During our childhood, Sandel continued, “this Midwest populist tradition left its mark—on national politics, and on us. We were eleven years old when [President Lyndon] Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and fourteen years old when Eugene McCarthy, another Minnesota senator, challenged LBJ in the New Hampshire primary to protest the war in Vietnam.”
Sandel also pointed to another, subtler source of our civic education: “The Minnesota of our day offered a rich array of class-mixing public spaces and experiences. In the suburbs at least, the public schools were strong. Public parks and recreation facilities were plentiful and widely used by people from all social backgrounds. The Minnesota State Fair attracted people from all walks of life. So did Metropolitan Stadium, where baseball fans gathered to root for the Minnesota Twins.”
Going to a baseball game “was a more democratic experience in those days,” Sandel observed:
Of course, seats behind home plate were always more expensive than the cheap seats in the bleachers. But the difference was not as vast as it is today. A bleacher seat cost about a dollar, and a box seat about three dollars and fifty cents. As a result, going to a baseball game was a class-mixing experience. Business executives sat side by side with teachers and mail carriers. Everyone drank the same stale beer, ate the same soggy hot dogs, and waited in the same long lines for the restrooms. And when it rained, everyone got wet. Of course, we didn’t go to Metropolitan Stadium for a civic experience; we went to root for the Twins, and to see Harmon Killebrew hit home runs. But the class-mixing conditions at the ballpark made for a shared democratic experience. These conditions also obtained—not perfectly, but for the most part—in the neighborhoods, in the public schools, and in most of the places we inhabited. It made for an inadvertent education in democratic citizenship.
Going to a ball game is different now, he continued. “Like most sports teams, the Minnesota Twins now play in a corporate-named stadium, called Target Field, replete with luxury skyboxes offering ‘gourmet dining and bar service’ and ‘exclusive, dedicated concierge service,’ where VIPs can watch the game in air-conditioned comfort far removed from the common folk in the stands below. So much for the soggy hot dogs and shared democratic experience. In the age of the skybox, it is no longer the case that everyone gets wet when it rains.”
Sandel sees something similar unfolding throughout our society. “Today, people of affluence and people of modest means live increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. We send our kids to different schools. I call this the ‘skyboxification of American life.’ This marks a departure from the Minnesota of our youth. It is corrosive of citizenship and democratic equality. At the time, we scarcely noticed this democratic civic landscape. It formed the background conditions of everyday life. It is more evident in retrospect, now that it has become a distant memory.”
Sandel’s thoughts were echoed by another St. Louis Park alum, Norman Ornstein—the political scientist, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (a Washington, D.C., think tank) and one of the most oft-quoted analysts on American politics and Congress. His books include It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, The Permanent Campaign and Its Future, and Intensive Care: How Congress Shapes Health Policy, all co-written with Thomas E. Mann. Norm is five years older than me, and was actually born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where his dad moved from Canada to open a men’s clothing store. His mom, though, was from North Minneapolis, and the family moved to the city when Norm was four and stayed until he was nine, when he attended the St. Louis Park Hebrew school and middle school. Then the family moved to Canada for a few years, and then moved back to St. Louis Park. He graduated from high school at age fourteen and entered the University of Minnesota as a sophomore at age fifteen.
When I asked what impact growing up in St. Louis Park had on him, Ornstein began our conversation by pulling out of his wallet his ticket from the seventh game of the 1965 World Series, October 14, in which the Minnesota Twins, the American League champions, lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers at Metropolitan Stadium. Broke my heart. Norm’s too. But that loss wasn’t all that stayed with us all these years. What he saw growing up, said Ornstein, was a politics driven by a passion for social justice, a passion for fair play and civility, and a “pragmatic looking-for-political-solutions” expectation by the public and “a deep respect for institutions.” It is little wonder, therefore, he added, that his own career as a political scientist has been shaped around “working to protect, enhance, and improve institutions of government and educating the public about how to participate. I don’t think I would have had that passion if it were not for how much of it was inculcated into me as a child growing up in Minnesota.”
That Thing in the Water
I am not naïve about my childhood—or about Minnesota or St. Louis Park. There was a lot that was also wrong about that time and place where I grew up. Racism was still rife. Sexism was still rampant—if many of my teachers were amazingly talented women, it was in part because the full world of work was not yet open to them. Gay rights were on virtually no one’s agenda, and that left so many people hiding in closets. Those, alas, were norms prevalent throughout the country in those days and it’s good that we have replaced them.
But if you were lucky enough that your life was not constrained by these prejudices, it was hard not to be impacted by all that was also right about Minnesota and St. Louis Park back then. And in my case it was hard not to carry with me for a lifetime a sense of optimism that human agency can fix anything—if people are able and ready to act collectively. And it was hard to leave there and not carry with me for a lifetime an appreciation of how much a healthy community can both anchor and propel people.
