The skies are not as blue over Palm Coast City Hall these days. (© FlaglerLive)
Among the strange phenomena that emerged from the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century, when half the population was wiped out by the plague, were groups of people who’d go around publicly beating themselves and each other. They were called flagellants. They thought that abusing themselves and others would appease God. When that didn’t work, they beat up on Jews. Jews’ presence in the ever-cankered calculus of Christian cruelty was considered polluting and invited God’s wrath.
I think a similar form of delirium has seized many of our elected officials locally and elsewhere. At least Jews aren’t being singled out this time. But government workers are. To hear the vile ways the public describes government workers, you’d think they were the cause of the decline and fall of every empire from here to Rome.
When Palm Coast’s administration fired a half dozen people last week, commenters on social media–and unfortunately on this site–were dancing jigs on their graves, blaming them for everything under the sun, including daring to walk around the Central Park pond for exercise (because as always they could not point to a single specific case of waste, so they resorted to idiotic clichés). The flagellants would rather government workers be mules tied to their desks.
I’m sure a few residents wouldn’t mind whipping them as they blame them for every pothole and every utility hike and every swale clog, never considering that if there is shitty service–and there is plenty of that: this is Florida after all, welcome center to third-world living–it isn’t because of government workers, but because there aren’t enough government workers. Because starving the beast has been an American obsession since 1981 (yes, it’s as precise as Jan. 20 that year.) Because the grave-jiggers don’t want to pay taxes. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s old adage that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society” isn’t for them. Which explains their incivility.
The elected meanwhile, who set the tone for the frenzy and effluent incivility, have been self-flagellating over such fabrications as high taxes and excessive spending, firing government executives and demanding across-the-board cuts while state legislators invite voters to obliterate government revenue further with a ballot measure as harebrained as it is reckless. But that’s the intention, isn’t it.
This isn’t new. It started half a century ago with Ronald Reagan’s recasting government as the enemy, at least the part of government that ensures a fairer and more just society. Reagan was always OK with the warmongering, policing and fascistic part of government that keeps people in their place and deregulates the way for corporations to exploit and profit in peace, whether at the expense of government or public health, safety, environmental protection, civil rights and liberties. He campaigned on demolishing the New Deal and the Great Society.
He didn’t get far. But he set the template that Republicans have followed since. Worship of private enterprise anarchism is the new creed, shareholder value the guiding virtue. Government is a heresy. Demonize and dismantle accordingly.
The Trump/Musk clusterfuck known as “doge” came and went without a single visible achievement other than the demolition of foreign aid: The federal budget deficit for this year is $100 billion more than it was at the beginning of Trump’s term, “and the cumulative deficit over the 2026–2035 period is $1.4 trillion (or 6 percent) greater,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. Doge has been “memory holed,” in the Orwellian words of Maggie Haberman, co-author of Regime Change, the new book on the first 18 months of Trump 2.0.
But at what cost. Florida inflicted its own mutant doge on local governments, minus Musk’s brains and brash. The smear reached a new low when Blaise Ingoglia turned demonization into an election campaign strategy as he fabricated dark fantasies of massive local government waste. Inexplicably, shamelessly, local governments like Palm Coast and the County Commission (but not Flagler Beach, an oasis of good sense) reacted to the fabrications as if they were fact or worse–as if Ingoglia or the legislature had the authority to preempt local government tax policy. They do not. That’s like saying the unelected Ingoglia may supplant the tens of thousands of voters who elected our county commissions and city councils.
Palm Coast’s mystified city manager tried to remind his council members that state presumptions are not law, that local needs are not illusions. He might as well have been a Cathar at the receiving end of a beheading. Next thing you know the City Council is gunning for an absurdly irresponsible tax rate and the manager is firing people.
That’s where we are. You’d think artificial intelligence’s hallucinations are running our governments. And that constitutional amendment proposal is still ahead. It’s like Jim Jones is pissing Kool-Aid on Florida, and everybody’s lapping it up.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
