Opinion: Where have all the average people gone in our political engagement?

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As a rural progressive, it is easy for me to get caught up in the outrage of the moment. Like-minded citizens are assembling from St. Paul to Cyrus, Minn., to rightfully display their disgust for the most outrageous, offensive power grab by a president in American history. But as I watch what is happening in our country, I’m left wondering, “Where have all the average people gone?”

Are my neighbors at the recent protests? Not the media stereotype of my neighbor — the flag-in-the-back-of-a-truck, racist, storm-the-Capitol insurrectionist — but the hardworking, head-down, get-your-kids-to-school person who actually lives next to me and voted for the current president.

Does my neighbor accept the pardoning of criminals convicted of assaulting police officers or the deportation of lawfully present students? Is he OK with the misogynistic, crass and rude behavior that seemingly goes against everything I thought he stood for? Can he casually overlook assaults on the very tenets of our democracy, such as elections, a free press and religious freedom?

We may disagree fiercely on who we voted for, but my neighbor and I would agree that what we’re seeing is not us at our best.

Many rural voters chose President Donald Trump in spite of his crude and reckless behavior, which says a lot about how far both parties have fallen out of touch with the average voter.

Over the past four decades, economies in rural communities throughout Minnesota have been decimated. In small towns across the state, people remember thriving main streets lined with flowers and throngs of people shopping at locally owned businesses. Today, they drive through vacant downtowns and past empty manufacturing warehouses to shop at the Dollar General on the edge of town.

They resent the loss of living-wage jobs and are angry at the addiction and poverty that blanket many rural areas. They watch their children and grandchildren leave for opportunities elsewhere and see the government enabling entitlement rather than empowering work.

And what have politicians offered them? Republicans have embraced that fear, anger and resentment, shifting blame and pointing the finger at anyone other than themselves. Democrats have either completely vacated the playing field or offered public charity and bigger government.

Minnesota history offers a different political possibility.

Forty-three years ago, during the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, rural Minnesota faced the terrible trifecta of downturns in agriculture, mining and timber. The entire state’s economy was threatened. National politics had taken a hard-right shift in the 1980 election.

Minnesota made a different choice in 1982 and put DFL Gov. Rudy Perpich back in office.

Perpich took a big-picture view of Minnesota. He maintained that investing in education, research and innovation would make Minnesota a national model and put us on the international stage.

Perpich provided a vision of the best of all of us, which resonated across geographic and partisan divides. It was personal and humble. He didn’t hone this message through fancy focus groups, but from his lifelong belief of government as a force for good in people’s lives — a conviction forged from his provincial beginnings on Minnesota’s Iron Range as an immigrant’s son who grew up without indoor plumbing and entered kindergarten not speaking English.

When Perpich was a child, if his father’s lunch pail was on the kitchen table, his dad was working. If it was on the shelf, he was not. He learned that having a job meant everything. His message was simple: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Perpich relentlessly pursued jobs for communities across the state. For him, “Jobs, jobs, jobs” was more than a campaign slogan; he governed it. He would go anywhere, traveling across the country and around the globe, prospecting jobs for Minnesotans.

In his pursuit of jobs, Perpich didn’t shred our social safety net. He didn’t leave people behind, but understood that having a job went beyond providing a family with necessities. A job offers pride and dignity and a sense of self-worth that fulfills the basic human desire to be useful. It allows people to see hope not only in themselves but also in their communities.

How many times have you heard it said that rural people are voting against their interests? Perhaps, but maybe they’d rather have a job than what they see as a government handout. My mother-in-law relied on public assistance to lift her up and help raise her four children, but she did it while working two jobs. Like Perpich, she understood that many of society’s ills could be cured with a little shift work.

Perpich capitalized four sentences in the speaker’s copy of his 1987 State of the State address:

“WE ARE PROPOSING TAX REFORM THAT REWARDS WORK

WELFARE REFORM THAT ENCOURAGES WORK

RESEARCH THAT CREATES WORK

AND EDUCATION REFORM THAT PREPARES FOR WORK"

Today, Rudy would be laser-focused on ensuring that the technologies and jobs of tomorrow are realized in Minnesota. Are we going to simply steal rare earth metals from Ukraine, Greenland or Africa, or do we want to put our “brainpower” to work coming up with Minnesota-made clean technologies, like green ammonia being pioneered at the University of Minnesota Morris, data centers scaled and sustainably powered to fit rural regional centers like St. Cloud or Fergus Falls, Minn., and rare-earth-free magnets being manufactured right here?

Perpich saw Minnesota at its best and articulated a future that included my neighbor. That is how he won the hearts and minds of people across the political spectrum and across the state. We can do it again.

Ben Schierer is the former mayor of Fergus Falls, Minn., and the author of “Perpich, a Minnesota Original,” a book released this April by Minnesota Historical Society Press.