BRADENTON, FLORIDA — You’d expect a state whose voters chose Bush over Kerry to reject an increase in the minimum wage, but a Florida ballot measure that raised it by a dollar an hour was made into law by a three-to-one margin despite opposition by both President Bush and Governor Bush. And we’ve seen many instances of “conservative” Floridians volunteering to pay extra taxes to get better schools and other services, not to mention a level of social tolerance that is amazing when you look at the huge number of megachurches around here.

In Manatee County, not far from the Bradenton city limits, you’ll find Palms of Manasota, which bills itself as “America’s 1st Gay and Lesbian Retirement Community.” It’s been here, happily unmolested, since 1997, growing a little bit each year, and among the amenites it advertises are the “small town charm” of nearby Palmetto and the local tradition of strong support for the arts.

This is a “conservative” area in that it tends to vote heavily Republican. At the same time, it is tolerant of racial and lifestyle diversity, and a local add-on sales tax that supports our schools was passed by a ballot initiative margin nearly as large as the statewide one that increased the minimum wage. There was a flap, for a while, about the Manatee school board wanting to discriminate against non-Christians by opening their meetings with sectarian prayers, but in the end the bigots were forced to give up their fight.

Now Florida is getting hit with a wave of baby-boom early retirees and working empty-nesters whose voting patterns here will probably lean toward fiscal conservatism but who will also support the essentially libertarian position that the government should stay out of people’s personal lives as much as possible. At the same time, this new group of Florida voters will probably be more environmentally concerned than the current population.

These patterns are likely because of the kind of people who move to Florida. Many want to live inexpensively, which despite an unhealthy real estate boom over the last few years is still easier to do in Florida than in many parts of the country at least in part because this is a low-tax state. On the personal freedom front, Florida tends to attract restless people who want to lives their own lives their own ways. I believe many have an attitude along the lines of, “Hey! The kids are grown, now it’s time for us to do what we want, and if that includes smoking a joint now and then, it’s nobody’s business but ours.” As far as environmentalism, a major reason people move here is to enjoy the climate and to stay outdoors as much as possible, which means they don’t want every square foot of the state covered with Wal-Marts, look-alike housing developments, high-rise condoms, and tacky strip malls. So no-growth movements are big here, despite the hypocrisy inherent in the fact that so many of them are led by recent arrivals who wouldn’t be able to live here if someone hadn’t already built places for them to live, shop, and play.

There seems to be general agreement among the populace, not only in Florida, that we want to live safe, fume-free lives in places that are reasonably scenic, surrounded by well-educated, productive neighbors, with convenient shopping and entertainment but with wilderness space nearby and accessible. We want medical care when we’re sick, but we’re (rightfully) scared of its cost, which is rising faster than any other item in our budgets. We want a healthy economy, but we want it for us — and by “us” I mean the 90% of Americans for whom work or work-derived pensions are the bulk of our incomes. When we are told that the economy is doing fine while at the same time we are worried about our jobs, and half the people we know who have lost their jobs have been forced to take new ones at lower pay, we scratch our heads and wonder who decides what makes an economy healthy.

We Americans are a mass of political contradictions, especially in Florida. We want the cops and other government nosies to leave us alone, but we want strict laws that keep other people from doing things we don’t like. We want the benefits of civilization and the infrastructure that goes along with it but we also want pastoral scenery. We want SUVs but we also want energy independence. We want tolerance, but don’t want to see behavior that differs too much from our own — at least by the people who live near us.

The end result is that most of us are neither “liberal” nor “conservative” in the old sense. The major political parties don’t seem to have caught on to this yet. It will be interesting to see how they transform themselves when they do.

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