Transcription
Here's a question for you. How did Minnesota get so crazy?
Part of it is being like a white woman that I'm privileged and I have a lot of privilege.
I'm Rich Lowry of Nashville View and let's look at what happened to Minnesota. This is a state that's always had a very strong Democrat/populist tradition, but lately has seemed to go completely off the rails and become the California of the upper Midwest with Minneapolis a frozen version of San Francisco. So, how did this happen? How do we get a Tim Waltz, a Keith Ellison, a Jacob Fry?
Well, let's begin the story at the beginning with the seedbed of the population of Minnesota. I'm going to rely a lot here on the entry on Minnesota and the American almanac of American politics. But basically happens, you have these Yankees in the north want to go west. They just go straight across the country. They bypass the tundra of Minnesota. So Minnesota wants to attract people might like that climate. So you get Norwegian immigrants, you get Swedish immigrants, you get German immigrants.
Now, if there's one thing we've learned from the welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota, it's that immigrants bring their cultures from their former societies with them. And this happened way back when as well. You get Scandinavian immigrants, you're going to get a Scandinavian inlected political culture. And this is why Minnesota, like Scandinavia, is a leader in developing welfare state policies. These immigrants bring a Scandinavian type belief in collective social action and a friendliness and impulse towards socialistic policies to Minnesota.
What happens is after the populist era, you get the rise of a third party on the left in Minnesota and other places in the region. The so-called farmer labor party extremely influential, elects people to major offices in the 20s and the 30s, but has ties to the communists which is discrediting. And what eventually happens is the Democrats merge with the anti-communist element of this party and you get the Democratic farmer labor party which becomes dominant and has been hugely important to the politics of the state ever since. The synthesis here is high levels of government spending, government supports for people very pro- labor union, pro- high wages, pro- civil rights and anti-communist, although not radically so. And a historic figure in forging this union and this synthesis and representing it is Hubert Humphrey.
Now Hubert Humphrey was a senator, a vice president, ran for president in 1968, lost to Richard Nixon. Not my cup of tea, not my kind of politician, but he wasn't corrupt. He was genuinely idealistic, really brave and pioneering on civil rights. And he represents this tradition that runs through Minnesota politics. Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, the early denter from the Vietnam War, and Walter Montdale, who is Jimmy Carter's vice president and also loses a presidential election in his case to Ronald Reagan. These are some of the most liberal politicians in the country at the time, but they don't hate America and they don't hate American institutions and they don't want to overturn fundamentally American institutions.
And what happens is this thread in Minnesota politics is supplanted by something much more radical and there are a lot of figures that represent it. But let's look at the aforementioned Tim Waltz. One thing that happened was the sheer accretion of power. Now when Tim Waltz was in Congress, he's in a relatively reddish district. It was relatively moderate. Then he becomes governor. That's not great. But things aren't out of control because Democrats don't have full control. Despite his image as a blue state, Republicans have a foothold. If you look at 1991 to 2022, that entire period, Democrats have unified control of the governor's mansion in both houses of legislature only twice. From 15 to 18, Republicans hold the state house. From 17 to 22, Republicans hold the state senate. But then in 2022, that bad midterm for Republicans, Democrats take everything and it is Katie R the door.
After 2022, they just figure we can pass every leftwing initiative we want. Who's going to stop us? What's to stop us? It's almost impossible to catalog all that they did. In a short video, I'll just say every possible radical abortion measure. They become a so-called transgender refuge and adopt all sorts of extremist trans policies. They force a radical cultural agenda on the schools, including a mandate for a totally preposterous ethnic studies program. You get driver's license for illegal immigrants. You get healthcare for illegal immigrants. They take a $17 billion budget sur surplus and immediately blow it on every kind of spending initiative imaginable.
And the other big factor here is that the base of the party was changing. the core voters of the DFL party in its heyday Hubert Humphrey and others involves true to the party's name a lot of farmers and a lot of blueco collar workers and what happens is the Democratic party sheds those kind of voters right no longer has rural voters instead it it base becomes centered on urban areas and the suburbs and as it becomes more geographically homogeneous it becomes more ideologically homogeneous and further to allow especially on cultural matters in that 2022 election. They actually lose the Democrats some some state house seats in rural areas but they make up for them in suburban areas. So a narrower and more radical party is the result.
And then there's another element that plays a part here goes to another historic figure in Minnesota politics, the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Well Stone is a little different than some of these other politicians from the past we've talked about because he's more purely an activist. He dies tragically in a plane crash and his family, this is admirable, they don't want stuff named after him or any of that. They want an organization that's going to carry on in his tradition by training other progressive activists. It's called Wellstone Action. It's very effective. Trains lots of people. And by the way, there's turmoil there that ultimately results in the in Wellstone sons being kicked off the board because they're not woke enough. They want a past version of progressivism associated with their father when the people other people running it want something more radical. And by the way, you know who's an alumnest of Wellstone action training? None other keeps coming up like a bad penny than Tim Waltz.
So you get a lot of power for the Democrats. You get a narrower geographic and ideological base. You get a robust progressive training apparatus. And then you throw on top of that the reaction to Donald Trump after he's elected the first time and the reaction to George Floyd and it's going to be truly a toxic mix. If you look at Jacob Fry, he seems like total progressive clown and radical to us. And he is by any reasonable standard. But you got to remember in the context of Democratic politics in Minneapolis, the guy's a moderate. He has to go to a struggle session during George Floyd and realize these people are part of this political coalition.
I've been coming to grips with my own brokenness in this situation, my own failures, my own shortcomings, and I know there needs to be deep-seated structural reform in terms of how the department operates. But the systemic racist system needs to be revamped.
Fry only wins a third term because he beats the DFL endorsed candidate Omar Fatah who's to his left. The city council's at loggerheads with Jacob Fry because much of it is hostile to him because it is to his left. So, as we have more focus on Minnesota with the welfare fraud scandal, with the ICE actions there, don't expect anything rational or reasonable to come out of politicians from Minnesota. These are people who have the worst sort of instincts and also have an incentive to pander to people even further to their left. So, no matter how bad or crazy it is, don't worry. It could get worse and it could get crazier. I'm Rich Lowry. Over and out.
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