In This House We Believe A Bunch Of Stuff, With Justin Ellis

In my personal mental masthead for Defector, there are bureaus representing the places where my co-workers live. Philadelphia you know about. New York, for better and worse, is implied. Minneapolis, where no Defector staffers currently live, is more complicated. But we have Drew, whose Minnesota sports fandom has put him under this heading even though he hasn’t lived there in decades, and we also have Justin Ellis, who was shaped by his experience growing up there even though he, too, is a long time gone. Given that recent years have shoved Minneapolis into the center of American politics, and given that Justin wrote a fine new book about the state’s long and complicated history on race called The Cruelty Of Nice Folks, it made sense to get the Minnesota Bureau together on the podcast this week.

Even before we turned to Minnesota, we were in the midwest, as Drew led off the episode with what he called a rant about recent mainstream media coverage of “the left” and the perverse fetish for electability as demonstrated through recent primary elections in Minnesota and Wisconsin. When Justin joined we turned our attention more closely to Minnesota, covering the role of Tony Dungy Particles in the state’s Republican party, his unusually long and grueling process of writing this book and the usual longish and grueling-ish process of promoting it, and the contested and uneasy space between the perception of Minneapolis and the reality of living there in a moment when it has never been more in the news. We also spoke about the grating conflict between ostensibly progressive politicians and a deeply regressive status quo, considered Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as a test case for a style of feckless establishment progressivism and the strategic use of anti-Trump spiciness, and how Minnesota politics highlights the broader crisis within Democratic Party politics. Everyone was sort of getting their rants on at this point, with Justin’s disquisition on the technocratic impulse as a substitute for actual action and the fallacy of racism without racists being a special standout.