As I tried to make sense of the ever-mounting list of businesses closing this Friday in solidarity with what is a union-led movement to shut down Minnesota’s economy, I became increasingly confused. The effort seems designed to send a message to ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement). The message? Whatever harm you want to impose on our community, we can impose a bit more.
Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense. Maybe it’s just misdirected rage from a community under a sort of siege, struggling through a bad winter with the baddest of vibes. When I look at the list of businesses closing, I see mostly retailers and restaurants. Businesses that are the most vulnerable to sick-outs, intimidation, and social media misinformation.
They are also, fascinatingly, the businesses already suffering the most under ICE’s extended Twin Cities residency. Anecdotal conversations indicate, for those city retail businesses still operating normally (many cannot, due to loss of staff), business is down 40-60% for the month. Downtown and South Minneapolis businesses are the hardest hit. St. Paul is affected as well. Suburban businesses have experienced some erosion of staffing, but business has mostly held up.
The Whole Foods off France, deep in Edina near 494, had veritable pre-Thanksgiving crowds Monday afternoon. Many customers were patrons of color, not the location’s typical demographic. Clearly, people who feel vulnerable are fleeing to the suburbs, too. A friend who works in the corporate sector told me his out-of-town colleagues are being warned to choose hotels outside the city proper.
Another friend forwarded a comment from a Minnesota Star Tribune article where two readers were jousting about Friday’s “economic blackout.” One said, “we need to size [sic] the means of production in order to destabilize the regime.” The other asked, “What exactly is this going to do to stop the federal government? This is a huge self-own. This hurts Minnesota’s economy and our local businesses.”
The first commenter was dropping Marxist theory. Giving them more credit than is perhaps due, they may be suggesting that by shutting down a bunch of restaurants and toy stores, it will give Stephen Miller and Dan Bovino pause. More likely, it’s a classic modern leftist tactic: activists using BIPOC people as steppingstones to advance a separate cause. The socialist solution to everything seems to be don’t go to work.
In fact, most of us are going to work Friday. Precious few corporate or other businesses are closing, and their workers who want the day off to pat themselves on the back will use a PTO day.
Because, see, shutting down workplaces that primarily employ tipped workers and Latino folks is merely going to impose more harm on people who have seen the most financial loss during ICE’s reign of error. Saturday will dawn and they will be a day’s wages poorer and the activists will say, “We won!”
A small number of area businesses, like Berlin, Can Can Wonderland, Dual Citizen Brewing, the Lowbrow, and Nicollet Ace Hardware, are donating profits or in some cases revenues to causes that benefit the innocent victims of this siege, such as the Immigrant Law Center and area food shelves. I wish more had chosen this path, which sees workers get paid, a point clearly made, and a cause served.
I have never really warmed to the earnestness of Minnesota politics. Those people, both well-meaning and not, who wrap their identity in “doing the right thing.” It’s always struck me as somewhat performative, egocentric, and unsustainable. It worked when Minnesota was 97% white, in 1980, but as the state has gotten more diverse, and as political consensus has become elusive, the noblesse oblige school of governance seems like an expression of privilege or perhaps guilt.
This earnestness, except from those for whom it is tactical, seems an expression of how Minnesota’s “moralistic” politics has broken down, as one group purports to help another by harming it. I’d really prefer if we adopted the folkways of most places, where policy is sustained on mutual self-interest. I give you some of what you need in exchange for getting some of what I need. Rather than “We’re going to do what’s right for everyone based on, unhhh, what’s right!”
Minnesota’s national reputation is in the toilet right now, unless you’re a leftist activist. We’re viewed as an unstable place to move, to invest, to take jobs, to raise a family. The national media has covered our crises with more alarm and hyperbole than we have lived them. But the die is cast.
Unless Minnesota can moderate its excesses, on both sides, this place is going to find itself in secular decline. Extremism is a magnet for attention, but the wrong kind. And we can’t thrive in a bubble anymore. There aren’t enough rich Minnesota families left to sustain us all in good jobs and Lake Woebegon neighborhoods.
Spending the Day of Truth and Freedom doing something productive rather than performative would be a good way to start.
Adam Platt is editor of Twin Cities Business magazine. He has been with the magazine since 2011.
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