On January 20, 1981, Minnesota Republican Senator David Durenberger sat with his colleagues outside the U.S. Capitol to watch Ronald Reagan's inauguration as America's fortieth president. Durenberger considered himself a progressive Republican, which he defined as a combination of fiscal prudence and social conscience. He was a pioneer in legislative efforts to combat climate change and also a champion of charter schools; his other priorities included equal rights for women and minorities, high-quality public education, affordable health care, accountable government, and what he called "a fair, business-friendly tax code to pay for it all." At the time of Reagan's inauguration, Durenberger counted himself as one of seventeen progressive Republican senators. By the time he retired in 1995, there were only four. Soon, these also left office. Durenberger was one of the last of his kind.
In 2018, Senator Durenberger co-authored his memoir, When Republicans Were Progressive, with Lori Sturdevant, an editorial writer and columnist for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. In this podcast interview, Sturdevant talks about how she wrote the book with Durenberger and how it serves as his memoir and a history of Minnesota's bygone progressive Republican tradition. It's a tradition that reaches back to Harold Stassen, who became a national figure as Minnesota governor during the 1930s by creating an effective and compassionate Republican response to the Great Depression, and it carried through to later moderate and progressive Republicans in Minnesota into the 1990s. Sturdevant discusses the factors that made Minnesota's political culture conducive to fairness, compromise, and civility - and how that culture has been shaken in recent years by the nationalizing forces of political polarization and changes in the media and developments within the Republican Party.
Senator Durenberger died in early 2023 at the age of eighty-eight, making When Republicans Were Progressive in some sense his last political testament. Lori Sturdevant explores the factors that underlay Durenberger's faith in progressive Republicanism and why this seemingly obsolete political philosophy might matter again.
