Tag Archives: identity

What Duluth Can Teach the World

Today I write about the gifts my city can provide to this present moment. I am not writing about a political program or an economy or even necessarily confining myself to the city’s boundaries; there is some inherent blurriness on the edges. I am instead talking about a culture, a life that is possible here, and the general sentiments invoked by the very name Duluth.

For this enterprise, I am using the imprecise tool of the English language to capture the feeling of a place. None of these things on their own are truly remarkable; many cities share some of these traits. But few, if any, share all of them. Duluth is within American culture and Minnesotan culture and probably a dozen other regional monikers, all of which find a harbor here on the westernmost end of the Great Lakes. I’m not arguing that Duluthians have made any remarkable insights, but rather that the mix of things that come together in their city offer something interesting.

I am also spelling out an ideal. Obviously there are regular moments when Duluth and its people fall short, just as there are with any place. I recognize others may also have very different associations with Duluth, some rather less positive. This piece is certainly not an argument that the entire country should copy Duluth’s choices, or that its ways of life are for everyone. But I think I am getting at a core here, and I highlight the things I do because I think some of Duluth’s sharper edges have something to say to the rest of the country.

Duluth’s distinctive culture stems from its deep, intense rootedness. Visually, it is the Midwest’s most striking city, and its relative isolation and memorable weather set it apart from any easy comparison town. This place works its way into people for life, no matter how far they travel. Many fall in love with it, a few define themselves against it, others move on but look back wistfully. People who are from Duluth will always be from Duluth.

I will not sugarcoat it: rootedness can mean sacrifice. It limits options, from career advancement to the dating pool to some of the luxuries of life available at more urban (or rural) scales. I understand why some people do not want to make Duluth’s potential sacrifices and pursue other paths. But to have the conviction to choose, and then believe in that choice, can overpower an awful lot of existential uncertainty. People who have chosen Duluth have chosen something more than a city that someone chooses for a job or a school district or because it happened to have the right house. They have, consciously or unconsciously, slipped into a stream that will carry them in certain clear directions in life.

My list of what Duluth can teach isn’t exhaustive, but here, perhaps, is a start.

Duluth teaches respect for forces beyond. Duluthians get regular reminders that they are not in control, and that they cannot bend nature to their wills. There will be days when it is twenty below, or when the incoming snow makes travel nearly impossible. There will be gale-force winds and days of awesome fury on the lake. There are also just days of monotonous grey and fog. The woods are at hand, and they contain secrets, require some sense and preparation from people who explore them. Duluthians know these vagaries of nature are part of life, and while they are not above grumbling here and there, they know what a gift it is to have a day of absolute beauty, whether a still winter morning or among golden autumn leaves or a glistening day of summer sun and Lake Superior-provided air conditioning, will come. (I still have nothing nice to say about spring here.)

Those forces affect the city’s growth and economy, too. Rock and water constrain development, and will keep Duluth from ever booming the way some Midwestern small cities on the flatlands have, though they also should not be excuses for raising up the lift bridge against incoming traffic and locking this city in as it is. Instead, Duluthians can adapt to these natural challenges, build in ways that respect or even take advantage of them, but their lives will always be defined by them. In a city like this, it is hard to forget that in the long run, nature always wins.

Duluth invites reflection. The easy access to nature simplifies the context shifts that help to strip away thoughts that cloud the mind. No matter how grumpy or down I may be in any given moment, I am a short walk or run away from a good mood. This built-in reflection makes it easier to hone certain disciplines, to think of inward turns not as retreat but instead as pauses that renew and refine beliefs. I do not believe that simply walking into the woods can solve all mental ills, but it certainly creates more conditions to do so than sitting in traffic on a ten-lane freeway does.

Duluth spurs a human pace. So often I see friends in other cities, exhausted or run down by frantic work paces or the panicked need to choose the right school or neighborhood or otherwise trapped in a doom loop of achievement for its own sake and I just think, “you need a little Duluth in your life.” These attitudes exist here too, of course, but they are tempered somewhat by less glaring extremes and a sense of remove from the starkest national divides. It’s easier to remember how small all of these concerns are and turn off that striving upper middle class anxiety brain that has become the assumed default mode in so much of American media. While I have spent much of my life in or around that milieu, I am very happy to live among salt of the earth northern Minnesotans who help put things in perspective.

A Duluth life is an active life. Duluth is a city of outdoor recreation, lending itself to easy walks, runs, skis, skates, paddles, rides, or other forms of movement that keep people going. Getting outside and touching grass comes naturally here, and some version of the free-range childhood (or adulthood!) lamented as lost in other parts of the country still exists to some degree in Duluth’s parks and streets. I want that life, and I want it for future generations. Since I moved back here ten years ago, I have (somewhat improbably, for people who knew an earlier version of me) become a workout machine, doing something nearly every day, taking advantage of both Duluth’s recreational bounty and the free time I enjoy because my working life is at some remove from the all-consuming achievement machine in some sectors of the economy.

Duluth is on the trailing edge. No one would accuse Duluthians of being the first adopters of new technology; at times there is a skepticism of change or creative ideas that, more than any of the other items listed here, drives me nuts. But, when I step back and look at the grand sweep of things, I think that reticence is generally a healthy thing. Duluth is a place where people have time to stop and think about how to use tools well instead of adopting them blindly, to make sure we are putting them to our service instead of letting them dictate how we spend our time and money. This city may not be where the thrilling innovations are always happening, but it may have something to tell people who are always trying to optimize and integrate every technical tool they can but still can’t figure out why those tools don’t consistently make life better.

Duluth rises from ruins. Just as Duluth commands respect for the natural world, it commands respect for human struggle and failure, and it gives opportunities to rise up from it. The 1980s economic collapse and Duluth’s subsequent reinvention is the largest scale and most recent telling of this story. But there are many others: a resurgent local Native American population, a city willing to acknowledge and memorialize a lynching before any other in the country, even something as simple as the collegiality among neighbors after any blizzard. Duluth has conditioned me to enjoy visiting other cities and countries with deep and sometimes fraught histories, not because I see them as monuments to disaster or guilt but because I think they tell far more interesting stories of human achievement during and after our darker moments. Humans fail and do horrible things. But Duluthians go on, remember and rebuild, and can, with time and effort, write stories of triumph.

And, finally, Duluth has fun. This is not some staid retreat center: Duluthians get to live in a place where other people go to have fun, and someone who fully revels in it will, well, have a lot of fun. Its early years had some Wild West moments as it boomed and saw the arrival of sailors from all over, and it was ahead of the curve in building breweries. It is a college town, and that provides some life; its arts scene punches above its weight. I appreciate that Duluthians don’t usually go full-on into the culture of endless self-optimization and can enjoy a good time. Turn off the stupid trackers and go enjoy that precious summer day on the beach.

A Dream Sours

Whither the Democratic Party, after Tuesday’s stunning defeat? There will be time enough to contemplate how our new Republican majority goes forward, but for now, it’s time for an autopsy on the demise of a Democratic era, and the collapse of an Electoral College Maginot Line.

This begins by looking back on the past two elections. It’s time we recognize that Barack Obama was not at the head of a tide, or at least not one for the immediate future. He was exceptional. He ran on an agenda that did not have broad popular support, but swept to power twice on the force of sheer charisma, integrity, and ability to inspire optimism in spite of it all. The repeated decimation of Democrats down ballot across the country shows how quickly this wore thin. The wins at the presidential level masked some serious shortcomings in state and local races, and are an embarrassment for a party that had reason to think it was on the rise.

Obama’s presidency will thus go down as a paradox: a popular man whose legacy will likely not outlive him, unless President Trump truly surprises us. The economy performed steadily under conventional measures during the Obama years, but nothing reversed the widening gaps that preceded him. His signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, helped cover more people but has been fraught with issues throughout, and probably won’t resemble the original after a few months. His foreign policy was better than that of his predecessor and of the alternatives to him in 2008, but never quite amounted to a coherent doctrine. Everywhere else, he faced resistance and gridlock; he responded with executive orders, effective in the short term but setting a dangerous precedent for successors to roll them back and more. There were some momentous shifts on social issues, though future Supreme Courts may have some word on how permanent those are. The real question, I suppose, will be whether the Democrats can harness the electoral machinery he put into place and reuse it in the future, or if it will languish. Otherwise, Obama is just the bookend to an era of rising and falling global liberalism, a Washington Consensus that arose out of post-Cold War confidence and now heads into the great unknown.

It was bound to end, as all movements must; the question was how, or when. Even if Hillary Clinton had won, she probably was the end of the line; the Democrats just didn’t have a new generation ready to carry it forward, and its limitations were becoming obvious. It could have evolved, if there were an effective leader to bridge the gap, but there wasn’t. Instead, the Democrats had a candidate of the status quo, and when she crashed, so did the whole enterprise.

Our old friend Mitt Romney has been on my mind lately. In fact, I think there are a lot of parallels between the Clinton and Romney campaigns: blandness, occasional tone-deaf statements, inability to broadcast much of an agenda other than opposition to the other guy, reliance on sheer institutional inertia, certainty of ultimate victory. The unexpected polling error in both Obama and Trump’s favors are not coincidental; it’s just that one more clearly swung the election. Candidates who fail to be fresh will always underachieve, even if they don’t make any unforced errors.

I won’t wade into the discussion over the magnitude of Clinton’s email- and foundation-related sins, but the existence of these issues is a fundamental problem when the theme of one’s campaign is competence and reliability. When a candidate gives mixed messages on the thing she’s supposed to be good at, it’s a bad sign. I’d also add that, whether there were fires or not, there has always been an awful lot of smoke around the Clintons. Yes, Republicans have drummed a lot of this up, but eight years of the same efforts exposed practically nothing on Barack Obama. Clinton was a flawed candidate, and flawed in the worst possible way for the pitch she was trying to make. Her time would have been 2004 or 2008. By 2016, it was too late.

