After all, Beirut has better weather. Or if Beirut doesn’t seem like the right comparison, how about Belfast?
Keep in mind that Minneapolis was a nothing place when I was a kid back in the 1950s. There was no particular reason to pay attention to it if you lived in places like New York or Los Angeles. Minneapolis did have a pro basketball team, the Lakers, but then they moved to Los Angeles (and kept the name Lakers). And Minneapolis had a few corporations that used it as their corporate headquarters, but they were mostly food companies (General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill). Other than that, it had nothing that brought it to the attention of the rest of the country. Consider the following cities: Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kansas City. They all seemed to have greater prestige than Minneapolis when I was a kid. Now consider Omaha, Denver, Oklahoma City, and Indianapolis. They seemed to have about the same prestige as Minneapolis back then. Cities like Duluth and Bismarck had less prestige, and still do (though I believe there was a time long ago when Duluth actually had more).
But then things changed. Minneapolis – actually the entire state – got the Twins and the Vikings. For some strange reason, an English theater director, Tyrone Guthrie, decided to found a theater in Minneapolis, and in a few years there were theaters cropping up all over the Twin Cities. Computer companies like Control Data and later Cray Research became prominent. Television shows like Mary Tyler Moore were set in Minneapolis, and a few movies were filmed there, too. In 1980, a huge Picasso art show came to America, but it went to only two cities: New York and Minneapolis. (It was such a big show that one had to reserve a time to go see it.) The local airport expanded from a tiny little place to a huge international airport. People like Garrison Keillor became nationally known, even though they made lots of references to local things (like the Dales). As Minneapolis got more and more visible in the national eye, someone came up with the clever idea that while New York was the Big Apple, Minneapolis was the Mini Apple, though that name faded quickly.
Anyway, Minneapolis had become a little urban jewel. It had mostly avoided the urban unrest of the late 1960s, so it could attract people who would otherwise want to avoid its dreadful winters.
And now all of that has been destroyed. Maybe the businesses destroyed will come back, but if other places are any indication, they won’t. It would be too risky, especially since there is no indication from the city’s elites that they understand that such places need police protection. Since owners cannot count on the police for protection, they will either have to protect their own places (and often anyone who does so will be arrested while looters won’t be), risk having no protection, or just not bother.
There is no reason to move to Minneapolis anymore, unless you like living in a city in decay, which a small minority does. But most people – even most liberals – don’t like such a thing.
It reminds me of a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years back by an alum of Antioch College, who had come back to see why things seemed to be going so badly. The article was printed after it went under, but the alum had visited before it did. What he saw shocked him. He remembered pleasant lawns and buildings and plenty of students around, but now it all had a very different and unpleasant feel to it. The grass had not been mowed, the buildings were defaced by graffiti, and there were hardly any students visible. This was because most liberal students looked at the place and cringed. (He didn’t talk about the conservative students, but obviously they didn’t want to go there, either.) But a small minority thought it was awesome. And it was that small minority of about 300 students that kept the place alive, barely. And even they weren’t enough, and it closed.
The Twin Cities will now attract that tiny minority that thinks that a city that allows rioters to take over a police station is awesome. No one else will be impressed because there are plenty of warmer cities that will seem more attractive simply because of the weather. That is, the attraction of the Twin Cities included good governance, a flourishing arts scenes, and beautiful lakes and parks, but it also had that huge drawback: the bitterly cold winters. Scratch the first of those off the list, and the beautiful lakes and parks don’t mean anything if people don’t feel safe visiting them. Maybe the arts will continue to flourish there, but then again, it’s not clear. Anyway, there are flourishing arts scenes elsewhere, so why bother with that cold weather?
As for Beirut, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks somewhere about how people in Lebanon thought they were immune to the sectarian and other battles in the other countries of the Middle East. For thousands of years, the Lebanese would say, we’ve been at peace. And then they succumbed to the fighting, too, and although that was back in the 1970s, they still haven’t emerged from that era.
The point is this. Conservatives know something that liberals don’t, which is that there are things worth conserving. If your town is a pleasant liberal town, then you don’t want it to be spoiled by rioters. Once that happens, sensible people start thinking about moving out, and outsiders who would enrich the place hesitate to move in. It’s a downward spiral with no obvious bottom.
Minneapolis, you’re toast!
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