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Hortman was good at disagreeing, which is the essence of democratic politics • Minnesota Reformer [1]
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Date: 2025-07-09
Since the assassination of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, I’ve come across a well-intentioned sentiment countless times: “Even though we disagreed….”
It’s a misplaced qualifier that seems to forget that the job of public office is to disagree. Government exists, to paraphrase President James Madison, because we are not angels — our interests, values and ambitions will always be in tension.
A healthy democracy doesn’t suppress those disagreements or turn them into weapons — it channels them. We elect people not to transcend conflict, but to manage it: to cast unpopular votes, to persuade behind closed doors and in public forums, and to bear the burden of principled disagreement on our behalf.
Melissa Hortman carried that burden splendidly. Everything I’ve read, and the little I was able to personally witness, demonstrates that she stepped into public life not to erase disagreement, but to organize it and to make it productive. She made her case within her caucus, across the aisle, and to the public with discipline and persuasive force. That’s how she gained and held power in a divided state. She disagreed well.
Her killing wasn’t “senseless” in the way that word is often used. It was targeted; intentional, political violence aimed at someone who embodied disagreement. Her death is not an abstract act of random cruelty. It is an attack on the foundational idea that we govern ourselves by trusting others to disagree on our behalf.
Hortman’s killing is a personal loss for her friends and family and a civic one for those of us who love Minnesota. The implicit promise that we provide our neighbors in elected office is that we will resolve our differences through their arguments, not our violence. If our politics becomes a place where disagreement puts lives at risk, public life enters a disastrously vicious cycle: fewer capable people will step forward. Fewer disagreements will be constructively resolved. Persuasive disagreement will be replaced by performative violence — rhetorical at first, then literal.
I pray we have not already entered that cycle. But if we have, then this moment demands a deeper commitment to what Hortman practiced. Those of us in and around public life must name what was lost and defend what it represented. The answer to political violence is not less politics, but clearer arguments and deeper civic trust.
In the days and hours after Hortman’s death, the familiar noise of social media followed, as it so often does in moments like this. Some denounced the tributes offered by Republican officials as hollow. If they truly mourned her, they would abandon their principles and adopt Democratic-Farmer-Labor policy preferences. From the other end, the same tributes were dismissed as RINO Republican pandering to the respectability politics of a party that would never return the favor.
But if we are to learn anything from Melissa Hortman’s example, it must be the belief that disagreement, even sharp, principled, partisan disagreement, is not a danger to democracy, but its design.
As a lifelong Republican, I only met Hortman a handful of times. I can’t pretend to add to the beautiful tributes offered by those who loved her, but I am reckoning daily with what her life stood for and what her death threatens.
Melissa Hortman represented the best of our constitutional tradition. And now she’s gone because of a political assassin who rejected the very premise of our democratic life: that we resolve our differences with words.
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