WHAT COULD GO WRONG? First NYC, Now Minneapolis Primed for Commie Mayor.
Of course, people feel welcomed, unless they’re the kind of people who enjoy freedom, life, prosperity, and sanity. To people coming from a pirate-infested, impoverished, civil war-torn country like Somalia, Minnesota’s democratic ways are paradise, and there’s snow! How can this utopia possibly get any better? Omar Fateh has some ideas.
Born in Washington, D.C., to Somali parents, this 35-year-old with soooooo much life experience identifies as a Democratic Socialist; surely he’s had a class on Practical Application of Economic Policies while getting his Master’s in Public Administration from George Mason, right? Oh. Right. Moving on!
Unfortunately for him (and his donors, who might as well light their money on fire), his platform is full of ideas that have been tried and tried and tried again, and never worked.
Sending social workers to respond to 911 calls? It’s in there.*
Rent stabilization and publicly owned housing? You bet.
State-mandated wages for private companies? Yes.
Good luck, Murderapolis residents; as Kevin Williamson wrote in 2021: Minnesota Nasty: Minneapolis is a nice city no longer.
When Minneapolis was thriving, the entertainment district in the city’s core attracted both residents and visitors, and the tax dollars their merrymaking threw off became an important source of city revenue. That has died off. The immediately pressing economic question for the city is whether that business was gutted by the epidemic, in which case it may recover, or whether it was terrorized away by the riots and the crime wave, in which case it may not recover.
“If you took Hubert Humphrey and plopped him down in Minneapolis today, he wouldn’t recognize the place,” says Annette Meeks, a former Republican Party leader and head of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, a conservative think tank. “It’s not the social upheaval — it’s just the rank craziness.” At the top of the hit parade of crazy are efforts, well under way, to completely abolish the city’s police department. The city’s charter commission kept a police-abolition measure off the ballot the last time around, ruling that the city charter has to be amended before such an action is taken, but a petition drive has been launched to make that happen. “They need 12,000 signatures to get it on the ballot,” Meeks says, “but they’re going for 20,000, overachievers that they are.”
Meeks paints a bleak picture of Minneapolis’s political environment: The Republicans moved out and fell into obscurity decades ago; the caucus system and ranked-choice voting create complexities that favor committed full-time political activists over civic-minded volunteer leaders; boutique radicalism has replaced such old-fashioned livability issues as park maintenance and crime; and the new breed of leaders can win by grandstanding on cultural issues rather than concentrating on the difficult work of seeing to it that the city is run well. On top of all this, Meeks says, is a shocking new viciousness as the manners and style of social media move into the real-world political space.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” she says, “and the radicals won.”
* This will end as well as it did just a few years ago:
UPDATE:
