Noblesse Oblige - Just when

Noblesse Oblige - Just when I was about to give up on the dailies' editorial pages as sources of good blog-fodder, the Strib steps into the breach. As usual, they don't disappoint.

These are troubling days in Minnesota for many reasons, but the Citizens League has produced a report that crystalizes the most important deficit now facing the state. It's not a financial shortage, but a shortage of belief in the common good.

We've been through this before -Laurie Studevant had a long, atrocious article on the subject right after the New Year.

Now, it seems the Strib editorial board has taken up the cause for themselves.

"Doing the Common Good Better" is the product of 56 diverse minds from across political, economic and cultural lines, each with an unsettled feeling, according to the report's authors, that there's something terribly wrong in this once-special place. They've put their collective finger, we think, on the primary reason: Citizens who were once informed and engaged are now acting more as an audience, one that has either disengaged from politics, or been captured by the half-truths and simplistic sound bites of political extremists.

When you read the Citizen's League's actual report, the usual boogeymen are trotted out on cue - Talk Radio, "polarization", and the usual code phrases that, deciphered, mean "conservatives", or anyone who doesn't believe government is the fount of all wisdom.

The report itself is long, and deserves its own separate fisking - whichn I'll try to get to later this week.

Indeed, the report begins with a dangerous assumption that there still exists a "public life" and a "public good" in this state. You'd never know it by listening to talk radio's unrelenting assault on government as the enemy of a people whose only hope resides in the private sphere.

Strib Editorialists: Why do you suppose talk radio has quadrupled its audience in ten years? Because people just aren't bright enough to know they're being manipulated?

No. Because people - real people - are sick to death of being treated as afterthoughts by Minnesota's "public class", the people with the boundless time, energy and, yes, money, to get their "communal" civic vision imposed on the rest of the state; a vision that is usually imposed in the most condescending terms. Like:

Minnesota's complex problems cannot be solved by libertarian "garage logic," or by the narrow interests of DFL subcaucuses. These unfortunate forces have filled a vacuum created by important social changes: a decline of noblesse oblige, greater demands on work and family time, a sprawled suburban landscape, marginalized political parties, globalized corporations, a "personalized" media and a decline of civic organizations.

Note the condescension: Noblesse Oblige? Indeed - we have a nobility in Minnesota?

Sprawl is a problem? Although you couldn't make me live in a suburb, Jason Lewis has one thing right - "sprawl" is a reaction to the sort of "civic society" that the Citizen's League, and the Strib editorialist, pines for.

And the "personalized" media - what could the Strib be talking about?

Such downward trends place Minnesota in particular jeopardy, the report rightly argues.

"Downward trends" - indeed.

As we've said many times, this is a cold, remote place made special only by the collective endeavor of energized citizens, without whom there would be no cultural assets, no big-time sports, no exceptional schools, universities and public services, all of which have made Minnesota a Midwestern magnet for economic success. California and Colorado have the climate and geography to compete and prosper with ordinary public assets. Minnesota does not.

But the Strib - and the Citizens League - make the fatal leap, linking all these good things to an overweening, suffocating public sector, which they seem to equate with "common good", as if that noble confluence of public spirited activism must be managed by the government, or it doesn't count.

That's why the current Republican drive to cut Minnesota down to the level of its neighbors, to make it more like every place else, is so risky.

And so enters the traditional Minnesota superiority complex. Some of "our neighbors" do some very good things; North Dakota weathered the recession vastly better than Minnesota did; by all rational measures, North Dakota's public schools are the equal of Minnesota's, on a fraction of the budget.

The Citizens League report, of course, doesn't get partisan on these matters.

It doesn't need to - it has the Strib to cover that watch.

What it does propose is a statewide summit on citizenship. Among the topics: Find a way to change the caucus system so that politics invites the participation of moderates as well as extremists.

Read: transfer political power from those who show up, to those who don't.

For all my criticism, the report is worth a read. I'll blog about it tomorrow, maybe Wednesday. But no good idea can pass, unspun, through the Strib editorial board.

Posted by Mitch at March 17, 2003 10:45 AM