Minnesota and the comfort of its own myth

A state cannot reform what it refuses to recognize.

There are places that define themselves by what they are, and there are places that define themselves by what they believe they are. Minnesota has long been the latter, living comfortably inside a story of its own making: clean government, civic virtue, shared purpose. It is a story repeated so often it has hardened into doctrine. And doctrines, like myths, have a way of obscuring the truth.

Fifty years ago, that story reached its symbolic peak when Gov. Wendell Anderson appeared on the cover of Time magazine holding a northern pike beneath a headline celebrating “The Good Life in Minnesota.” The accompanying article called it “a state that works.” It was more than a moment of publicity. It was a declaration of identity. Minnesota was not just another state. It was a model.

If Time were to put Minnesota on its cover today, the image would look different. Perhaps a person of color standing at the edge of a lake, holding a fishing line with no fish on it. The promise remains. The catch has become elusive.

When I first came to Minnesota nearly four decades ago for graduate school, I carried that image with me. I had grown up in New York and spent time in New Jersey, places not exactly known for clean government or civic harmony. Minnesota seemed almost idealized. Early on I asked one of my professors, himself also from the East, what government was like here. His answer has stayed with me since. He said, in effect, that Minnesota had just as much inefficiency and corruption as the states we came from. The difference, he suggested, was that Minnesota was better at hiding it and far more invested in denying it.

At the time, it sounded too cynical, perhaps even unfair. Over the years, I have come to see its wisdom. Minnesota does not simply tolerate its myths. It depends on them.

That dependence is cultural as much as political. Garrison Keillor understood it better than anyone. His fictional “News from Lake Wobegon” closed each episode with the familiar line that all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average. But Keillor embedded a second joke, one less often quoted: The town seal of Lake Wobegon bears the Latin motto sumus quod sumus, we are what we are. It sounds like prairie stoicism. In practice, it is the quiet conviction that whatever Minnesota is, it is already enough. Keillor meant it as satire. The state appears to have taken it as a governing philosophy. Sinclair Lewis was less gentle: his novels “Main Street” and “Babbitt” exposed Midwestern self-satisfaction, and Lewis understood that the greatest obstacle to reform is not failure itself but the refusal to acknowledge it.

That shield is now harder to maintain. The Feeding Our Future scandal, described by federal prosecutors as the largest pandemic-relief fraud scheme in American history, exposed a state apparatus that had been warned, repeatedly, and chose not to act. A report by Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor found that officials raised concerns and flagged irregularities early, yet continued approving payments. The department was “ill-prepared,” the auditor concluded. Officials cited fears of lawsuits, accusations of racial discrimination and negative public scrutiny as reasons not to halt funding, even as the fraud scaled into the hundreds of millions. More than $250 million in funds meant to feed hungry children was stolen. Less than a third has been recovered.

Then there is the Legislature. When a state senator was charged with and ultimately convicted of felony burglary, her party’s caucus blocked expulsion and allowed her to cast deciding votes on legislation for more than a year. The calculation was naked: Her vote was needed; accountability could wait. More recently, ethics complaints against three House members — two accused of leaving committee hearings to drink and returning to vote, one accused of carrying legislation that benefited his outside employer — were dismissed without sanction. These were the first such complaints heard in 17 years. The committee’s unanimous verdict: Nothing to see here.

Both parties bear responsibility for this. Neither is primarily in the business of proposing policy for good governance anymore. Both are in the business of mobilizing their base for partisan control, and the people’s business has become a side effect. Nowhere is this clearer than in the fights over the state flag and state seal and over guns, issues that have consumed enormous political energy while the deeper work of governing goes undone.

The 2024 flag redesign replaced a seal critics rightly called offensive to Native Americans with a simpler design by a 24-year-old from Luverne. The result has been a two-year cultural skirmish, with cities defiantly flying the old flag, DFL lawmakers proposing to penalize them financially and Republicans selling merchandise off the backlash. Debates over gun legislation follow the same script: Each side performs its convictions, votes fall along party lines and nothing changes. These fights are not really about cloth or firearms. They are about identity and belonging, and they are far more useful to politicians as rallying cries than as problems to solve.

All of this sits uneasily alongside the state’s progressive self-image. Record high school graduation rates are celebrated even as the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis documents racial achievement gaps among the widest in the nation. Scholars at the University of Minnesota call it “the Minnesota Paradox”: The state ranks among the very best in overall quality of life and among the very worst in racial disparities across education, employment, health, housing and criminal justice. Measured by the income gap between Black and white residents, Minnesota ranks last in the nation. These are not minor inconsistencies. They are fundamental contradictions that the myth of exceptionalism actively prevents us from solving.

The conversation I had with my professor all those years ago returns to me with increasing clarity. Minnesota is not uniquely corrupt, nor uniquely dysfunctional. What sets it apart is its relationship to its narrative. It is a state that has long believed in its exceptionalism, and that belief has made it difficult to see, let alone address, its own shortcomings.

Keillor’s Lake Wobegon was a satire. Its motto was a joke about the danger of comfortable self-acceptance. The tragedy is that the state seems to have missed the punchline. To say “we are what we are” should not mean settling for what exists. It should mean confronting it, honestly and without the comfort of myth.

The legend of the good life still lingers. But legends are not reality. The question is whether Minnesota is finally ready to live without one.

A version of this story appeared in the Minnesota Star Tribune