Where Tim Walz's Traditional Values Come From
Missing from a lot of commentary on Walz’s quirky folksy manner has been any serious in-depth treatment of Minnesota’s distinctive political history and Walz as an immigrant from Nebraska, shaped by these traditions. To explain the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party as the most successful left-wing party in U.S. history and Minnesota, the state with the longest unbroken record of voting for Democratic presidents, you have to look at its roots.
The state’s late-19th-Century waves of immigrants were dominated by Scandinavians and Germans who brought values reflecting cooperative enterprises, rural self-sufficiency, local communitarian models and a strong sense of justice. These values were reflected in both the dominant immigrant religions, Lutheranism and Catholicism.
In the 1870s, farmers’ and small-town residents protested the power of the railroads and the credit system that forced farmers to sell in a highly unstable market and purchase necessities in a protected one due to high tariffs. This egalitarian conviction that a conspiracy of wealth threatened the republic reflected deep social justice values. These battles were harbingers of the Progressive Era in Minnesota from 1899-1918, and it’s no accident that the Grange, a farmer-led reform movement’s founder, Oliver Kelly, was a Minnesotan. Later, in Minneapolis, the proud and aggressive American Indian Movement was born in 1968. And if Walz is elected, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan will become the nation’s first Native American governor.
By the 1930s, Minnesota had become a hotbed for the convergence of many similar interests of the labor movement and farmers, forming the Farmer-Labor Party, and then the DFL. In no other state have the populist interests of working populations sustained a state-wide political party into current times. These liberal, often religious, convictions have sustained heroic social justice activism and a preference for human rights when confronting state’s rights and capitalist orthodoxy.
https://www.postalley.org/2024/10/14/where-tim-walzs-traditional-values-come-from/