Ryan Hartman, an Earth First! member and self-described anarchist, had decided to run for a spot on the city commission. If he won, he’d be the second anarchist to hold public office in Lake Worth in less than a decade. You wouldn’t necessarily expect radical politics to find such a substantial foothold in Palm Beach County, one of the richest counties in the state, which is home to both Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion and the headquarters of the white supremacist website Stormfront. Lake Worth has long been a cheap and diverse outlier in the Palm Beach region, a place where old-school hippies, recent immigrants, and young activists—or “the crazies, the communists, the socialists,” as a Lake Worth attorney told a local conservative website in 2011—could afford to enjoy South Florida’s mango trees and February sunshine. That year, the town elected its first Republican mayor in years. Hartman’s candidacy was part of a larger effort to take Lake Worth back from the pro-development faction.
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