As Mayfaire puts it, “we want to keep each other safe, no matter who is in power, no matter which laws come down.”