Our New Dystopia - Over the weekend, several emailers told me I had to read yesterday's op-eds in the Strib for the new pieces by Lori Sturdevant and Jim Boyd.

Remember back in, say, 1993? There were tortured-sounding editorials in The Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and by the likes of the Cockburns and Dan Rather Daniel Schorr, about how crazy, ugly, inefficient and just plain different life was in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc? How the trains were running even less on time than before? About the difficulties people were having dealing with more than one opinion being allowed, or with prices not being set by central authorities, or with having to find a job on their own?

These pieces start with the same basic assumption: that as long as one group, or party, or side in an argument holds absolute control, it's the same as "consensus".

Sturdevent's piece sneaks up on you - starts by complementing Governor-Elect Pawlenty, then slides into some really ugly stereotyping:

Time was when there was no doubt: Minnesota, rural and urban, was one state. City people literally had country cousins. Suburbs were the clusters of stores and houses at the end of the streetcar lines that took the breadwinners to the big downtowns to work.

Read: Outstate Minnesotat was a bunch of "country cousins", people stayed down on the farm and let city people with the book larnin' do the governin'. Ya sure. And the burbs were just where people went to sleep at night, before taking the mass transit line, peace be upon its name, to the city. They knew their place.

Onward:

Folks throughout Minnesota listened to Cedric Adams at lunchtime and bedtime, cheered for the Gophers, and ended the summer with a trip to the State Fair.

And spoke with Swedish Accents! And ate Lutefisk! And indulged in more facile cultural stereotypes!

Minnesotans were nearly all white, nearly all middle-class, nearly all Christian.

And nearly all male! Er...whoops.

We return to Sturdevant:

The few who were not were shunted aside into city ghettos and the Iron Range, the better for the majority to pretend they did not exist.

So let's make sure we have this straight: If we were to say "America was a great place fifty or a hundred years ago - a place where you could fly the flag, where merit ruled, where taxes were low and self-reliance high, where you could both pray AND learn in a public school, where kids waited until marriage to have sex, families stayed together and neighbors cared about each other", many people of Sturdevant's ilk would accuse you of indulging in a sentimental cultural myth.

But when the writer is canonizing a cultural myth of the left - then apparently it's another matter:

That homogeneous Minnesota is gone -- and to the extent that it was a racist, insular place, good riddance. No Minnesotan should want to turn back the social clock.

But neither should any Minnesotan want to be rid of the legacy of Minnesota's monocultural era, for it includes things that have put this state on the map: a world-recognized University of Minnesota; a K-12 education system of notable quality; bountiful, well-protected natural resources; a sturdy transportation system; a helping hand for those less fortunate; richly varied cultural amenities.

The irony is this: Building and maintaining the things Minnesotans hold in common has become both more necessary and more difficult as the state has become more diverse. They are the things that acculturate the newcomers, provide opportunity, renew the economy and stabilize a fast-changing society. They are the touchstones of "brand Minnesota" in the global competition for prosperity.

So let me get this straight - the Ole and Lena, Yumpin Yiminy, Cedric Adams stereotype is what makes this state great?

Or is it:

But those common enterprises often take the label "government services," and as such, they are no longer as widely appreciated. Agreeing how and how much to pay for them was tough even before the recession hit.

Did you catch that? "But we did it, back before all those uppity conservatives shattered our, ahem, consensus".

Do you see the subtle link here? "Good Ol' Hunky Dory Ski U Mah Minnesota" equals government services. The alternative...:

Adams [John Adams, U of M Geographer] is a student of the burgeoning growth in Twin Cities suburbs since 1970. It coincides, he said, with an increasing psychological detachment of Minnesotans from a whole-state identity.

People increasingly believe they have little in common with Minnesotans who live in another region of the state, Adams said.

"Increasingly"? Does Adams believe that people in the Iron Range ever really identified with the rural southwest? Or that people in the Twin Cities ever gave the Red River Valley any thought?

But no, that's not the divide that troubles Adams and Sturdevant.

For example, "most people in the suburbs don't have anything to do with Minneapolis or St. Paul. More and more of the economy is outside the core cities." It has been pulled there, Adams says, by low-cost land, underpriced utilities, infrastructure improvements funded by someone else,

But not, of course, the failure of the big-state system spawned by the "consensus" for which Sturdevant pines. It couldn't possibly occur to Sturdevant (so it seems) that people are abandoning the cities and her precious "consensus" because the big state's efforts to "acculturate the newcomers" through relentless PC have alienated the people who foot the bills, and in fact is just a sentimental code-word for "subsidizing poverty", perpetuating that which it claims to abhor; programs to "provide opportunity" have wasted billions and provided no opportunity that the market couldn't do better; efforts "renew the economy" have dragged the economy, and trying to "stabilize a fast-changing society" stultifies it.

