Minneapolis is a microcosm of the broad national struggle <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\nare so many prisms through which to view the tectonic events taking place on\nAmerica\u2019s streets since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but\nto my mind the most important is that our country is in the process of\nrenegotiating its founding motto, carried on the seal of the United States of\nAmerica: \u2018E pluribus unum<\/em>,\u2019 or \u2018Out of\nmany, one.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d say that our motto used to be \u2018Out of\nmany, one,\u2019 but it\u2019s now heading for \u2018Out of many, none.\u2019 I fear it could\nbecome \u2018Out of many, me.\u2019 But I am certain that if we\u2019re to thrive in the 21st\ncentury, it needs to be \u2018Out of many, we.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why do I say this? Two reasons. First, I\nwas born and raised in Minneapolis, and I have come to realize how much its\ngood sides and ugly sides \u2014 both of which have been on national display lately\n\u2014 are a microcosm of the broad national struggle over what exactly our motto\nshould be today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Out of many, one? Out of many, none? Out of\nmany, me? Out of many, we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was born in 1953 on the Northside, in the\nsame part of the city as my parents were born, after their parents immigrated\nfrom Eastern Europe. The Northside was basically a ghetto of mostly Jews and\nblacks who were not integrated there but isolated together by walls of racism\nand anti-Semitism. After World War II, much of the Northside Jewish community\nmade an exodus, en masse<\/em>, to one suburb \u2014 St. Louis Park,\nbecause it did not have restrictions on home sales to Jews and had enough\nhousing stock to take them all. Practically overnight, a suburb that had been\nalmost 100 per cent white, Christian and Scandinavian became 80 per cent white,\nChristian and Scandinavian and 20 per cent Jewish. If Sweden and Israel had a\nbaby, it would have been St. Louis Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, the African Americans, weighed\ndown by structural racism \u2014 with its bad schools, zoning restrictions,\npolluting highways and factories, all-reinforcing multigenerational poverty \u2014\nmostly could not escape the Northside, which exploded in riots in 1967. When I\ngraduated high school in St. Louis Park in 1971, we had two African Americans\nin our class of about 2,500. I also had an aunt and uncle who had moved to the\nsmall town of Willmar, in Minnesota, to start a steel company in 1949, and I\nspent summers visiting them. For many years they, and two other Jewish families\nthere, constituted \u2018diversity\u2019 in the virtually all-white, largely\nProtestant\/Catholic Willmar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After high school, I left Minnesota to\ndiscover the world. I returned some 40 years later to write a book (partly\nabout Minnesota) in 2015, Thank You for Being Late<\/em>, and I found that\nthe world had discovered St. Louis Park and Willmar. By then, St. Louis Park\nHigh School had become 58 per cent white, 27 per cent black, 9 per cent Latinx,\n5 per cent Asian and 1 per cent Native American. The black student body was\nroughly split between African Americans and recent immigrants from Somalia, and\nmy high school, which had essentially no Muslims in my day, now had more\nMuslims than Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 2019, I visited Willmar High School\nto research a column about its transformation since my boyhood and found that\nits student body comprised young people from some 30 countries across Latin\nAmerica, the Middle East and Asia \u2014 and nearly half the town of 21,000 was made\nup of Latinx, Somali and other East African and Asian immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Have no illusions; necessity was the mother\nof inclusion. Willmar, like so many Minnesota towns, needed workers at all\nskill levels. But that\u2019s often how walls first get broken down. Towns in\nMinnesota today that cannot manage diversity know that they will most likely\nwither. And they are seeing places like Willmar and St. Louis Park, which still\nhave plenty of racial issues to manage, thrive by becoming more diverse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I noted in my book, Minnesota nice \u2014 the\nstate\u2019s informal motto \u2014 covered for a lot of structural racism and police\nbrutality over the years and still does. George Floyd\u2019s death was not a freak\nevent. But it\u2019s also true that the state is full of people who want to get\ncaught trying to reverse that. (Check out the Itasca Project and the Northside\nAchievement Zone as just two among many examples.) Floyd\u2019s killing has shown\nthem that the effort needs to get into a whole new gear, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that brings me back to our national\nmotto. It was easy to say \u2018Out of many, one\u2019 when most of the \u2018many\u2019 were white\nand from Europe and when the black and brown minority was small and formally\nand then informally not treated as equal members of the \u2018one\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as St. Louis Park and Willmar testify,\neven a state like Minnesota is now just so much more diverse. And like the\ncountry, its major cities will become minority majorities over the next two\ndecades. Unfortunately, this new level of diversity, rather than being a source\nof our strength, has lately become a source of paralysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is how we got into \u2018Out of many,\nnone.