I have a confession to make: I moved to the Twin Cities in 2014. Mea culpa.
No, just kidding. My real confession is that despite being a Twin Cities resident since 2014, and a Minneapolis resident and homeowner since 2018, I haven't always been Minnesota's biggest booster. I grew up in the South but my dad's family and my alma mater are in the Chicagoland metro area, and that's different enough to here that I got nerfed by culture shock when I moved. In 2022, at the nadir of the "why aren't things normal again" post-vax pandemic era, an old woman came up to me to yell about how a house catty corner to mine was a meth lab and we needed to deal with it (fact check: false), and she opened with the same gambit many people here do when they want to impress upon you their importance and/or commitment to the area: she'd lived here for 43 years, you see.
The occupation changed this for me, in a way even 2020 didn't. I have no material explanation as to why. We lived in the same place in 2018, just south of the old KMart, so in 2020 I was huffing wizard cancer fumes from burning auto parts stores and letting complete strangers crash on my couch because the cops had slashed their tires: I was not ambivalent about the underlying social justice issues nor about my role as someone who lives here. But I didn't consider myself "of" Minneapolis in any meaningful sense, and now I do. Mea culpa for real this time.
The last few years have been tough. Pretty much every time I leave the house I'm confronted with some evidence of mismanagement of the city in which I live by the government to which I pay taxes. My wife and I walked to dinner last night and were almost hit by drivers disregarding right-of-way twice in a two block radius, which just happened to be as we were walking past the fifth precinct. Semi regularly I have to ask dudes to stop smoking crack literally on my front steps. I had to walk in the street coming home from the Jan 10 protest because the fucking fences were still up on the overpass at 31st and I-35. Uptown is dying, dying, dead, but then again so is downtown. There was no money for anything even before the occupation. Open Streets was replaced by some kind of weird haunted joke with bouncy castles. The bus lanes are always full of parked cars and so are the bike lanes. The owners of the vacant Burger King lot never fucking shovel their sidewalks. etc. Oh yeah, and a guy who lives in a house I walk past every 3-4 days was shot and almost killed by his insane racist neighbor with active warrants out for his arrest, after begging for help from the city for weeks. We'll return to that one.
Despite being an on and off dues paying DSA member, I am not a true enjoyer of politics: I like thinking about it, and I care deeply about political outcomes, but I hate talking to strangers and going to meetings, so the actual work of politics, for me, is a means to an end. If you are very tired and depressed and also make a good salary, it's easy to throw up your hands and say hey, fuck it, nothing matters, we ball. But because I now find myself extremely invested in the city that has been my home for 8 years, I do want these problems solved, and I'm not okay with kicking the can down the road another 3 years, or 5, or 10.
This past week, Minneapolis City Council shocked the world, or at least the Star Tribune, by refusing to confirm Todd Barnette. Jacob Frey shocked no one by flirting with constitutional crisis in response and claiming he'd veto the non-confirmation. The Star Tribune covered this event as a dereliction of duty by the city council, somehow, prompting council members like council president Elliott Payne and Jason Chavez to more clearly articulate their logic: Barnette claimed to be unaware of $20m in overspending last year; he does not answer questions when the council asks them; they've received complaints about his behavior. All of these seem like good reasons not to renew someone's appointment. I would for sure be fired at my job if I acted this way, and I don't make $300k nor am I ostensibly in charge of anything as sensitive as public safety. But to Jacob Frey and his allies, this cannot be a vote undertaken with constituents in mind. It instead is revenge for Frey not being in alignment with the city council during the 2020 protests.
Some of those allies, former council presidents including Andrea Jenkins, published an op-ed in the Strib where they claim that the council refusing to reappoint Barnette is inappropriate because his resume is so impressive. I confess that I find this shocking. A $300,000 executive position is not a role, in my opinion, that can or should be treated as a sinecure—in general, but particularly by the same mayor who created it. This lends credence to claims that might otherwise seem cynical, like the one that Barnette's actual role is to muddy the waters of police accountability: who is actually in charge, out of Frey, Barnette, and O'Hara? The ideal answer seems to be no one.
This is very clear when you consider the case of Davis Moturi, who was shot and almost killed by his racist neighbor John Sawchak after a long period of escalating threats. There are many questions about how this happened. Sawchak had a warrant out for his arrest at the time. Flyers warning about him were all over the neighborhood. Late last year, the city auditor explicitly said the police were refusing to cooperate with investigating this incident: specifically, how a man with an active warrant for his arrest and a documented history of racist harassment of his Black neighbor, whose council member is in the public record sending emails begging for police intervention, was in a position to attempt murder of that neighbor. I cannot think of a single recent local event that more clearly demands investigation. It points to ridiculous mismanagement of the city's second most expensive department, a department Todd Barnette nominally oversees.
