In picking Walz, Harris has won me over. I assumed that she was a creature of the consultant class, and in picking Walz she signaled she wasn't. She signaled, to me at least, that she has the independence of mind to make what the "pros" see as a rookie move. And it shows that she understands what the consultants and media and donors don't.
The consultants think Walz is too far left and comes from a state that really isn't in play. But anybody who thinks that Walz is too far left is probably somebody who once thought that Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were the future of the GOP.
In essays I posted last month, I made the case that in the next decade whoever finds a way to harness populist energies by aligning spiritual values with material needs wins a stable ruling majority for the coming decades. I argued that populists on the Right like Steve Bannon, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and the pro-Trump populists at Compact understand that–even if Trump and most of the Trump wannabes don't. The mistake that the Bannon populists make is that they believe that most Americans will gladly embrace the resentment-driven, stripped-down, quasi-theocracy that they want to impose if it's synced with a pro-worker policy a la Oren Cass. That won't work, and if they win, they and the rest of us will have to learn that the hard way.
In those posts I asserted that most of the country's populist energies were captured by MAGA, but that I thought those allegiances were fluid. I still think that, and I think that middle America is more likely to embrace the kind of compassionate decency and pro-worker alignment Tim Walz represents than the pro-worker policy and values alignment J.D. Vance and Sohrab Ahmari want. The question is whether Democrat elites will embrace a Walz form of populism or continue to allow the party to be dominated by the cosmopolitan ethos of educated coastal elites.
That's why Walz is so important, imo, in this moment. He's a populist in the best sense. He's progressive in a way that inspires rather than in a way that's scolding, moralistic, and so deeply alienating. He's like Bernie in that way, but with broader appeal. He got endorsements from both AOC and Joe Manchin. He's exactly what the Democrats need now, and I hope the oblivious coastal elites who haven't a clue why populist energies matter get a clue from watching him.
It's been too easy for Republicans to present themselves as the party of normies while branding the Democrats as the party of weirdos and malcontents. But we all know that there is something deeply weird about Trump, Ron Desantis, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Ted Cruz–and now J.D. Vance. They are all odd, unlikable, not-normal people, and any normie American who has not drunk the MAGA Kool Aid gets that. But many of the normie Americans are made very uncomfortable by all the Woke stuff, and so they lean Republican unless they have a reason not to.
And that's what is so great about how Walz has flipped the narrative. He can call these GOP guys weird and it lands because he is so not-weird, and yet he's progressive, not because he's Woke, but because he's a genuinely compassionate human being and has got a track record a mile long to prove it. That's what comes through, and that's why the attacks on him as too far left won't land. Decent people see the decency, the menschiness–not an ideology. It's to Harris's credit that she saw that in him in a way that the pudits and consultants didn't.
Whoever wins the battle for normie decency wins the election. I can't believe that most Americans want more GOP crackpottery, incompetence, and meanness when they have such a compelling alternative. That's why I thought that regardless of what the polls said now, people would come home and vote for Biden in the end. And so that logic also holds true for Harris/Walz, but now with a lot more energy and momentum.
And so now we wait for the next completely unexpected thing to happen.
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