(This commentary is part of a MinnPost Voices series highlighting “What We Can Do Week“ — an effort to bridge divides and reject political violence. Participating organizations include the Citizens League, Majority in the Middle, the University of Minnesota Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, the Minneapolis Regional Chamber and the St. Paul Area Chamber.)
When Lisa Demuth became minority leader of the Minnesota House in January 2023, the woman holding the speaker’s gavel did something Demuth has since said she did not expect. Melissa Hortman reached out and asked for a weekly meeting.
Demuth told this story on the floor of the House on Feb. 17, the opening day of the 2026 legislative session. She said it carefully, in the way you say something that has come to mean more than it might have meant at the time. “She didn’t have to do that,” Demuth said of Hortman. “Melissa’s brand of leadership brought people in instead of pushing people out.”
I keep returning to that detail. Not the bigger quotes from the day. The weekly meeting. The fact that the speaker, holding the majority, holding the gavel, holding the agenda, made a deliberate decision to sit down every week with the leader of the opposition. And kept doing it. For years.
Related: Middle Aisle: How do we decide to honor a legislative legacy?
I help people through conflict for a living. The single most reliable predictor I have found for whether a conflict will resolve is whether the people inside it have any sustained, non-performative contact with the human being on the other side. A weekly meeting. A standing call. A shared meal that is not also a negotiation. Anything that says, in its repetition, we are people to each other before we are positions.
When that contact exists, almost any disagreement is workable. When it does not, the smallest disagreement metastasizes.
What Hortman and Demuth built was that contact, at the highest level of an institution where it is least common and most needed. They fought hard on policy. The 2025 session was tied 67–67, and the two of them had to negotiate every consequential decision through a chamber that could deadlock on procedure alone. They disagreed about immigration, energy policy, taxation and the role of state government. The disagreements were principled on both sides. And the relationship held anyway.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because there is a soft version of this argument that misses what is most important. The soft version says we should all be more civil. The soft version is true, but it is not what Demuth and Hortman were modeling. Civility is a tone of voice. What those two had was structural. It was the deliberate, sustained, costly investment of time and attention in the humanity of a political opponent.
That practice is what I want to name, and what I think we have to name honestly. Because it’s the practice that’s been disappearing from our public life for a long time, and its absence is connected to what happened in Brooklyn Park. Not metaphorically connected, but mechanically connected.
When the people who lead institutions stop maintaining the relational infrastructure that lets opposition stay human, the rhetoric available below them changes. Political opponents stop being people you might still need to work with on Tuesday. They become the language of enemies. Of those people.
Researchers who study political violence have a precise term for what happens next, and a documented mechanism. It is the necessary precondition for nearly every form of organized political violence in human history. The man who arrived at the Hortman home last June was the symptom of a long absence, not the cause of a sudden one.
Which means the honoring of what Hortman built has to look like more than statements. It has to look like the practice itself, picked up and carried forward by people who did not know her, in institutions and workplaces and families and friendships that have nothing to do with the Minnesota House.
The work of honoring Hortman is the work of building the weekly meeting in your own life. With the colleague you disagree with on every consequential issue. With the family member whose politics make you wince. With the neighbor whose yard signs you found yourself irritated by all of last fall. To do what Hortman did with Demuth — to refuse, deliberately and over time, to let opposition collapse into dismissal.
Related: Speaker Lisa Demuth mourns legislative counterpart, Melissa Hortman
Five days before she was killed, Melissa Hortman said something to Lisa Demuth that Demuth has now repeated publicly, in tears, on the floor of the House. They had just finished a special session. The work was done. The chamber was emptying. Hortman turned to her opposite number, the woman who had spent the previous months opposing her on nearly every major question, and said: “I like it so much better when we get along than when we fight.”
We lost the woman who said it. The practice she built is the inheritance she left. Picking it up is the only memorial that matches the size of the loss.
Steve Reuter is a leadership and conflict consultant based in Northfield, Minnesota, where he advises organizations and leaders on navigating conflict, dialogue and depolarization.
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