What's the Matter with Minnesota?
In the 1970s, Minnesota and Wisconsin competed to be the most well-ordered state. Now, they compete to generate the most SteveSailer.Net content.
Here are excerpts from the August 13, 1973 Time magazine cover story on Minnesota as “a state that works:”
If the American good life has anywhere survived in some intelligent equilibrium, it may be in Minnesota. It is a state where a residual American secret still seems to operate. Some of the nation's more agreeable qualities are evident there: courtesy and fairness, honesty, a capacity for innovation, hard work, intellectual adventure and responsibility.
Politics is almost unnaturally clean -- no patronage, virtually no corruption. The citizens are well educated: the high school dropout rate, 7.6 percent, is the nation's lowest. Minnesotans are remarkably civil: their crime rate is the third lowest in the nation (after Iowa and Maine). By a combination of political and cultural tradition, geography and sheer luck, Minnesota nurtures an extraordinarily successful society.
Drawbacks
... Some argue that Minnesota works a bit too well and too blandly, that its comparatively open and serene population is a decade or two behind the rest of the U.S. The place lacks the fire, urgency and self-accusation of states with massive urban centers and problems.
You gotta admit, fire and self-accusation have not been lacking in Gov. Walz’s Minnesota.
Racial issues
Minnesota's people are overwhelmingly white (98 percent), most of them solidly rooted in the middle class. Blacks rioted in Minneapolis in 1966 and 1967, but with only 1 percent of the state's population, they have not yet forced Minnesotans into any serious racial confrontation. Or at least, not apocalyptic confronation.
… Says Gleason Glover, executive director of the Minneapolis Urban League: "For a black, Minneapolis is one of the truly outstanding cities in the U.S. to live in. The problems here -- housing, education, discrimination, unemployment -- are manageable ... There just isn't the real, deep-seated hatred here that blacks often encounter in other cities." Two black state legislators were elected last fall from predominantly white middle-class suburban districts. …
Civic duty
Part of Minnesota's secret lies in people's extraordinary civic interest. … Even more important than corporate giving is personal fund raising. Fund drives currently underway or about to begin in the Twin Cities amount to a staggering $300 million, of which $136 million has already been raised. …
Political culture
Some of Minnesota's success can be traced to its ethnic traditions. ... In many respects, the Scandinavians, long the largest single group in the state, have shaped Minnesota's character. They, together with its large Anglo-Saxon and German strain, account for a deep grain of sobriety and hard work, a near-worship for education and a high civic tradition in Minnesota life. ...
Arthur Naftalin, a brilliant mayor of Minneapolis during the '60s, points out that no single group -- ethnic, religious or business -- has ever been able to take control of the state. There were no Tammany machines to greet the immigrants. "With our great variety," says Naftalin, "we have always had to form coalitions." ...
(In the late '30s, Gov. Harold) Stassen pushed through a comprehensive civil service law that abolished patronage. "By taking politics out of the back room and engaging thousands in political activity, from women to college students, Stassen made the governmental process in Minnesota a superior instrument of the people's will," observes author Neal R. Peirce in The Great Plains States of America. ...
… Chuck Ruhr, 36, owner of a Minneapolis ad agency, lives a long commute -- by Minneapolis standards -- from his office. … Says Ruhr: "There is a little of the bad things up here -- drugs, pollution. Being way up here, people have had a chance to see the crest of the wave coming and react to it. There's an attitude, too, that we've got a nice little thing going and let's keep it that way."
It would be fun to ask Gov. Walz just how much he deplores Mr. Ruhr’s racist statement.
By the way, in 2016 I wrote “What’s the Matter with Wisconsin?”
That article is a great throw-back, Steve; thanks.
I grew up in NW Iowa, just across the border from Minnesota, and have quite a few friends and relatives who have moved to the Twin Cities to live the frozen urban lifestyle. Most of them are/have become hard-core lefties in the Walz mode; from what I've seen so far, they're beside themselves with joy that he (and their state) have been 'honored' in this way.
My impression (as an Iowan, whom woke Minnesotans typically look down on, both geographically and culturally) is that Minnesota lefties are a special breed. They're still drawing down the social capital that had accumulated so deeply in 1973 Minnesota, i.e. they still see it as a place that just 'works better'. This imbues them with a peculiar brand of polite-but-snotty upper midwestern smugness and condescension to other, lesser residents of the region.
But on the other hand, they know deep down they're still just flyover hicks to their cultural superiors on the coasts, so they burn with a zeal for wokeness fueled by a desire for recognition and validation from NYC and Washington and San Francisco.
It's this combination of cultural confidence and radical-envy that inspires them to do completely insane things like import Somalis by the tens of thousands, and just assume they can not only 'save' them from their pathologies, but also transform them into nice, orderly soft-socialist citizens.
I haven't lived in the region for a long time, though, so it would be interesting to hear from those who are there now if these impressions ring true.
One other note: it was amusing to see John Hinderaker eat his words on the Walz nomination. As recently as last week Hinderaker was swearing up and down that Walz's chances were 'zero'. I like the way Hinderaker thinks and writes, but he's often just that quarter-beat behind the zeitgeist and its fallout.
“Minnesota nice” leads to AWFL passive aggressive behaviors. The entire city council of St. Paul is now woke diverse millennial birthing persons. Massive fraud is another case study of how a small, low trust group can burn and loot a high trust society.