The Power of We

Why has that happened?

For several reasons, I think. For one, we have allowed ourselves to become crisis-oriented.

Two, I think there is so much bad news that it is more comfortable to tune it out. It’s not just the Iraqi War, but the whole situation of turmoil and loss of confidence in our government, our global indebtedness of $8 trillion, and so on.

For democracy to work, all positions must be played well, like on a baseball team, but we have gotten out of kilter. Oddly enough, it is the business system that is making more gains in terms of long-term thinking, particularly about energy. The government response in this area is that we will get virtuous sometime in the future, when the current incumbents are long out of office and tough decisions have to be made. But business is seeing the energy crunch as a business opportunity, and so we are seeing some real progress. Biofuels, hybrid vehicles—these are not coming out because of government policies, but because companies see growth potential in those areas.

What we tend to ignore about government in general is its fundamental weakness: It is very much married to the status quo. Every expenditure it makes has a constituency, and over time those constituencies get more and more dependent on government expenditures. So when a new need arises, it has to take something away from the status quo.

Congress solves this problem very easily—it simply prints money, creating both an inflationary and a debt risk. And locally, we are increasingly weak on funding tomorrow’s needs.

We haven’t always been that way. What’s changed?

If you look at the 1950s and ’60s, people don’t realize how close we were to the crux of change from an agrarian to an industrial society, most of it propelled by World War II. We had a nation at the pinnacle of its power suddenly finding itself the leader of the free world—a whole new road for us. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower had to lay out the path. Theirs was brilliant leadership.

In Minnesota, meanwhile, we were a state crying out to be discovered. Fortunately, we were blessed at that time, in that we had so many leaders who saw the power and promise of Minnesota and recognized what I call the power of We over I. I’m talking about leadership that came out of the grain companies, out of Honeywell, 3M, and elsewhere, who anchored Minnesota, the ones who brought us theaters and orchestras. We also had a tradition here of affluent families providing remarkable leadership. They were the ones who built the political system that lasted from the 1940s to the end of my term, and didn’t yield that power until the right wing came into play.

These were centrists. Think of a John Cowles, Jr.—you can’t find a major initiative in downtown Minneapolis that doesn’t have his fingerprints on it. The same with Wheelock Whitney, or Ed Spencer of Honeywell. You had an array of talented people who defined our expectations. I remember as a very young member of the Minneapolis City Council, and we would go to the Normandy Inn for lunch. There were leaders from labor, the legislature, the city, and business, and the agenda was always, ‘How do we build this community?’ It was an agenda that was embraced, incidentally, by both parties.

The old Republican Party was focused on quality—that was its first criterion for candidates. The same was true of the DFL. At that time, our communities were sending up their best and brightest, and the competition between the parties was very healthy. But that was a time when we were building Minnesota.

What would be very healthy would be to look back and redefine leadership. Leadership today, especially on the Republican side, is peddling fear—we have to be afraid of the future. Nonsense! You look at the great leaders of the past—Stassen, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush I, and on the other side from FDR to Humphrey to JFK—these people understand vision and its role, and it was always a positive vision. If one slogan embodied the postwar era, it was ‘We shall overcome.’

Why are we so receptive right now to this message of fear?

Because right now, that is the only thing being put out there to the market. I think there is a very large market for going back to the middle politically and doing things we need to do to deal with the future.

Global warming gives us a tremendous opportunity to undo mistakes of the past and to integrate all of our concerns—economic, political, and environmental—into one overriding initiative. It’s a marvelous opportunity. We should not look at global warming and ask in fear how we can avoid it. Our leaders should say, ‘No, if we make these changes and adjustments, these are the kinds of lifestyles we might enjoy.’ It’s the same with globalization: We need to look at the positive aspect globalization offers for peace and for bringing the world together. The question is whether we can do it in a way that respects the physical environment and cultural diversity.