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Why Minneapolis? If you had asked me eight years ago where I felt the culture wars were going to be centered I would have said Portland. Being in the PNW it was the epicenter of wokeness and it seemed like you had antifa and Proud Boys gearing up for street battles there. If not Portland I would’ve picked somewhere else stereotypically woke, Seattle, San Francisco, even NYC while not unusually woke is at least especially prominent.
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something. But from George Floyd to Somali Daycares and Renee Good it has clearly become the main battleground. Does anyone have any theories as to why this is?
Minneapolis has been stagnant economically compared to more "woke" cities. In 2000, Minneapolis had a GDP per capita significantly above the US average; now it's basically average. Maybe it's vibes: when you're relatively treading water, you have worse outcomes on a range of measures?
I had ChatGPT pull data (change in GDP per capital; data sources are BEA and the Fed):
Supports my hypothesis, but it doesn't really ring true to me.
I think perhaps it's the white people in Minnesota. When I think of the prototypal white person there, I think of some middle manager for Fortune 500 #352. Competent and well-meaning, but not quite a go-getter. And that ends up reflected in the political culture, in that it's not especially responsive to changing circumstances. California, by contrast, has the same issues, but it encountered them earlier and its system has rapidly evolved to be resistant to shocks from them. A billion dollars in corruption and fraud, you say? Race riots? We found ways for the system to manage those decades ago.
Minnesota is naive; its system assumes good intent and isn't able to deflect or absorb the actors with bad intents.
This was what came to mind, too. Minneapolis was spared the ruin of the rust belt, even though it lacked the thing that saved the only other major city in the Midwest (Chicago), which was being the economic capital of the whole region. But over the last 20 years a lot of the economy it did retain has either stagnated or declined.
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