And yet, the council member who sent those emails is Andrea Jenkins. She does not seem to view this event and the resultant stonewalling as disqualifying, or even something Barnette was really responsible for at all.
It is very, very easy to feel angry about this sort of thing, and I am angry. I think it's ridiculous and insulting. I make a fraction of what Barnette makes to perform much less important duties, and I am held to standards that seem to exceed his. This is infuriating! But beyond emotion, it just flat-out doesn't make sense. Why do we have this position if job performance doesn't matter? Should the mayor and his direct reports be evaluated on their resumes and how good they look in front of a camera, or should they be evaluated on outcomes? Actual outcomes, not claiming credit for crime rates that correlate to nationwide trends? The era of machine politics is over even in Chicago, but whatever you can say about the nakedly transactional nature of a Daley mayorality, people could actually call someone to complain about their sidewalks never being shoveled, and the expectation was that the vote ran directly through fixing that problem. Now, Frey-aligned council members like Elizabeth Shaffer and LaTrisha Vetaw will admit to not knowing much about how 311 works or viewing their primary job as "putting my lipstick on, curling my hair and selling [landlords'] message". Constituent concerns are viewed not just as unimportant but as a sideshow, a distraction somehow.
At the national level, politicians are branding themselves as "fighters" in contrast to widespread Democratic capitulation to Trump. This is essentially a promise to wield power if voters give it to them, but it's not a promise to be ideologically left-wing. We have nothing like this on the local level, but I would like to suggest that while the terrain is extremely different, there is one underlying commonality: namely, it should be neither confusing nor DSA-coded to think that public servants should be held accountable for poor outcomes in their purview. It should be broadly understood to be disqualifying to ask the public to re-hire you, either directly via election or indirectly via appointment, on the strength of your previous resume, rather than your actual performance at the job in question. It should be shameful to fail a constituent so comprehensively they wind up in the hospital as the victim of a likely hate crime, or to refuse to speak to your colleagues and compare them to babies when they ask you questions, as Jacob Frey has done to council members in the past. And it should matter, when the federal government invades and murders your constituents, that your response to such an event was to go on TV, accept accolades, and scold your constituents for the nature of their protest, rather than attempting to contribute to the coordination and execution of a city-wide relief and resistance effort.
Jacob Frey disagrees. To him, politics seems to be a sort of shell game of reputation management. I won't bother speculating on his motives for behaving this way. To be honest, I don't really care. What matters to me is that living in the city is measurably less pleasant the longer he has the reins, and I think that when he launches a full-scale attack against the city council, after consolidating power under the strong mayor amendment, specifically to demand that they abdicate their legal responsibilities, specifically because it is offensive to him that an executive making $300,000 per year is held to performance standards that entry level junior developers would find unremarkable, that something is broken. And I do not think what's broken is our city council.
I love Minneapolis. I didn't realize how much I loved it until I was forced to help defend it. I feel at home here in a way that tells me that even if North Carolina somehow goes full gay socialist, I won't move back "home", because it's not really my home anymore. It is because I love Minneapolis that I want people to be honest about what's broken here. It's not the DSA. It's not the centrists, either. It's the people who are resistant to the most elementary forms of accountability, whose response to being held to basic standards is petulant rejection and derision of the entire idea that government should serve its people. It's the people who would sign on to a statement that a guy's impressive resume should outweigh his negligence in his current job. And, speaking of the news cycle, it's the people who look at all of this and decide the answer is another astroturfed red-baiting organization aiming to disallow DSA participation in our own political party.
We know these people overlap, because Frey staffers like Sam Schulenberg publicized "The Humphrey Project", and Frey briefly followed the Twitter account.
I think it is entirely fair to say that Frey-aligned people are the dominant problem in DFL politics right now, specifically because they believe ideological disagreements take precedent over ensuring a functioning government. I do not believe the Edina moms, with whom I share very little politically yet with whom I marched against ICE, are the problem. This is an important distinction: the problem is not that the DFL contains both socialists and centrist liberals. That is normal and fine. What's not normal or fine is involving yourself with government while having contempt for its core functions. In this sense, Frey and his allies share more with the average Republican than they do with any DFLer, which could perhaps explain why they take Republican money and encourage Republicans to be their delegates, proxies, and sometimes even candidates.
But, chin up! As I said, I love Minneapolis. I believe these problems can be fixed. It is possible to learn what 311 does. It is possible to hire a community safety commissioner who knows what a budget is and why it's important. It is possible—I really believe this!—to come up with a better strategy for revitalizing Uptown than arresting McDonald's loiterers. This city has a rich history of political action, and it doesn't belong to any single faction of the DFL. We are so, so much stronger together than we are apart, we just learned this. We can build, and rebuild, a city that is a joy to live in and contribute to.
We just need to be a little more honest about where the problems are coming from.
