I’ve watched with some amusement as coastal, very online lefties have crushed on Gov. Tim Walz, who can ably voice progressive ideas while (authentically) wearing Carhartt. You’d think he were a cat who suddenly started playing a blues guitar.
And I get the excitement: A presidential ticket pairing Walz with Vice President Kamala Harris, the thoroughly California lawyer, showcases the diversity of America, the broad popularity of liberal ideals and the big tent of the Democratic Party.
Stereotypes can also be self-fulfilling; as a prominent Democrat, Walz gives people who look like him a reason to investigate his ideas further.
I covered Walz’s first campaign for governor beginning in 2017 and used to think there was something complex and contradictory about him — the military career and A+ NRA rating, the congressional votes against the Great Recession bank bailouts, the high school football coach who was an early supporter of gay marriage rights.
I’d fallen into the trap of political analysis that’s guided by the facile sociological observation that people who live in cities like fancy coffee and bike lanes and are Democrats and people who live in rural areas are into guns and church and vote Republican.
Because Walz lived in the comparatively small college city of Mankato — population: 45,000 — and was in the National Guard, there must be something complicated going on, I thought.
I was probably wrong.
I’ve been thinking lately about this scene in “Field of Dreams,” which has a great subplot about how the wife of the Kevin Costner character is at war with a bunch of book banners in their small Iowa town.
During a town meeting, Annie Kinsella pleads with the townsfolk not to ban books by the J.D. Salinger stand-in, Terence Mann.
She’s shouted down by a local “Moms for Liberty” type, who mocks the Kinsella family: “Your husband plowed under his corn and built a baseball field. The Weirdo!”
Annie: replies: “At least he is not a book burner, you Nazi cow!”
There’s nothing complicated about the fact that a woman who lives in a small town is against book banning.
My father was a Naval aviator who nevertheless put a sign on our house every Christmas that read, in block lettering, “PEACE.” When the teacher of the “gifted and talented” kids in my hometown of 10,000 saw it, she asked if he’d want to join her anti-nuke efforts. To which he replied, “I think we need more ICBMs.” But they were allies on other issues, like less emphasis on sports and more on academics.
What’s actually complicated is America, a place where plenty of Republicans live in big cities and hippies live in small towns, which are the original source of a lot of peace and justice movements. Walz’s 2022 margin of victory was a bit more than 200,000. Guess how many votes he received in rural Minnesota? Nearly 200,000. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump scored more than 200,000 votes in Minneapolis’ home county, the alleged seven-headed beast, Hennepin.
Walz — and his wife, First Lady Gwen Walz — are liberals who lived with (or more accurately, near) rural people.
That Walz knows his way around guns and spent time in the National Guard — to serve, sure, but also for simple financial reasons — is all related to where he was raised in rural Nebraska. It’s sheer circumstance.
And as it turns out, none of these markers — “conservative coded,” in today’s parlance — reveal anything about his politics. He’s not actually a “moderate” — whatever that is — and he never was.
(And so what? What was the “moderate” position on civil rights or Vietnam or Iraq or gay marriage or the Trump insurrection?)
Unfortunately, this great pluralism and multiplicity and complexity appear to be waning, and we are increasingly trapping ourselves in the binary they’ve built us — “red zip codes are getting redder, and blue zip codes are becoming bluer,” as NPR reported in 2022.
Walz has his faults — you’ll be hearing a lot about them if he’s the vice presidential nominee, including in this space — but I like that he’s taught us (or reminded us) that there aren’t two Americas, as the national media has drummed into us for decades. If you’re far enough away, the canvas and its broad brush strokes seem to convey a bifurcated landscape, a cold civil war. Up close, however, there’s 10,000 Americas. Mankato is home to gay rights advocates who are also football coaches, just as I welcome the F-150s peeling away from my intersection in St. Paul.
I don’t mean to minimize our differences or neglect what’s scary about the upcoming election or the stakes. Paradoxically, MAGA’s apocalyptic framing — we’re always in a “Flight 93 election” — is what makes it so scary.
They obsess that they are losing their country to the “childless cat ladies” and “illegal aliens” and stay-home dads and trans kids and whoever else is just trying to live their own lives these days.
The words have changed but the sinister notes remain the same. They picked up the (tiki) torch of a long and ugly history that tries to dictate who is and isn’t a “real” American and who therefore gets to have a say in our future.
In 1835, Samuel F.B. Morse published “Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration” and warned of a Catholic plot to take over the United States, as historian Jill Lepore relays in “These Truths.” Jim Crow laws remained in place 130 years later.
Enough already. We don’t have to love each other or like each other. But we have no choice but to live together.
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