The message of Sturdevant's piece - "Shame on you suburbanites, farmers and other dissidents for not knowing your place, and falling into line behind the banner of Hubert and Fritz and Saint Wellstone. Shame! Do you not know, it's the Minnesota Way?"

Lileks says everything I did, but more succinctly:

The articles were part of a package about this shattered state, this bifurcated land riven by cultural schisms. Twas not always so. When the state was, oh, 60% Democrat and 40% Republican, we were united, marching into the glorious dawn with ours arms linked, a hymn on our lips to Great Leader Hubert and Dear Leader Mondale. Now that the state appears to be 60% Republican and 40% Democrat, however, we are like a cold bar of taffy smashed on the granite tabletop - pieces and shards, a whole no more. The reason? Individualism. The articles all lament the sad fact that Minnesotans no longer think of themselves as a collective, but regard themselves as individuals. And where are these doubleplus ungood rebels? They’re out there living in THE SUBURBS.

It goes on from there. Perhaps the piece should be saved in a time capsule, as a record of what we Minnesotans faced in our ruling...er, governing elites' attitudes.

Boyd's article ended with easily its best observation - something Ms. Sturdevant should have taken to heart before uncasing her Powerbook:

However we build on what is, it's better than wishing for what was.

Indeed. The old stereotypes are dead.

Time to wheel in the new ones!

One of the most important was reported last week in the newest census reports: Minnesota's population has grown by 65 percent since 1950, a much faster rate than any other state in the upper Midwest. Many of those new Minnesotans came from surrounding states, but many others came from farther away. Most have settled in the Twin Cities suburbs; they are weighted toward the professions; they tend to be Republican, and they were not steeped in the old Minnesota compact.

Alternate explanation: they weren't raised with Scando-Lutheran groupthink coloring their every human interaction.

The second influence has been the change in the parties, and it's not limited to Minnesota. The Republican Party has systematically rid itself of its moderate wing. It has managed to define its message simply -- economic growth through tax cuts -- while Democrats still struggle with a cacophony of discordant voices.

This observation should shock all of you Republicans. We're unified? I'll remember that at my next caucus meeting.

Seriously, there are deep rifts in the GOP - conservative versus moderate, single-issue pro-lifers versus those focused on economics, Rockefellers versus Reagans. But if we are seen as uniting around the "growth through tax cuts" message, we must be doing something right in spite of ourselves!

The upshot in Minnesota, as in most states and the nation as a whole, is that conservative Republicans sit in the catbird seat, and likely will for a long time. There is no middle from which a new consensus can be -- or needs to be -- formed.

The amazing part is that Boyd thought there ever was a "moderate consensus". When, as Lileks said, Minnesota was 60% DFL and 40% GOP, the "consensus" involved taking the very bleeding edge off the DFL's policies.

The third influence eroding consensus -- and civility -- is a popular attitude of disdain toward elites. People are better educated and more likely to work in white-collar jobs. They are less willing to defer to such intermediating institutions as the press, unions, the parties, government (including the public schools) and the influential "opinion leaders" of old.

And that really cheeses the metro DFL off!

They want to have their own say and to be much more in control of their own lives. They want more choices in where they live and how they live, including how they educate their children and how they save for their retirement. Far from being consensus-oriented, they are fiercely individualistic. Unlike the old elites, they also tend to be far less polite in pushing their personal agendas; thus the loss of civility in public discourse that so many -- usually from the old elites -- lament.

Read: All you uppity conservatives and your Talk Radio are upsetting the applecart.

Realism requires the recognition that individual choice is especially powerful right now. If any consensus is possible, it should be built around marshaling the power of choice in service to community. It's true in education, and it is probably true in health care, for example.

Boyd is both right, and a tad myopic. There's nothing inimical about "choice" and "community". Just in the way communitarianism is expressed by those with choice.

Boyd's piece is far the superior of the two - it eschews Studevant's sentimentalization of a lost majority's groupthink, and at least realistically assesses the changes of the past ten years.

So at least someone at the Strib gets it!
posted by Mitch Berg 1/6/2003 07:17:50 AM

Sunday, January 05, 2003