It's a model state that once brimmed with crisp progressivism and button-downed goo-goos and a one-for-all civic ethic and it gave us Humphrey, Mondale, and Wellstone. Now it's effectively closed, a shambles of pseudoconservative ideology and uncompromising nihilism.
Welcome to Minnesota. In the opening line I used the present tense -- it still is a model state -- although the model no longer fits its history. Now it's a model, as political scientist Lawrence Jacobs warns, of "ungovernability."
The causation is simple: "There’s a new ethic here," adds Jacobs, "that compromise is weakness." And of course sticking to one's guns ultimately (and I scarcely need add, paradoxically) translates into a corruption of principled leadership, since the inevitable wreckage of deadlock translates only into the singular principle of desolate rudderlessness.
At stake is a choice of deficit-resolution that virtually anyone, let's say, ideologically born after the era of Horace Mann would find a no-brainer. The Democratic governor has suggested "rais[ing] income taxes only on those earning more than $1 million a year -- an estimated 7,700 Minnesotans, or 0.3 percent of all taxpayers." The Republican-controlled legislature's proposal? "[D]elaying another $700 million in payments owed to schools."
The malevolence of contemporary Republicans' assorted Plutocrat-Protection and Nineteenth-Century-Restoration Acts requires little discussion, if any. Their diseased ideology of Bachmannesque indifference to the public -- or what they would call egads! the collective -- good is simply too manifest to beg any further diagnosis. Only the cure remains: for exasperated, exhausted voters to send these predatory bumpkins packing back to their suburban mansions or rustic log cabins, where in privacy they can polish their blue steel and caress their Bibles and with luck find someone to reread to them the classics of anarchy theory.
That's the American Way -- a polite, thanks-but-no-thanks, we've-had-enough, essentially conservative, peaceful change of leadership and governance, the nonrevolutionary limits of which, as I speculated yesterday, the GOP is rather ill-advisedly testing.