The Daily Digest for April 16

Good morning,
A contingent of Minnesota National Guard who had been staging — apparently with permission — out of the St. Paul Labor Center left Wednesday after labor activists asked them to leave. Some chanted slogans like "Don't come back" at the departing Guards. "The infrastructure of labor is not for rent to the people who are suppressing that protest," a board member of the Minnesota Nurses Association said. But Gov. Tim Walz, among other politicians, rebuked the union activists, saying their actions to the Guard were "unacceptable." [ Read more from the Pioneer Press' Frederick Melo]
Speaking of politicians and the National Guard, first-term state Sen. Zach Duckworth, R-Lakeville, announced today that he is currently deployed in the Twin Cities as a Guard member.
Yesterday I noted how Walz was being attacked from the left for his response to protests and unrest the last few days. Walz has also been taking it from the right, with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem appearing on Fox News to say that "What Gov. Walz is doing in Minnesota is tragic. It's harmful to his state and to his people... Leadership has consequences and we're seeing it play out on the streets of Minneapolis tonight." [Watch]
Context: Last year, when reporters asked Walz if he blamed Noem for South Dakota's fall COVID-19 wave, Walz said no: "I'm not blaming other governors or other states." [Read more from the Forum News Service's Sarah Mearhoff]
Remember: Walz and Noem served together in the U.S. House from 2011 until they were both sworn in as governors in 2019.
After months of debate, House Democrats and Senate Republicans still don't have any agreement over changes to policing law, with the issue thrust back to the forefront in the aftermath of the killing of Daunte Wright by a Brooklyn Center police officer. [Read more from Brian Bakst and Tim Pugmire]
Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka told MPR this morning that he's "going to be part of the solution" on policing, and is open to a bill reducing traffic stops for infractions such as expired vehicle license tabs. [Listen to Gazelka's interview at the top of this story]
Let's talk theory: To understand politics in a time of civil unrest — and especially to understand the reaction to civil unrest — the one thinker you absolutely need to understand is Thomas Hobbes, born more than 400 years ago in Wiltshire, England. Hobbes lived through the violent English Civil War, and is most famous for his 1651 book The Leviathan , which argued to prevent chaos and bloodshed, "the war of all against all," society needs to have a strong leader capable of deciding disputes that would otherwise lead people to settle those disputes violently. Hobbes was a monarchist, but he has plenty of heirs in the democratic political tradition, "law-and-order" people who embrace, as philosopher Christian Thorne put it, "the Hobbsean idea that nothing — absolutely nothing — is more important than suppressing the possibility that war might break out from within the tissue of society."
And zombies? Thorne, in one of my favorite essays ever, examines the development of fast zombies in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake through the lens of Hobbes and other political theorists. Merely making zombies fast doesn't just intensify the action, Thorne argues, it changes the entire theme of the movie: "Slow-zombie movies are a meditation on consumer society — on a certain excess of civilization, as it were; and fast-zombie movies are pretty much the opposite." 28 Days Later makes the Hobbesian mindset even more explicit, since its zombie apocalypse is set in motion by "animal-rights activists, the stupid Left, which doesn’t understand animality, doesn’t understand violence, doesn’t understand 'rage' — the movie’s key word, that one — doesn’t understand the dangers of freedom. The Left doesn’t understand that if one breaks down too many barriers, everything will spin out of control." Or so the Hobbesians believe, anyway. But read to the end, because Boyle's fast-zombie movie, at least, isn't as straightforward as it looks. [ Read more]
A new poll finds most Americans oppose bills that would "prohibit student athletes from joining sports teams that match their gender identity" — including most Republicans. That said, most Republicans and many independents also oppose the idea of transgender students joining sports teams that match their gender identity — they just don't want government to get involved. Overall Americans were evenly split on the question of transgender sports participation. (And of course, the relatively neutral wording of these poll questions don't match how either side of the issue would frame it as its political valence rises.) [ Read more from NPR News' Danielle Kurtzleben]
Yesterday was a campaign finance deadline for federal candidates. Here's how much Minnesota politicians reported raising in the first quarter of 2021: