Minneapolis Proved Something MAGA Can’t Accept: Most People Are Actually Virtuous

Culture

from the bring-a-covered-dish dept

There’s a line buried in Adam Serwer’s recent Atlantic piece on the Minneapolis resistance to ICE that deserves to be pulled out, examined, and posted on every lamppost in America:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.

Read that again. It explains so much.

Serwer continues:

In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

For years now, a certain strain of American political thought has operated on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally selfish, that “community” is a sucker’s game, and that anyone who claims to care about their neighbors is either lying or being paid. It’s the philosophy that undergirds every policy designed to punish rather than help, every sneer at “the woke mind virus,” and every insistence that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

And then Minneapolis happened.

When the Trump administration surged thousands of armed federal agents into Minnesota—ostensibly over a fraud case that Biden-era prosecutors had already been handling—they seem to have expected one of two things: either cowed compliance or the kind of violent resistance that would justify an even harder crackdown. What they got instead was something that appears to have genuinely baffled them: tens of thousands of ordinary people who simply refused to let their neighbors be dragged away.

Not activists. Not “paid operatives.” Just… people. Moms with minivans full of car seats making grocery deliveries. Dads doing dispatch shifts between work calls. Biologists and lawyers and nurses driving around in the freezing cold, honking at SUVs with out-of-state plates. As Serwer describes it:

Even among those involved in opposing ICE in Minnesota, people have a range of political views. The nonviolent nature of the movement, and the focus on caring for neighbors, has drawn in volunteers with many different perspectives on immigration, including people who might have been supportive if the Trump administration’s claims of a targeted effort to deport violent criminals had been sincere.

The thing that seems to have broken the MAGA brain is that even people who might have supported targeted enforcement of immigration law looked around at what was actually happening—the pregnant women dragged through snow, the doors kicked in, the indiscriminate terror, the senseless killings—and said “no.” Not because they’d been radicalized by some shadowy operation, but because they have eyes and consciences.

Ana Marie Cox, who spent a decade in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region before moving to Texas, wrote for The New Republic about what she calls the “carbon-steel fibers wound together by generations of consistent, need-blind aid”:

Bonds formed under the pressure of negative double-digit windchill are key to understanding what’s happening. It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snowblowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency. I cannot tell you one story about that happening to me. I have at least three or four. The pun is irresistible: Minnesotans have always declared common cause against ice, they’ve just changed their focus to the ice that you can’t also use for hockey practice.

You can dismiss it as a joke until someone at a café gives you a spare scarf because you can’t find yours. People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, “Just pay it back someday.” Of course you will—everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern microdistance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don’t help people out because you like them. You just do.

Cory Doctorow has referred to his “covered dish” dilemma in the past a few times, which goes like this:

“If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”

It’s basically a question of, in times of trouble, will your neighbors seek to take advantage of you. Or will they look to work with you as a community to respond to the adversity you all face.

The MAGA world seems to view only the former as possible. They always show up with shotguns. Reality keeps showing that most people lean towards the latter, and show up with covered dishes.

Minneapolis is showing up with covered dishes. Thousands of them.

This is the part that the JD Vances of the world genuinely cannot comprehend. Vance has said it’s “totally reasonable” for Americans to want to live only near people they “have something in common with,” that social cohesion requires ethnic homogeneity. Minneapolis is proving the exact opposite: that diverse communities can be more cohesive, not less, precisely because they’ve had to build those bonds intentionally.

Serwer captures this beautifully:

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme.

What’s been particularly striking is how the resistance has explicitly rejected the kind of violent confrontation that the administration seems to have been hoping for. The “commuters”—the volunteers who patrol neighborhoods looking for ICE vehicles—have been trained to follow traffic laws, avoid physical confrontation, and simply bear witness. Their weapons are whistles, phones, and car horns. As one volunteer told Cox in her second piece on the resistance:

“I don’t mean to be flip about this, but they can’t shoot us all.”

There are more of us than there are them. There are more good people in the world than bad. There are more virtuous people who believe in community than angry insecure people who believe that everything is a zero sum game.

And for each act of cruelty, each selfish bit of nonsense from ICE or CBP or the administration, more Minnesotans realize they need to be involved.

The instances of physical violence only goose the number of people willing to be targets. Says Chris, “Every time they attack us, another round of volunteers comes in. We refuse to be cowed.”

And it’s somewhat working. The administration has already been forced to yank Gregory Bovino, the preening Border Patrol commander who seemed to relish his villain role, out of Minneapolis, though they replaced him with Tom Homan (who, to be clear, is basically as bad). But, still, it’s not a sign of strength to be switching leaders and clearly demoting the guy who’d been the face of this invasion. That’s a strategic retreat forced by people whose only armor is their willingness to show up.

