Reviews for The political outsiders

The average rating for The political outsiders based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-24 00:00:00 Donald Johnson I'm not fully sure what Delton is accomplishing by pointing to Minnesota as a bastion for liberal thought in the early 20th century here, except perhaps to trace the evolution of a moment in which labor, economics, and ethics all came together to articulate an overlap between local and national politics. She is pointing us to the moment in the 1920s at which Minnesota's long immigrant history was forced into an articulation of how politics would serve rural interests, and yet also how rural interests had to be national interests when it came to the issue of civil rights. Maybe it's because Minnesota feels like an anomaly to her--a predominately white, predominately rural state that made an overcommitment to defending civil rights, which she articulates as the path to the eventual demise of postwar liberalism. Or perhaps this is a moment in which the assumption that class politics would govern voters, that people would vote based on their economic interests rather than on basis of party loyalty or ethnic identity. Or maybe this was just the moment in which labor was not solely about money, but also about values, identity, and the promise of democracy on a much larger level. She argues that this is a universal problem, that these were the same disagreements happening all across America, but I'm not sure everyone would have articulated these principles as that of a liberal pluralist bent. What I find most interesting about this text is how she frames the old guard of Minnesota immigrants--largely Scandinavian--as informing how race and ethnicity, and subsequently tolerance, were pursued as local issues and then articulated as moral issues central to the state's politics. (I also like her argument that what prompted this shift was the massive wartime influx of black migrants into Northern cities, as it forced new conceptions of both whiteness and citizenship into public debate.) Otherwise, still trying to figure out exactly how this relates to how we understand rural/agrarian politics as a whole.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-05 00:00:00 Taylor Starr A good, solid presentation of Minnesota's turn from the more "radical" politics of Olsen and the Farmer-Labor party to Humphrey's moderate stance through the lense of civil liberties. Interesting, though a bit scattered in argument.