The City That Showed Up

The change, it had to come. We knew it all along. You can’t hide from the turning of the tide – civil society will survive and abide if everyone stands up like one midwestern city.

By Tom Watson, Guest Columnist

Look at this photo.

In another era, Norman Rockwell would have painted it. A young woman in a bathrobe and slippers — she clearly ran out of her house the moment she heard the commotion — stands on an icy sidewalk in Minneapolis, phone raised, stubborn and defiant. Around her, a crowd of neighbors. Some in winter coats, some in whatever they grabbed on the way out the door. A guy in an orange jacket. All of them holding up their phones like shields. And facing them: masked federal agents in full military gear — camouflage, tactical vests, helmets, weapons. The word POLICE is stenciled on body armor designed for a battlefield, not a neighborhood street corner next to a two-hour parking sign.

These are just people who came outside. A woman who didn’t even have time to get dressed stood in the cold on an icy street and faced down the apparatus of a militarized federal government with nothing but a cell phone and the furious, clear-eyed conviction that her neighbors deserved a witness. That’s the whole thing, right there. That’s what democracy looks like when it’s not a speech or a bumper sticker but a reflex — an instinct so deep it gets you out of the house in your bathrobe on a February morning in Minnesota.

There’s a moment in every democratic crisis when you find out who your neighbors really are. In Minneapolis, that moment arrived with federal agents and freezing temperatures and a community that decided, collectively, that it would not look away.

I’ve been writing about the assault on civil society for some time now. The dismantling of USAID. The attacks on nonprofits. The slow strangulation of the institutions that hold this diverse, sprawling republic together. But Minneapolis has been something different — something that cuts against the despair we felt last year. It’s a city that’s providing a real-time model for what democratic resistance actually looks like when it moves from rhetoric to action, from tweets to bodies on the street in subzero cold.

On a recent episode of my podcast, I spoke with Nonoko Sato, president & CEO of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, and her words have stayed with me. “The fear is palpable,” she told me. “We don’t know exactly who’s going to get picked up, what families are going to be impacted, who’s going to be going hungry or homeless.” She talked about the rent coming due, about immigrant families too afraid to go to work, about small businesses in immigrant corridors struggling to survive. But then she said something that reframed the entire conversation: “We’re not going to back down. This is a state where we deeply care about our neighbors.” She described something I think we’re all hungry to see — people who recognize their own privilege going out with their own bodies to protect their neighbors, regardless of race, background, or immigration status. That, Nonoko said, is “extremely heartening.”

It should be heartening to all of us. Because Minneapolis is modeling what a functioning civil society looks like when the pressure is greatest.

Barack Obama sees it too. In a conversation published just days ago, the former president pointed directly to Minneapolis as an example of what gives him hope. He described the extraordinary outpouring of community organizing there — neighbors buying groceries for each other, teachers standing up for their students, citizens using cameras and peaceful protest to shine a light on what he called behavior we’ve previously seen only in authoritarian countries and dictatorships. Obama marveled at a street band performing every night in zero-degree weather after a day of protest and mutual aid. He called it an embodiment of the values that make us care about each other — and argued that when Democrats tap into that spirit, they win.

He’s right. And he’s describing something that goes far beyond partisan politics. What’s happening in Minneapolis is the living, breathing proof of what Francis Fukuyama has long argued: that social capital is essential for stable liberal democracy. In his landmark work Social Capital and Civil Society, Fukuyama made the case that the informal norms of cooperation between people — the trust, the networks, the willingness to act collectively — constitute the cultural foundation without which democratic institutions cannot hold. Minneapolis is building that social capital in real time, under duress, in the cold.

And Hillary Clinton, in her annual letter to the philanthropic community just weeks ago, put it as plainly as anyone has: civil society, philanthropies, activists, faith communities, mission-driven companies, citizens — we must lead the way. She’s right that no one is coming to rescue us. The rescue is the work itself, and it’s happening on the streets of Minneapolis.

And it’s not just Minneapolis. It’s spreading.

Last week in Lindenwold, New Jersey — a small town in Camden County, not exactly a hotbed of progressive activism — ICE agents conducted an operation near a school bus stop at the Woodland Village Apartments. Fourth and fifth graders, waiting for their buses on a Thursday morning, saw the vehicles and the agents and they ran. Children, nine and ten years old, sprinting through a parking lot, captured on doorbell cameras, banging on doors, terrified that their parents had been taken.

The next day, the community came out to protest. And a video went viral of a man at the rally — just a local guy, not a liberal, not an activist — barely holding back tears as he tried to explain why he was there. He’d never protested before in his life, he said. But he watched those fourth and fifth graders run away from their own government, and something broke inside him. He picked up a flag and came out. “I’m not gonna stand by and watch my neighbors run away scared,” he said. “It’s not Camden County. It’s not New Jersey. It’s not the United States.” He loves his country, he said. He loves his town. But this — children fleeing masked federal agents in terror — that’s not what we are. “I never want to see a child ever run away from our own government ever again.”

That man is not an organizer. He’s not reading Fukuyama or following the Democratic messaging strategy. He’s a guy from South Jersey who saw something so fundamentally wrong that he couldn’t stay home. And he’s not alone. From Lindenwold to Minneapolis to high school walkouts across the country, ordinary people — not activists, not partisans, just neighbors — are showing up because the alternative is unbearable. The time to hesitate is through.

This matters far beyond immigration enforcement. The connective tissue being built in these communities — the mutual aid networks, the legal observer teams, the interfaith coalitions, the neighborhood alert systems — is the same infrastructure a community needs to fight poverty, to respond to climate disasters, to demand environmental justice in communities that have been treated as sacrifice zones for decades. It’s the same infrastructure that protects tenants from predatory landlords, that keeps public schools accountable, that ensures access to healthcare isn’t rationed by zip code.

As my colleague Dr. Steven Cohen at Columbia has written, the way to turn around the nation is to make our revival a community project, a reconstruction of the American community in every community — one that requires leadership, shared sacrifice, and a commitment to building common purpose across every divide that the authoritarians are desperate to exploit.

That’s what Minneapolis is doing. Not perfectly — Nonoko Sato was clear about that, and I respect the honesty. Minnesota isn’t perfect, she said. But its people deeply care for each other, and they are proving it with action, not just aspiration.

Let me be blunt about what I think this means for the rest of us.

Every city in America is going to face its own version of what Minneapolis is facing. The federal raids, the funding cuts to nonprofits, the attacks on education and healthcare and housing. The question is whether your community has the social infrastructure to respond. Whether your neighbors know each other. Whether your local organizations — the food banks, the legal clinics, the churches and mosques and synagogues, the neighborhood associations — are talking to each other and ready to act together.

Uncivil Society by Tom Watson is a reader-supported publication about the fight to preserve civil society and save democracy.