Editor’s Note: The Wages of Extremism
We plan issues of Twin Cities Business roughly 10-12 weeks before you see them, so it’s not easy to predict how news will evolve between our plans and your reading. This time, we hit the jackpot, unfortunately. I wish the latest The Ask piece, about how the state and region’s national reputation is harming our business climate, wasn’t quite so topical, even though it was conceived before the ICE assault on our community.
Let me preface this by saying I wholeheartedly condemn the violent and indiscriminate federal invasion of our state. Donald Trump’s revenge action—purportedly to punish DFL leaders for social services frauds—merely erases the ostensible reason from the news. Our local leaders’ incapacity to de-escalate, and their fixation on defiance, has only worsened innocent people’s suffering—particularly Latino immigrants, who are essential for our state economy to function. I wonder how many of them are thinking of relocating to a city in a red state where life is normal?
The federal action refocused national attention, often hyperbolically, on Minnesota. The Ask explores the price the region has paid for a half-decade of harsh publicity. Minnesota needs external involvement to grow: outside financing, new entrepreneurs, incoming college students, and visitors like conference-goers and tourists. Yet what they see in the news is Third World-style police actions, unhinged activists, empty streets, and closed businesses—while Nashville, Salt Lake City, Boston, and Charlotte are business as usual.
Liz Fedor’s feature about new St. Paul mayor Kaohly Her is more than an insightful conversation with a new mayor; it’s a cautionary tale about what happens to a city when it decides that business prosperity is irrelevant to its fortunes, when activists take control of government and reallocate wealth using tactics honed in university seminars and political party meetings.
In my conversation with former Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips in our October issue, he noted, “absent a thriving business sector, there are no resources for all the things that the left wants.” St. Paul’s previous mayor and council assumed they could create prosperity with regulation and taxation alone, because that’s what their activist training taught them.
When we devolve public policy challenges to a morality play of good versus evil, it becomes impossible to find solutions.
St. Paul is now crying for investment. For businesses. For leadership that understands the essential connections between action and reaction. Let’s hope the new mayor delivers.
Activism is one of the few resources the Twin Cities outperforms in. We, along with Portland, Oregon, are known nationally as a place to come if you want to fight the establishment and build a beachhead against colonialism and whiteness. It’s alarming to see how Minnesota’s culture of responsive and representative government has morphed into an ecosystem where conservatives like Mike Lindell do battle with activist leftism, while business has no political advocates.
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I had breakfast in January with my friend Nate Garvis, who many of you know from his time running government relations for Target, then working to develop future leaders at Studio E throughout the 2010s. He had a wise observation: “We have a hidden activist class that is directing institutional cultures, academia, journalism, and politics, who believe their primary purpose is promoting activism.” The role of activism, he notes, “is to strip things of context so they look black and white.” When we devolve public policy challenges to morality plays of good versus evil, it becomes impossible to find solutions.
Look at St. Paul. Its leaders refused to accept that rent control would lead to disinvestment. Their view of capitalism was that the greed of business and the vast riches that flowed to the ownership class—whatever the season or economy—would cause them to continue to build and grow, while new benefits would flow to average people. They refused to accept that business has to operate profitably or it does business elsewhere. And it did. Minneapolis didn’t implement rent control and instead made it easier to build; the city saw a huge wave of housing growth, while rents have fallen.
If we let them, the excesses of leftist activism and right-wing extremism will destroy this community’s hard-won prosperity. They have a six-year head start. We better start pushing back.
