Betrayal

In the comments of a thread below, our frequent visitor LookingNorth shared a disturbing confession:

PS: Yes, it kills me now to say it. I did vote for Hjelle and Cave. Go ahead Frostbrand and Drawnleftward, ban me from the blog or flog me publically if you like. I probably deserve it.

Neighbor, all joking aside, I don't think you need to worry about drawnLeftward and I doing either one of those things.

Some people, our troll being a convenient example, see politics as a matter of picking a team and then supporting and defending them, even when doing so becomes ludicrous, illogical, and self-contradictory — as it so often has this past year in Maplewood. In their way of thinking, specific issues are really beside the point. The overarching strategy is to separate "us" from "them," and then use that division to push the interests of "us" at the expense of "them.” Thus we see the Longrista troll continually trying to unify critics of Longrie/Cave/Hjelle under a label like "Rossbachians," and telling us that the political victors deserve all the spoils they can take for themselves and their loyalists.

Reality is not so simple. Critics of this city council majority come from all over the political spectrum. I am sure they do NOT have unified views on the many of the specific issues before Maplewood. (Compare the voting correlation of Juenemann and Rossbach to the correlations between members of the Gang of Three, for example.) It's even less likely that they have monolithic views on politics in the world beyond Maplewood city limits.

What the critics do have in common is that they see that the institution of city government is being destroyed, and they are concerned about the process of governance and, in short, the rule of law. The rules by which the city is supposed to govern itself are being ignored and undermined, in big ways and small. We've spent a lot of words in this blog talking about the specific examples.

There's another way of looking at politics, which is to see it as a process of mediating the different and sometimes conflicting interests of citizens. In this point of view, it's not absurd to provide help to someone you know voted against you, or vice versa; nor is it crazy to take a stand against someone's position on one issue, while supporting them on another. Whether you are concerned about lowering taxes, or preserving open space, or encouraging redevelopment, or hiring more police, or reducing the city's payroll — whatever the specific ways that you think the common good can be served — you can unite with people who strongly disagree with your particular goals or priorities when it comes to supporting a framework of governance that is open, inclusive, and accountable.

I wasn't watching that closely at the time, but I don't think the Longrista campaign literature highlighted their wish to dismantle the city staff, ignore state laws they didn't like (such as the Police Civil Service Commission statutes or the open meeting law), pursue personal grudges at taxpayer expense (including the taxpayers of other communities, whose insurance premiums are paying the League of Minnesota Cities' lawyers to defend cases the judges have told us the city will lose), give us the second highest levy increase in the past decade, etc. I mean, it's one thing to vote for Cave because you think she likes preserving parks; it's another to do so knowing that she thought the city council should just ignore state laws that she finds inconvenient.

And how could you know? If someone had told you in late October of 2005 that what we saw in 2006 was Diana Longrie's idea of good governance, would you even have believed it? I don't think I would have.

I think there's a growing number of Maplewood residents who feel a particular bitterness about the state of the city, like LookingNorth — the bitterness of betrayal, of being delivered goods that were not what they thought they were ordering.