In retrospect, I do think Bernie Sanders probably had better odds than a lot of people gave him credit for, though not as good as his supporters would have liked to believe. He certainly would have played better among the rural white people around the city I live in. But gains in one place could lead to losses elsewhere. Clinton wrecked Sanders among people of color, and Clinton herself failed to generate the needed turnout from people of color. Maybe Sanders wins back some of those Midwestern states, but Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia might all flip the other way. Do the math, and it’s still a toss-up. That particular “what if” is a murky one, and the moment is past. The Democrat most capable of building a big tent was Joe Biden, and that ship has also sailed.

A lot will be said on the left about racism or bigotry, and its apparent triumph. But any discussion of racism has to get past that loaded word and look at the details. Two hundred counties that broke for a black man four years ago went to Trump. This wasn’t a rush of people suddenly discovering hate in their hearts. Instead, you have a lot of people for whom the battle with racism was not their primary reason for going to the polls. Many of these people probably have no real desire to discriminate, but live in places where racial issues aren’t really present in day-to-day life, and are far more motivated by other factors. And when a candidate gives voice to their dearer causes, it’s not hard to dismiss some warts; once that dismissal of warts is normalized, further revelations aren’t going to upend the process. Sure, Trump would take a hit in the tracking polls when he went after someone based on their ethnicity or gender, but before long, the dynamics of the two-horse race would have him trending back upward, as the latest spurt of outrage faded from memory and the persistence of day-to-day life on the ground rose up again.

It’s also worth asking some questions about the wide range of things that fall under that blanket label of “racism.” The working definition on the left considers both a card-carrying member of the KKK and a person who questions protest tactics when Black Lives Matter occupies the freeway and fouls up a commute as exhibiting racist tendencies. Deplorable as one may find all of these attitudes and the many shades in between, it’s counterproductive to treat these phenomena the same way, and slap the same label on the full range of people who hold them. Much as “47 percent” doomed Mitt Romney, the “basket of deplorables” comment left a lot of wavering people fundamentally alienated. Once again, Clinton was supposed to be the uniter, the candidate of “stronger together.” This made her failures to live up to that ideal considerably more impactful than those of Donald Trump, who made no such claim (or, at least, not one anyone took seriously). The candidate of unity failed to display it, and the other guy spoke to voters on a levels they actually cared about. If the Democrats continue to paint with the broad brush of racism instead of interrogating different cases carefully, they will continue to appear condescending, and will continue to lose.

These racial lines have an added drawback for Democrats: most people of color are tightly packed into cities, and as we’ve seen, this limits their odds of winning majorities in the House and of winning the Electoral College despite taking the popular vote. The Democrats, the supposed party of tolerance, are extremely likely to live just among themselves, and it hurts them. Sure, it would be nice to eliminate some of those structural issues that give rural voters added influence, but this is the system we have, and it’s not going to change without getting a hand on the wheel in the first place.

The hubris of so many Democratic operatives, the belief that a more diverse nation would create a firewall and a longer-term majority, might yet come to pass. But as I explained in my initial reaction, the rise in white identity on the right is the natural outflow of identity politics on the left, however justified it may or may not be. This is why identity politics is ugly and dangerous, and it is a major reason why so many struggling states around the globe lapse into ethnic groups squabbling over government. There can be no functioning state without a nation, and that nation needs to approximate some sort of broad identity, even while allowing for nuance within it. Sure, the Democrats may be on track to pick up Arizona and Georgia and maybe even Texas over the next decade. But if they don’t change course somewhat, and rely on demography alone while failing to reach out to large demographics, things will continue to flip. Minnesota—yes, Minnesota—will be the next state to go red, along with the rural northeast, and more will follow.

I heard from a reliable source that Obama wanted to go spend time in Appalachia, but that his advisers told him it wasn’t worth the time. If true, it may prove a fatal error.

I’ve come back to Obama a lot in this post, in part because he is very much my president. The first bubble I ever filled on a ballot was for him, and even as I’ve drifted away from doctrinaire liberalism into something a lot more complicated, I don’t regret either of my votes for him. I was in Washington, D.C. the night he won, and that night might be the most momentous bit of history I ever live. Temperamentally, I relate to the man: cautious and intellectual, prone to elevated rhetoric and a desire for communal action, while perhaps suffering from a certain aloofness and detachment at times. He had genuine empathy for the America that was left behind, but forces beyond his control—forces beyond anyone’s control—largely rendered him powerless to change things. George Packer put it presciently, back in 2010, as the Tea Party arose to face Obama and the failures of Middle East nation-building and the end-of-history Pax Americana became evident:

The noble mission to make the world safe for democracy ended inconclusively, and its aftermath has curdled into an atmosphere more like that of the Palmer raids and the second coming of the Klan. This is why Obama seems less and less able to speak to and for our times. He’s the voice of reason incarnate, and maybe he’s too sane to be heard in either Jalalabad or Georgia. An epigraph for our times appears in Jonathan Franzen’s new novel “Freedom”: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

The dream has soured, and it has done so on both sides of the aisle. Fortunately, we have ways to pick up the pieces.