The Politics of Offense and Defense
Until very recently, the political cultures of Minnesota and Wisconsin seemed pretty much in step. In the 1930s, both Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin anticipated the New Deal with their own brands of progressive populism. After World War II, both states shifted to the right as Farmer-Labor joined the Democrats and Wisconsin, more drastically, traded Fighting Bob La Follette for Joseph McCarthy in the Senate. Yet by the following decade, senators like Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson and Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey led the charge in Washington, D.C., for environmental protection, civil rights, and an expanded social safety net.
Since then, both states have become reliably blue strongholds in federal races and each has had about the same number of Republicans and Democrats in the governor’s office. The two states’ progressive streak in Congress has been kept very much alive by the careers of Senators Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold, and more recently, Al Franken and Tammy Baldwin.
But in the past few years, the states’ political pathways have started to diverge—sharply. While Minnesota has once again become a progressive laboratory under Governor Mark Dayton, passing landmark legislation on marriage equality, minimum wage, and progressive taxes, Wisconsin has veered in the opposite direction. (See “The High Road Wins”, by Ann Markusen, part of this package on the Great Lakes states from The American Prospect magazine’s 25th Anniversary issue.) Republican Governor Scott Walker has enacted voter ID, rejected Obamacare funds, and seriously undermined workers’ rights statewide. What gives?
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“TYPICALLY WHEN WE think of coalitions, we think of a big table with a bunch of organizations who all care about the same thing and are interested in doing the same thing,” says Dan McGrath, executive director of TakeAction Minnesota. “Well look,” he adds pointedly. “That form of organization is designed to play defense.”
About a decade ago, progressive organizers in Minnesota had a different idea. Recognizing the need for a broad-based, but also deeply organized, progressive alliance, leaders of Progressive Minnesota and the Wellstone-era Alliance for Progressive Action began holding regular meetings. What they aimed for was a coalition based less on immediate goals and more on deeply shared values—an organization that could develop a long-term political infrastructure and then fight for change on its own terms.
It was a particularly dark time for the Minnesota left. Wellstone’s 2002 death had left an indelible scar on the state’s progressive movement, while his successor in the Senate, Republican Norm Coleman, positioned himself as a staunch Bush ally. At the same time, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty—no Scott Walker, but bad enough—pushed through a conceal-and-carry gun law and cut funding for education and social programs. Michele Bachmann was ascendant. Republicans began to talk of Minnesota as a swing state.
They started to ask themselves what they wanted their state to look like and how they could get there in the long term.
In order to counter the Republican takeover, says McGrath, organizers realized they had to look beyond Coleman and Pawlenty and toward larger issues of economic and racial justice in the state. They started to ask themselves what they wanted their state to look like and how they could get there in the long term. “The way this type of coalition is constructed is very different,” he says. “It’s really about aligning around shared values—a shared vision. And really respecting the unique strengths of different organizations around the table.”
Within a few years, that table included groups like CTUL, a workers’ center; ISAIAH, a faith-based community coalition; and Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), a former ACORN chapter dedicated to racial justice. The coalition’s increasingly broad scope allowed it to unite community organizing, legislative work, and policy analysis under the same umbrella and to balance short-term campaigns with more long-term struggles for social change. Building this kind of infrastructure means that TakeAction is “designed to go on the offense,” says McGrath.
