A Dark Day in Minnesota
Defending democracy from its armed despisers
Much as I love my state, I’m not sure Minnesota is the poster child for effective governance that it used to be. But this spring’s deadlock in the state legislature has forced our Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) and Republican leaders to overcome their recent animosity long enough to revive at least something of Minnesota’s older tradition of bipartisan cooperation. As part of a power-sharing agreement with the GOP, DFL leader Melissa Hortman handed the House Speaker’s chair to Republican Lisa Demuth, with whom she then worked this month to hammer out a compromise budget that left our most progressive and most conservative lawmakers unhappy.
Which makes it all the more troubling that Rep. Hortman and her husband were assassinated early this morning by a gunman posing as a policeman. The killer also shot DFL state senator John Hoffman and his wife, both of whom survived that attack.
I’m sure we’ll learn far more about the motives of her killer before too long, so I don’t want to speculate here. Still, it’s worth noting that police found in the suspect’s car some sort of manifesto and a list of other politicians, along with papers reading “No Kings” — apparently an allusion to the nationwide protests against President Donald Trump taking place today. With the manhunt still going, law enforcement officials this morning asked Minnesotans to exercise an abundance of caution and not take part in public protests.
No Kings organizers ultimately canceled all such demonstrations in Minnesota, including one at the state capitol, where I had attended a similar protest earlier this year.1 That seems like the right call to me.
But at the end of a week when many Americans probably aren’t sure what to think about immigration protests in Los Angeles, and on a day when a democratic (not just Democratic) leader has been killed, it also seems like a good moment to use one tool of democracy (individual expression) to articulate the value of another (collective protest), all in service of the fundamentally non-violent — really, anti-violent — nature of our political system.
While free and fair elections are the main way that the people of a democracy shape their government, giving consent to be governed in those moments doesn’t mean that we decline to dissent the rest of the time. Indeed, the First Amendment makes clear that those entrusted with power must continue to respect the rights of citizens — maybe especially the minority whose preferred candidate was not elected — to express their differing opinions by speech, print, petition, and assembly.
Indeed, today’s assassination underscores why all Americans should respect and exercise those rights. Like voting and lawmaking, free expression offers a way for citizens to work peacefully through their differences, neither diminishing the importance of what’s at stake in our debates nor resolving them through violent means that ultimately undermine the freedom, equality, prosperity, and security that we all seek.
To be sure, exercising the right to assembly is meant to make people uncomfortable. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of the protest that landed him in a Birmingham jail cell, such nonviolent actions seek to cause tension in order to draw attention — making visible the deeper moral, political, or legal crisis that was already raging beyond the notice of most citizens as they go about their regular lives.
But being made uncomfortable is not the same thing as being made unsafe.
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While the assassin attempts to void the result of a democratic election, the protestor seeks to influence lawmakers and voters who don’t yet take their side. While the assassin intends to stifle dissent, debate, and deliberation through fear, the protestor can only assume that her argument will be met by counterargument, in a polity where the line between minority and majority is constantly shifting and neither is expected to stay silent. The protestor demands action but expects negotiation, King explained in his Letter to Birmingham Jail, lamenting how long his part of the country had been “bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.”
So while Minnesotans won’t join their fellow Americans in today’s protests, today’s acts of violence only reiterate for me why I value demonstrations — along with campaigning, voting, lawmaking, petition-gathering, editorializing, and other expressions of opinion — as an integral part of the political system I celebrated in the run-up to last year’s election:
Rather than compelling conformity for the sake of social order, democracy values the diversity of beliefs and behaviors that freedom releases. Those differences inevitably lead to disputes, but democracy provides means to resolve conflicts without recourse to coercion or combat. If you disagree with one of your fellow Americans, you can try to persuade them to come around to your way of seeing the world. If you think the system in practice is less perfect than my idealized claims make it out to be, you can protest — and propose reforms. Where disagreements endure, you can organize with like-minded citizens to elect or lobby those who make and enforce laws — officials who almost inevitably need to compromise with their rivals to govern effectively.
Officials like Melissa Hortman. Peace be to her memory, and may peace prevail in our troubled nation.
For reasons that should be clear from my many previous posts critical of the current White House, and which don’t need to be rehashed today.