The MAGA movement has spent years cultivating what Serwer identifies as a series of “mistaken assumptions”:

The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible… A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying “In This House We Believe…” but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And, as Serwer correctly notes, part of the reason for this belief is that it has kinda been true… for the actual elite, who have spent the last year trying to pretend Trump isn’t doing what he clearly promised to do:

And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders.

But it turns out that millions of ordinary Americans are not those people. They’re the ones delivering groceries to families too scared to leave their homes, the ones doing laundry for the volunteers doing deliveries, the ones who signed up for constitutional observer training (over 26,000 through just one organization, according to The New Yorker).

Cox captures what this invisible infrastructure looks like:

So much of the resistance is either carried out by women or coded as women’s work—unheralded, boring, unglamorous, and mostly undocumented. “You’re in the middle of resisting fascism, and someone still needs to do laundry,” Chris points out. A single father and a Parent-Teacher Association president, he stepped forward early on to do admin and dispatch, sometimes pulling four-, five-, six-hour shifts.

“I was eating nothing but takeout. I said something, and now I’ve got a full fridge.” The grocery deliveries to immigrant families are vital. What keeps those deliveries happening are the deliveries to the people making deliveries. It’s mutual aid all the way down.

Someone even volunteered to do the other volunteers’ day jobs, the work-work—formatting spreadsheets, answering emails. She volunteered to sit at a desk; she has young kids and doesn’t want to leave them alone. So she offered what she could: clerical skills.

The MAGA bros, full of hate and seething, have been running around X insisting this must all be organized and planned. They talk nonsense about “op sec” and “supply lines” when it’s really just all communities looking out for one another.

There’s a temptation to view all of this through the lens of political tribalism—Team Blue vs. Team Red, libs vs. MAGAs. But that framing misses something important. Pastor Miguel, who leads Iglesia Cristiana La Via in Burnsville and has been organizing food drives for families in hiding, told Serwer:

“One of the things that I believe, and I know most of the Latino community agrees, is that we want the bad people out. We want the criminals out,” Pastor Miguel, who immigrated from Mexico 30 years ago, told me. “All of us came here looking for a better life for us and for our children. So when we have criminals, rapists—when we have people who have done horrible things in our streets, in our communities—we are afraid of them. We don’t want them here.”

He’s not some open-borders absolutist. He’s someone who looked at what ICE was actually doing—picking up people with pending asylum cases, targeting workers with valid permits, terrorizing entire neighborhoods—and recognized it as something other than law enforcement. Then one of his friends, a man he believed had legal status, was picked up by federal agents.

This is what the administration either didn’t anticipate or didn’t care about: that once you deploy armed agents to conduct indiscriminate sweeps through American neighborhoods, you’re making everyone feel hunted. And when everyone feels hunted, everyone has a reason to resist.

Consider Stephen Miller’s ridiculously racist stated belief that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Serwer’s response is devastating:

In Minnesota, the opposite was happening. The “conditions and terrors” of immigrants’ “broken homelands” weren’t being re-created by immigrants. They were being re-created by people like Miller. The immigrants simply have the experience to recognize them.

This gets at something crucial: the people organizing mutual aid networks, running food deliveries, and patrolling for ICE vehicles aren’t doing it because they’ve been brainwashed by some progressive ideology. Many of them are doing it because they or their families have seen this before. They know what occupation looks like. They know what arbitrary state violence looks like. And they know that the only thing that stops it is ordinary people refusing to look away.

If you want to support what’s happening in Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits has compiled resources for organizations doing this work. But Cox makes an important point: maybe you should also look around your own neighborhood. Because ICE is almost certainly already there, even if it hasn’t made the news yet.

This is not a bad time to take groceries to a free fridge in your city. Or maybe: Find a chore to do for a neighbor now, before they need it. Or maybe: Get trained on Naloxone administration. Volunteer to walk dogs. Start a tool library. Learn some names.

Start building those connections. In Doctorow’s terms, bring the covered dish now, so that your neighbors know you won’t bring a shotgun later.

The resistance in Minneapolis wasn’t conjured out of nothing when the federal agents arrived. It was built over decades by people helping each other get through brutal winters, showing up for each other after police killings, and developing the organizational infrastructure that could be activated when the moment demanded it.

Serwer ends his piece with this:

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

The morally depraved fear that virtue is common. Minneapolis is proving they were right to be afraid. People bringing covered dishes instead of shotguns is terrifying to them. But it’s how civilization actually works—something the MAGA true believers may never understand.

Filed Under: community, gregory bovino, jd vance, maga, minneapolis, neighbors, tom homan, virtue