St. Louis Park was exactly what the political philosopher Edmund Burke was describing in his classic Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), when he hailed the community, or what he called the “little platoon,” as the key building block and generator of trust for a healthy society.
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections,” Burke wrote. “It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.”
St. Louis Park and Minnesota, when they were at their best, offered many of their citizens the opportunity to belong to a network of intertwined “little platoons,” communities of trust, which formed the foundation for belonging, for civic idealism, for believing others who were different could and should belong, too. The world today gives us so many reasons and tools to hunker down and disconnect. St. Louis Park and Minnesota gave many of us who grew up there the opposite—it gave us reasons to believe that we could and should connect and collaborate, that pluralism was possible, and that two plus two often could add up to five.
In retrospect, though, I also realize what a relatively small distance we had to travel to bridge the economic and cultural gaps between us. That is not true today. In this age of tightening global interdependence and intimate contact between more diverse strangers, the bridges of understanding that we have to build are longer, the chasms they have to span much deeper. And that only makes the need for community building and healthy communities that can anchor diverse populations much greater.
Is that a bridge too far in too many places? I honestly don’t think so—with the right leadership. But before I could even consider how we rise to this steeper global challenge, I needed this refresher course. I needed to go back and reconnect with that time and place in my life where politics worked, where community spirit was real, where public institutions were respected, where my friends were my friends, not “followers” on Tw
itter or icons on Facebook, and, yes, where when people really get mad at a reckless driver who almost kills them, they almost honk.
THIRTEEN
You Can Go Home Again (and You Should!)
I seem to have a thing with parking garage attendants.
I was doing book research back in Minnesota in early 2016. I had rented a Hertz car and on January 9 I returned it to the airport that morning to catch my flight back to Washington, D.C. It was absolutely bone-chilling cold. I was wearing a heavy down parka. When I dropped off my car at Hertz, there was only one attendant on duty and he immediately flashed me a smile. His name was Qassim Mohamed, forty-two, and he had helped me at least once before. He was a news junkie and had engaged me about politics. I had not seen him for a while, though, and I couldn’t remember if he was Arab or African. We chatted a bit as he went through the paperwork for my rental, and at the end I said to him, “Remind me where you’re from?”
“Somalia,” he said, “but we feel home here now.”
What a nice thing to say, I thought. I hadn’t asked him anything about how he felt about living in Minnesota. He just volunteered that he felt at “home.” But there was one more thing he wanted me to know about his new home. His head was covered by the hood of his Hertz jacket—and as we spoke we could see each other’s breath—so it was with a big grin that he added, “Different weather.”
Different weather from Somalia for him—but now the same Minnesota for the both of us. What a remarkable place, I thought later. Four decades after I left, I can still return and feel at home; and a decade after he arrived, a Somali refugee can feel at home, too.
Our little exchange immediately reminded me of a conversation I had had with the former vice president Walter Mondale the previous August. I had taken him to lunch at a fish restaurant in the office tower of his law firm in downtown Minneapolis. A man of enormous decency and integrity, Mondale is one of my favorite people. We talked a lot about how enduring some of these Minnesota–St. Louis Park values had become. As we got up to leave, Mondale, his gait slowed by his then eighty-seven years but his mind as sharp as ever, remarked to me: “You know, it sustains itself—there is a continuity. Humphrey is gone, but the elements he started are alive in a new generation twice removed from him.”
Coming back to Minnesota and St. Louis Park nearly forty years after I had left for college and a career, it was obvious to me that Mondale was right—and then some. With seventeen Fortune 500 companies choosing to headquarter there, and with the website Patch of Earth declaring that the Twin Cities had topped a combination of the seven major national ranking lists of “best cities” in which to live and raise a family, something must still be working, especially when you remember this place is a frozen tundra five months of the year.
But the question that tugged at me, and I asked over and over was: What was that “it” that was being sustained? I needed to know because I wanted to bottle “it” and share “it.” Nothing, it seemed to me, would be more useful in this age of accelerations. Having returned home to reconstruct what had worked in the past to make my community an inclusive place that could anchor and propel many of its citizens, I wanted to understand what was still working today—and that is what this chapter is about.
I eventually concluded that the “it” starts with the fact that Minnesota, and even little St. Louis Park, has and had a critical mass of leaders who year in and year out came to politics and power in order to govern. They squabble and gridlock as much as any in the country (and even occasionally throw up the odd wrestler, like Governor Jesse Ventura, to take a hand at making a mess of the place), but at the end of the day, more often than not, they’ve forged compromises for the greater good of the community. Yes, that is what lawmakers are expected to do, but the venomous polarization that has swept across American politics in the last two decades has made that no longer the norm, or even the expectation, in Washington, D.C., anymore.
