Swamp Things: The Wetland Roots of American Authoritarianism

“Swamp Things” demonstrates the roots of Trumpism through a case study of the hinterland strongman Leander Perez, who ruled Plaquemines Parish in southern Louisiana from the 1920s through the 1960s. Perez considered the parish his own watery white-supremacist empire, where racist practices went hand in hand in with environmentally destructive activities, such as oil drilling and petrochemical production. In the liquid subtropical hinterlands of the U.S. South, racialized, authoritarian regimes of labor and resource extraction developed anew after the demise of slavery. The politics of these regimes finally materialized at the federal level when Donald Trump, the landlord of Mar-a-Lago (“Sea-to-Lake”), became president. His promise to “drain the swamp” had very specific connotations that harken back to the days of Leander Perez.