06 Aug Tim Walz, Kamala Harris, and the Base Election
This morning, in anticipation of Kamala Harris’s announcement of her running mate, Sohrab Ahmari, the founder and editor of Compact magazine, penned a piece warning Republicans to be wary of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz, Ahmari insists, should scare the bejeezus out of Trump fans:
By picking Tim Walz as her running mate, Harris has gone a long way toward bolstering her left-populist flank and neutralizing Vance’s potential appeal. Walz can’t be framed as a neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton-Obama mold. This makes it all the more urgent for Team Trump to lean away from both online culture-warring and conventional GOP messaging—and lean into a positive, bread-and-butter populism.
Walz’s origin story—a son of deep-rural Nebraska with degrees from Chadron State College and Minnesota State—attests to leading Democrats’ fears that Vance could deepen the class realignment of the two parties. But Walz doesn’t just bring his humble roots. He also has a formidable record of governing as a populist and Midwestern-style social democrat.
With all due respect to Ahmari, this analysis has some flaws. For starters, the suggestion that Walz has “a formidable record of governing as a populist and Midwestern-style social democrat” presumes that Midwestern-style social democrats are a real thing, but they’re not, at least outside of Minnesota (and sometimes Wisconsin). Minnesota – the land of my birth – is an outlier in the Midwest. No other Midwestern state has its contemporary penchant for progressivism, and, likewise, no other Midwestern state would touch Tim Walz with a ten-foot polling booth. There’s a reason he moved from Nebraska to Minnesota, after all.
Additionally – and more to the point – Ahmari appears to be using an overly flexible definition of the term “populist” here. Ahmari lists some of the things that Walz has done as governor to burnish his populist bona fides, but, in the end, all those accomplishments are merely pro-labor, rather than truly populist. And if being pro-labor were all it took to be a populist, then nearly every Democrat in the country – including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi – would be a populist.
To be fair to Ahmari, populism doesn’t have a hard, fast definition where policy is concerned, which is likely the source of his confusion. Instead, populism is characterized by an attitude or a general posture of aggressive hostility to society’s “elites.” Just because Walz is from the Midwest and enjoys peppering his speech with rural-sounding colloquialisms, that doesn’t mean he’s a populist. Indeed, in both attitude and policy, Walz is very much an advocate for and defender of the ruling class. His record during the pandemic and the (near simultaneous) George Floyd aftermath demonstrate that Walz is very much a pro-elite, pro-regime, pro-state kinda guy.
The accurate label for Tim Walz isn’t “populist” or, worse still, “prairie populist.” Rather, he is what is known as a “hicklib” – that is to say, a “liberal (or a leftist) who adopts (or artificially overemphasizes) the speech and mannerisms of a rural hick in order to feign authenticity and distance from urbanism/globalism. Walz is good at wearing jeans and John Deere baseball caps and talking about the virtues of being a down-home, corn-pone simple fella, but he is no more an actual populist than Klaus Schwab.
In truth, by choosing Walz, Harris does not “bolster her left-populist flank” but instead makes this yet another election in which the winner will be determined by turning out “the base” rather than appealing to undecideds and independents.
Walz is, above and beyond anything else, a cultural leftist. He is a supporter of “transitioning” children and putting tampon dispensers in middle school boys’ restrooms. He is a supporter of unfettered and unrestricted abortion. He believes that the United States is undeniably systemically racist and thinks that rioters are, therefore, justified in burning cities and looting Targets. He believes in effectively open borders – or at least an effectively open Southern border. He believes, unironically, that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” In short, he believes in and actively practices all the same “values” as Kamala Harris.
Most notably, in addition to being a cultural leftist, Walz is one other thing that demonstrates that Harris intends to run a base election. He is a Lutheran.
I suppose it would be better for the base if Walz were an atheist or something similarly hostile to traditional religion, but at least he isn’t one of them…umm…well…umm…you know…guys who wear caps that aren’t baseball caps, if you catch my drift <<wink, wink>>. Right now, the media are playing up the idea that Harris chose Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because she felt that she got along better with Walz than Shapiro. That may be true, but it’s also true that Walz’s last name isn’t Shapiro.
If nothing else, the selection of Walz confirms the impression that the Democratic Party base would not, at this moment at least, be especially supportive of a Jewish candidate for Vice President. That says something profoundly disturbing about the Democratic Party base, just as her appeasement of that base says something profoundly disturbing about Kamala Harris.
Sohrab Ahmari suggests that by selecting Tim Walz as her running mate, Vice President Harris hopes to blunt the “class realignment” taking place between the parties. That may be true – although I kinda doubt it. And in any case, by picking Walz over Shapiro she signals that she is apparently unconcerned about another, rather different realignment – of Jewish voters away from their longtime partisan home and more recent sworn enemies.
