Minnesota's Competing Narratives

A brief excerpt from the perpetually forthcoming book:

One way to view Minnesota's political battles over the last ten years is in the context of a longer-running conflict over the dominant narratives of the Minnesota story--the rugged individual of the Frontier vs. the mass collective of the Minnesota Miracle. 

An older narrative of Minnesota grounds our history in the pioneer families (think Little House on the Prairie)—having left the stasis of the Old Europe, or moving from “back East”—building  new lives in a new land.  Of course, this story tends to leave out those who came even earlier:  the native tribes and the French explorers and trappers who left their place names across our landscape.

At our nation’s birth, Minnesota sat on the far northwestern frontier, with the eastern third of the land entering the United States as part of the original Northwest Territory in 1787.  The earliest settlers had to carve that new life for themselves and their posterity in the harsh, northern climate of this new world’s wilderness.  Farmers, ranchers, loggers forged a state out of a territory, joining together as neighbor-helping-neighbor when times were tough or disaster struck.

The virtues of hard work and self-reliance were rewarded as fortunes were made and legacies secured.  The echoes of this frontier society can still be seen in section line roads, on our thousands of century farms, and legendary names like Pillsbury, Cargill, and Hormel.

The individual work ethic, the idea of neighbor-helping-neighbor, and the importance of family continue to shape Minnesota's society.   

However, in the alternative narrative, our public institutions were the result of our success.  This "Scandinavian socialism" of today's reality turns out to be substantially different from the one in our Minnesota Miracle memory.  But the conflict between narratives continues to play out in the halls of the state Capitol.

The more recent narrative—one that downplays the frontier past—replaces nearly two centuries of rugged self-reliance with the 1970’s-era “Minnesota Miracle,” which in this version heralds the establishment of a Scandinavian-style collective society on the North American prairie.  Think of the photo of then-Governor Wendell Anderson, smiling and clad in a plaid shirt, holding a northern pike, on the August 13, 1973 cover of Time magazine, “The Good Life in Minnesota.”

Time’s accompanying cover story described “A State That Works,” and approvingly reported on Anderson’s plan for a state takeover of school finances, 

The Republicans thought that Anderson had blundered fatally.  That they were wrong is an excellent example of the sophistication of the Minnesota voters.  They were willing to elect a man who promised to raise some of their taxes in return for larger overall gains.  When he took office, Anderson proposed a $736 million boost in state taxes—roughly a 30% increase in the biennial budget.

Of course those same sophisticated voters turned against Anderson in 1978, after he had himself appointed to the U.S. Senate.  And we could argue the extent to which those “larger overall gains” ever materialized in a state that has one of the nation’s largest achievement gaps.

Likewise, this Miracle narrative ignores that its model, Scandinavia itself, has turned away for the cradle-to-grave welfare state and distanced itself from the larger “European” project.  In fact, modern Scandinavia functions as a useful example of the kind of changes we need to make in Minnesota and America.  As reported by in Nima Sanandaji in New Geography, in an article headlined “Sweden, a role model for capitalist reform?” it turns out,

Sweden has dramatically scaled back the size and scope of government starting in the 1990s, which spurred the recovery of the growth rate.

Norway, which is not a member of the European Union (EU), has an economy dominated by the extraction of oil and natural gas from under the North Sea.  Sweden, an EU member, never adopted the Euro as it currency.  Denmark’s former center-right government instituted a series of budget and pension reforms in recent years."

In Minnesota, the November 2012 election represents a triumph of the Collective narrative.  With one-party rule returning to St. Paul, we'll see how this drama plays out in the coming months.