It’s the image that keeps Minnesota DFLers, and “moderate” Republicans of the Dave Durenberger / Arne Carlson, warm on cold nights; the moment when Minnesota’s political class got the national warm fuzzy they so desperately sought and, decades later, so yearned to have reaffirmed:
Governor Wendell Anderson on the cover of Time, proclaiming that all the best things in life could be delivered by “good government” – defined as interventionist, but driven by “compromise” between a DFL that was still very much the party of Hubert Humphrey, and a GOP that was basically the DFL in better suits.
The image encapsulates an era that for decades made the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant misty-eyed with nostalgia, with boxcars full of newsprint over the decades devoted to columns bemoaning our inability to reach the acme of their respective youths…
…even as we with eyes for history and current events noted that that gauzy, soft-focus bit of hindsight ignores how much that sort of governance depends on a shared culture of communitarian polity that emigrated from poor, rural Scandinavian towns to poor, rural Minnesota towns – not to mention that the DFL of today would expel the gun-owning, forthrightly anti-Communist Humphrey were he seeking office.
And now comes this piece, by one of the writers behind the original Time article and the original Minnesota myth, nearly five decades ago.
And he‘s revising his view – big-time:
What happened? Minnesota once enjoyed a high degree of social cohesion rooted in the traditions of previous waves of immigrants. But as the region has grown and become more diverse, the Twin Cities in particular developed most of the problems that bedevil much of the rest of urban America (crime, unemployment, drugs and so on). The reasons for this are complicated and widely debated. In any case, Minnesota now ranks among the worst states in the country when it comes to racial inequality.
In 1973, there were two strong political parties in Minnesota, both centrist and in touch with the state’s voters. A profound change occurred in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, especially among the wealthy and young. They contrived to seize political power by leveraging certain idealistic or merely sentimental impulses in the public mind. It was the prospering woke who elected the progressive Minneapolis City Council that supports defunding the police, and it was those white elites who, more than her fellow Somali-Americans, elected Ilhan Omar to the House. A mostly white “meritocracy,” caring more about, say, transgender rights than about job creation, took command in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country. Both parties have become much more ideological, controlled by angry amateurs—the woke and the antiwoke.
Morrow, currently 80-something, somewhat myopically saves some blame for the MN GOP, as if the Republicans move to the right was in any way symmetric with the DFL’s leftward lurch, and as if moderation itself, rather than enlightened communitarian self-interest, was what brought Minnesota’s near-mythical golden age about.
But the whole thing is worth a read – because the conclusion couldn’t be more correct:
The difference between my 1973 story and the news reports of 2022 amounts to the difference, as it were, between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Tom gives you the boyish, innocent, sun-shot rendering of Hannibal, Mo., in the middle of the 19th century. Huck’s story is the version of America that includes poverty, murder, alcoholism, child abuse, race prejudice, blood feud and imbecility. Minneapolis today looks a little more like the Huckleberry Finn version, although without Huck’s humor or his rascal charm.
Some of the same DFLers who venerated the myth created by the original coverage have been venting their bottomless barrels of spite at Morrow for turning on him – he’s being compared with Sean Hannity, for Florence’s sake.
But he’s far from wrong.
the Republicans move to the right
Mr Morrow is not completely wrong. It reminded me that there was a lot of pretty solid Republicans during the 60s and 70s who left the party because they felt like the MN GOP was taken over by anti-abortion activists and all that goes with activists. I’m not editorializing just remembering.
The DemoCommie Party of MN is still pissed off that Humphrey purged all of the Stalinist commies from the party. I grew up next door to a major DFL party big shot and I still remember he and my dad applauding the actions.
I hope the republicans nominate a candidate who can compete with Walz.
What was the percentage of the White population in MN in 1971?
Wasn’t part of the “good government” story the Local Government Aid (LGA) shipped from the metro to the outstate area? Today, doesn’t about 70% of that LGA stay right here in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Bloomington?
Ha! REuufhs. I can sorta answer that question. I happen to have an original, bound 1970 World Almanac which uses 1960 census data. On page 255, it states that the total population of MN was ~3.4m of which 42000 were non-white.
I believe it was 96%, commenter-whose-name-is-too-long.
NW observed: Wasn’t part of the “good government” story the Local Government Aid (LGA) shipped from the metro to the outstate area? Today, doesn’t about 70% of that LGA stay right here in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Bloomington?
My point, exactly
I think it’s higher, MP, like 98%. I found another, under the dust. A 1973 almanac.
98%
So, Minnesotan’s were enjoying “The Good Life”, but not much Vibrancy ™.
Go figure.
My 96% number does not include Indian reservations.
Dot or feather, MP? Well, you know, if we gonna split hairs… or feathers.
It’s worth noting that some racially diverse areas had some wonderful results at times as well. Minnesota had, at the time, a population that valued education and had good jobs. The iron mines were humming, freight was traveling along the Great Northern Route, technology was booming in the Twin Cities and Rochester, and agriculture was pretty healthy. The competitive pressures from Japan and elsewhere that decimated the steel industry in the late 1970s and 1980s were years away.
Now what, precisely, was the government’s role in this? Well, they pretty much weren’t getting in the way yet, and the ill fruits of welfare (incentivizing migration of people without education and work skills to generous states) hadn’t occurred yet. In other words, the hens hadn’t come home to roost.
bike;
Yup, then the DemoCommies started playing both ends against the middle. Kissing the asses of the mining unions and the environazis at the same time, hoping to get the votes from each side, but keep them in the dark. I’ve had many conversations with iron rangers, asking them why they donated money to the same two faced liars that also took money from the people that wanted them to be unemployed, but only got confused stares from most of them.
Just FWIW, the economy and culture of MN and WI closest European counterpart is Ukraine. Smart people, strong work ethic, base of agriculture, respect for education and the arts, no easy access to international trade. MN and Wi are not Scandinavian analogs.
MP, you are wrong about the culture. Could not be more different – their populism trumps everything. EVERYTHING.
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Somehow Milton Friedman’s comment about this subject comes to mind. Met by a Scandinavian government official who argued about how wonderful their socialism was, he countered by noting that people of Scandinavian descent in Minnesota and elsewhere did even better with free markets.
JPA, I’m curious about your description of Ukrainians. Are we talking about populism a la William Jennings Bryan, or….? Seems, though a bit off topic, like something that might be of major interest to the world, given what’s going on over there now.