In this week’s “Meeting the Moment,” Anat and I talked about the deeper context in Minnesota that helps explain not just why the horrific ICE murder of Renee Good happened, but also why the community response there has been so powerful.
Minnesota represents something the Trump regime hates: a majority-white Midwestern state where multiracial democracy has actually worked — where coalitions across race, faith, and class have won elections, passed progressive legislation, and governed successfully. These efforts included the Greater Than Fear campaign, a successful answer to years of right-wing race-baiting in Minnesota against immigrant, Black, and Somali-American communities after 2016. The campaign confronted that racism head-on (instead of ignoring it), and offered an alternative rooted in solidarity.
Minnesota is under full-scale occupation — but communities are organizing at an extraordinary scale in response. There are mass protests, statewide trainings, and a call for a Minneapolis general strike on January 23, alongside a national walkout on January 20.
We also talked about why Minnesota is still a Democratic stronghold while its demographically similar neighbors, Wisconsin and Michigan, are swing states. It wasn’t accidental or due to a sea change in voters’ attitudes — it was thanks to well-financed takeovers of state governments financed by billionaires in Wisconsin (Bradley) and Michigan (DeVos), who helped Scott Walker and Rick Snyder win their governors’ races in 2010 and act aggressively to curtail democracy and decimate unions. (More on this here.)
And we discussed a deeper reason behind the frustrating actions of Democratic leadership: too many elected officials govern as if their only job is to win the next election, not to do their duties as public servants. This is both a moral and a political failing. (Read Anat’s guest post at Weekend Reading about why the dominant poll-driven strategy doesn’t work for Democrats.)
