Posted on October 15, 2024 by Scott Johnson in 2024 Election, J D Vance, Minnesota

J.D. comes to town

Senator Vance came to town yesterday. I take it that his principal mission was fundraising, but he made a public appearance outside the site of the former Minneapolis Police Department Third Precinct building and declared Minneapolis a city in decline. J.D.’s opposite number on the Democratic ticket of course let the building burn in the signal event of the George Floyd riots of 2020.

The Star Tribune attempts to rebut Vance in a page-one news story by Ryan Faircloth. It’s a sort of fact-check kind of thing that features a response by Mayor Jacob Frey and crime statistics provided by the MPD. Suffice it to say the rebuttal is not exactly persuasive.

If you don’t fear the elevated levels of violent crime that persist in the city, you aren’t paying attention. Taking the data presented in Faircloth’s story at face value, there is not a single category of violent crime that has returned to pre-pandemic or pre-George Floyd levels. Aggravated assault remains at a record high. Local law enforcement is both understaffed and unenthusiastic. The Hennepin County Attorney is a “woke” non-prosecutor. Criminal gangs have staked out the city. It has fallen to the Office of the United States Attorney to fill the vacuum in local law enforcement.

You can’t give away vacant space in the office buildings that dot the Minneapolis skyline. Only four days ago, Deena Winter reported in the Star Tribune itself “Minneapolis to look at new taxes as downtown values plummet.” Mayor Frey to the contrary notwithstanding, downtown is not bouncing back.

Yet Mayor Frey says Minneapolis is the happiest city. Is this really the case? If some reputable organization declared Minneapolis the smuggest city in the United States, I would find it plausible. The happiest, not bloody likely. Yet according to the Institute for the Quality of Life 2024 Happy City Index, Minneapolis is it. Surely you — you Institute — jest.

I think Rodgers and Hart’s “Glad To Be Unhappy” is more like it: “Look at yourself – if you had a sense of humor/You would laugh to beat the band.”

You don’t have to be a social scientist to guess that the Institute’s methodology might be a tad off. Rather than asking residents how happy they are, which is what you might expect a happiness ranking to do, the Institute purported to measure GDP, productivity, air pollution, natural resources management, educational quality, good governance, and so on to create a composite “happiness” score. Even so, Minneapolis should still compute as a joke.

The Minnesota Reformer observed that a somewhat more direct approach produces a different result: “[Y]ou can also simply ask people questions about how satisfied they are with various aspects of their lives. Gallup’s been doing that for forever, and while they don’t have city data readily available they do routinely rank the states on these measures. Minnesota doesn’t even crack the top 20.” Reality bites.

The Star Tribune usually seizes on such findings to reassure its readers that all is well — that their smugness does not mask a fully justified inferiority complex. Even the Star Tribune’s straight news story on Minneapolis’s ranking sounded a slightly muffled note of incredulity. Star Tribune columnist James Lileks (since retired) turned the ranking into a classic column that betrayed some doubt:

If you’re wondering how they figured out Minneapolis is so gosh darned merry, there are empirical criteria at work. The Daily Express US said the study, done by the Institute for the Quality of Life, a research group in London, is based on “citizens, governance, economy, environment, and mobility.” The Institute also rates other cities around the world, and if you’re wondering who takes top happy honors on the planet: Aarhus, Denmark.

I looked it up on Google Street View, and was instantly unhappy that I did not live in Aarhus. The downtown looks thriving, neat, clean — no graffiti — and full of old buildings that carry a common culture from the past to tomorrow.

You see people at sidewalk cafes eating — oh, I don’t know — pippenwiffles and candied herring, perhaps, and reading the daily paper, the Kroenendaggerposten, published since 1273, or walking around thinking about art, or ways to reconcile the historical struggles between capital and labor.

Maybe. It just seems like a typical northern European city where you bask in wan light and repress unhelpful emotions, and that has a certain appeal. There are days in which I’d like to have a coffee — or, as they call it in their curious language, kaffe — and contemplate life in a bar whose name had an O with a diagonal slash through it.

You may infer that J.D. is on to something. The truth hurts and the Star Tribune is more into “fact-checking” than the truth, if you know what I mean.

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