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our founders created a system of divided\npowers, but they assumed that politicians would in the end compromise to get\nstuff done. Lately, however, polarization has become so tribal that compromise\nis impossible and the system has frozen into a veto machine, observed the\npolitical scientist, Frank Fukuyama. So, we can\u2019t do anything big or hard \u2014 or\ntogether \u2014 anymore. \u201cAs many people point out, it wasn\u2019t symmetric\npolarization,\u201d Fukuyama said in a Zoom discussion for The\nAmerican Interest<\/em>. \u201cThere\u2019s been a shift clearly to the left by the\nDemocratic Party, represented by Bernie Sanders, but the real thing that\nchanged was a shift by the Republican Party to a position that was very\nunfamiliar to Reagan Republicans, in which the state itself became the enemy\nfor a lot of the Tea Party wing of the party. And then it\u2019s captured by the\nTrump wing that was kind of an identitarian right-wing nationalist group. And\nthat has led, I think, to the current crisis that we\u2019re in, where fundamental decisions\nare really deadlocked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This paralysis has led some on the right to\nlong for a third motto, \u2018Out of many, me\u2019 \u2014 or as Donald Trump once proclaimed,\n\u2018I alone can fix it.\u2019 Trump believes that he can simply cut through the\nparalysis by seizing more executive power, the Constitution be damned, but he\nis not alone in this view. The leaders of Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey and\nBrazil all share this authoritarian impulse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a fantasy. The only way we are\ngoing to remain America is if our motto becomes \u2018Out of many, we.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Out of many, we\u2019 acknowledges that \u2018we the\npeople\u2019 are now more diverse than ever \u2014 that diversity, when it can be made to\nwork, is a tremendous source of resilience, innovation, creativity and renewal.\nBut for that diversity to be a strength again for America, it cannot be based\nany longer on a white majority learning \u2018tolerance\u2019 for nonwhites \u2014 the\ndescendants of slaves and immigrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tolerance is important to be sure. But \u2018Out\nof many, we\u2019 summons us all \u2014 people of every colour \u2014 to a deeper commitment\nto pluralism: a robust appreciation of the distinctive contribution of every\ncommunity and a commitment beyond rhetoric to make sure that each one has the\nschools, governance and policing that enable that contribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I like how Kay Coles James, the first\nAfrican American and the first woman to head the Heritage Foundation, a\nconservative think tank, put it in a recent essay on Foxnews.com: \u201cIt\u2019s time\nAmerica takes responsibility and expands human flourishing to all of its\ncitizens \u2014 not just the majority of them.\u201d (Hat tip to Michael Gerson for\nquoting this.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is clearly the fear of living in such a\ndiverse America that has brought a hard core of whites to stick with Trump no\nmatter what he does and to encourage the Republican Party to try to hold onto\npower any way possible \u2014 through gerrymandering, voter suppression, control of\nthe Senate through sparsely populated non-diverse states, and the courts \u2014 in\norder to keep winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not a sustainable strategy for sustaining America. We need a healthy conservative party in America \u2014 one that embraces diversity but offers conservative principles for how to get the most out of it. The GOP can\u2019t just keep trying to hold the presidency through manoeuvres while losing the national vote by bigger and bigger margins. If that continues, America, this great experiment, will eventually just blow apart. And then our tombstone will read: \u2018Out of many \u2014 just bits, pieces and fragments.\u2019 We can\u2019t let that happen. ples for how to get the most out of it. The GOP can\u2019t just keep trying to hold the presidency through manoeuvres while losing the national vote by bigger and bigger margins. If that continues, America, this great experiment, will eventually just blow apart. And then our tombstone will read: \u2018Out of many \u2014 just bits, pieces and fragments.\u2019 We can\u2019t let that happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomas Loren Friedman is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. 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