At the same time, there was and remains an unusually high degree of public-private collaboration in Minnesota, and St. Louis Park, where a critical mass of businesses view themselves as not just employers, but citizens, who have a corporate obligation to help fix local socioeconomic ills and whose executives are expected to actually volunteer in the community to do that. Again, what a stark contrast to Washington, D.C., where big business, post-2008, has disappeared from the national scene and debate—partly due to self-inflicted moral gunshot wounds by Wall Street bankers, partly because big business has been unfairly demonized post-2008, and partly because big American multinationals now have so many customers and employees overseas that their very sense of “American citizenship” has been diluted. As a result, they’ve largely given up trying to shape the national agenda on the big issues such as education, trade, and immigration the way they once did.
Additionally, the public in Minnesota and St. Louis Park have come to expect both politicians and business leaders to engage in these best practices; politicians are expected to compromise in the end, and corporations are expected to contribute to the community.
“CEOs here make clear that they want things to happen and for the two parties not to always be in blocking mode,” said Lawrence Jacobs, of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “It’s not Kumbaya inside the legislature, but the culture is that it’s not acceptable to just be a blocker and ignore the reality.”
All of these positive aspects of “it” over time built a lot of “social capital”—that is, trust—between and within the public and private sectors, and that trust has filtered back to reinforce these positive habits, enabling them to be sustained. Do I even have to mention what a contrast that is to Washington, D.C., where there is zero trust between the parties, or between them and the private sector, so the great engine of American growth—our public-private partnerships to promote research, infrastructure, immigration, education, and rules that incentivize risk-taking but prevent recklessness—has pretty much ground to a halt?
If one is to be honest, though, there was also another not-so-pretty “it” that made Minnesota work: the meme of “Minnesota nice” brushed under the rug systemic racism in housing and policing, particularly regarding African Americans. While the African American minority community in Minnesota was relatively small, it had a history of activism dating to at least the early 1960s. There were race riots in Minneapolis in 1967—and also a black power movement, among other mobilizations.
Nevertheless, stubborn de facto racial segregation in housing and employment, which continues to this day, kept enough blacks—and Native Americans—out of sight of enough whites for many whites to assume that things were in fact “Minnesota nice” for everyone. Recently, the shooting deaths of two unarmed black men by white police—one in North Minneapolis in November 2015 and one in suburban St. Paul in July 2016—helped to pierce that veil. So did a 2015 study by the American Civil Liberties Union that found that “black people in [Minneapolis] are 8.7 times more likely than white people to be arrested for low-level offenses, like trespassing, disorderly conduct, consuming in public, and lurking. Native Americans … are 8.6 times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses than white people.” Indeed, The New York Times reported that Philando Castile, the thirty-two-year-old school cafeteria worker who was shot and killed by a white policeman near St. Paul when he reached for his license after being pulled over, had previously been “pulled over by the police in the Minneapolis–St. Paul region at least 49 times, an average of about once every three months, often for minor infractions.”
The good news is that Minnesota today has a much deeper public awareness of the aspects of “it” that have been working all these years—and that need to be preserved—as well as of the problems that cannot be overlooked any longer. African Americans and Native Americans are no longer willing to tolerate separate and unequal schools or mistreatment by police—and, to the state’s credit, neither are many whites. When you add it all up, though, it means that the integration and community-building cha
llenge faced by Minnesota today is now more difficult and more necessary.
It is more difficult because it involves integrating not only African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos in larger numbers, but also more traumatized populations such as Somalis and Laotian Hmong, who have fled to Minnesota from the World of Disorder. It also involves integrating African Americans who have “immigrated” to Minnesota from dangerous and disorderly neighborhoods in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit.
To put it another way, I left Minnesota and St. Louis Park in 1973 to discover the world, and when I returned four decades later I found that the world had come to Minnesota and St. Louis Park. To be specific, St. Louis Park High School is now 58 percent white, 27 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Asian, and 1 percent Native American, with the black population equally split between African Americans and Africans, mostly Somali Muslims, who immigrated to Minnesota in the last two decades and found St. Louis Park one of the most welcoming communities in which to settle—just as my Jewish parents did in the 1950s. Of the white students, the majority are Protestant and Catholic and about 10 percent are now Jewish. My high school, which had almost no Muslim students in my day, now has more Muslims than Jews. They serve halal meals in the cafeteria, and down every hallway you see young women who are covered.
Thank You for Being Late Page 48