The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Region on the Mississippi

The future of the Midwest may be taking shape in some unlikely places, out of the view of most pundits, by people who are tired of letting someone else determine how they will live and have decided to do it themselves.

One of these places is called The 7 Rivers Region, where parts of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa come together. It's an extraordinary beautiful area, clustered around the towering bluffs and watery sweep of the Mississippi River valley, south of the Twin Cities and north of Dubuque. The region's core is the two towns of LaCrosse, Wisconsin and Winona, Minnesota -- both pleasant and prosperous little cities but not exactly the top of the agenda when economic planners meet these days.

Those planners should take another look. The 7 Rivers people are pioneering the concept of regionalism -- the idea that, in a global economy, individual cities and states are too small to compete, so can thrive only by leveraging their assets in broader regions. They haven't exactly seceded from their states, but they're linking arms across the Mississippi to promote their region, without waiting for Madison, St. Paul or Des Moines to do it for them.

The Election's Impact on the Midwest

"Democracy," said H.L. Mencken, "is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." In the wake of the midterm elections, Mencken's dictum is about to get a workout.

Nowhere is this more true than in the Midwest. In many Midwestern states, the "common people" have just elected governors and other officials who oppose precisely the policies -- on government spending, infrastructure, education and immigration -- that are crucial to the Midwest's economic recovery.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote that "the old industrial towns in the Midwest were the epicenter of the disaster" for the Democrats. Post-election maps made this graphic, with great swatches of Republican red across a region where, after 2008, Democrats actually dominated office-holders. 

But the question now is what this Republican sweep, and especially the ascendancy of the Tea Party, means for the real goals of the Midwest -- the reversal of its long-term economic decline, its recovery from the recession, its shift from old industry to a new global economy, its ability to fund the education and find the investment that will propel this shift.