Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what’s going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and fellow neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It’s still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

The Somalis who have been the most visible and politically active migrants to Minnesota over the past generation provide a vivid contrast. “The Somali,” the conservative writer Helen Andrews quotes a British official, “is convinced that he is entirely different from and vastly superior to any East African.” Somalia has been a land of chaos.

Their home country has become a kind of no-man’s land, an example of what the political scientist Edward Banfield called amoral familism, where people are loyal only to fellow clan members and have no sense of obligations to the mores of the larger society.

As described in The New York Times last November, “State agencies reimbursed the group and its partners for invoices claiming to have fed tens of thousands of children. In reality, federal prosecutors said, most of the meals were nonexistent, and business owners spent the funds on luxury cars, houses and even real estate projects abroad.”

Were they simply naive Minnesotans, accustomed to an almost entirely conscientious population? Or were they deterred by the charges of racism that would inevitably be launched.

Any doubts that Feeding Our Future was a one-off exception have vanished with the exposure of other state-aided programs, which seemed to have no operations and no clients. Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who resigned for reasons unrelated to fraud cases, has estimated that Somali-run frauds have swindled $9 billion of public money.

Minnesota liberals like to argue that Somalis have contributed much, but aside from their contribution to racial diversity statistics, they find it hard to come up with specifics.

These numbers compare unfavorably with those of Hmong refugees who started arriving in Minnesota after the Vietnam War. Somalis, after three decades in Minnesota, have made little progress. A low-trust, low-conscientiousness culture has proved to be stubbornly persistent, and, unlike the Minnesota liberals who helped the Hmong fit in, the last generation of Minnesota liberals has done little to move Somalis away from a dysfunctional culture that they brought from their embattled and unproductive homeland and from an adversarial attitude to the larger American society.

The social connectedness of Minnesota liberals themselves has not disappeared. It can be seen as an example of organized civil disobedience, only its participants seem to lack any sense that they are doing anything morally questionable or potentially felonious.

State and city lawsuits seeking to block federal enforcement, in open defiance of the Constitution’s supremacy clause, stand out among the many absurd legal theories advanced by the Trump administration’s opponents and, at times, the administration itself. It places officials in the moral tradition of segregationist governors such as George Wallace, D-Ala., and Ross Barnett, D-Miss., urging resistance to lawful federal authority, a kind of incitement that, as recent events have shown, can turn deadly for participants and bystanders alike.