The Anatomy of a Choice
Yesterday, Kamala Harris finally announced Tim Walz as her running mate after weeks of deliberation. The choice has been celebrated as a demonstration of courage (it would have, in many ways, been easier to choose moderate, pro-Israel, swing state Governor Josh Shapiro) and self-awareness (Harris’s blackness makes her a signifier of radical politics regardless of what her politics actually are). The question wasn’t the open-ended one of who she could choose to be her VP, but, rather, which straight white man she could choose. Everyone knew that it couldn’t be another minority of any kind. Everyone knew that it couldn’t be another woman. After all, there are rules in American electoral politics. So, it was Walz. As a midwestern governor who served in the army, never went to law school, and was a high-school teacher and football coach prior to becoming a politician, Walz is the campaign’s resident white working class representative. His brand of whiteness allows him to both be more progressive than Harris (supporting increased pathways to citizenship and reducing the number of people under carceral supervision) and seem less progressive than Harris (because of the rest of his biography).
Walz is also fitting in so far as it was he who inadvertently created one of the Harris campaign’s most popular slogans - “Trump is weird.” The particular deftness of branding fascism as weird instead of, more precisely, existentially threatening, solidified his position as the favorite on the short list of VP hopefuls because it did two things: re-frame Trump as, not unserious, but unusual; and re-frame the appropriate vehicle for average white working class concerns as liberalism instead of conservatism. His appeal to hokey sentimentalism, where, if we simply vote for Harris/Walz, we can all have our rights restored and go back to not arguing about politics with our uncles at Thanksgiving, isn’t groundbreaking, but is a clear reminder of the narrow vision that Democratic politicians have when they talk about unity and the common good. It may be resistant to the potential onslaught of Republican victories, but it isn’t radical by any means. It is, in fact, a deliberate rejection of the discourse that understands and experiences conservative extremism as a rampant force in the electorate itself, rather than the craftsmanship of Trump and the authors of Project 2025.
Last night, after taking a moment to point out the “old white guys in the crowd” during his first speech as vice presidential candidate, Walz waxed nostalgic about how “some of us…remember when it was Republicans who [were] talking about freedom,” but lamented that “it turns out what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office.” He went on to make the case for returning to the traditional Republican principle of limited government, but as applied to personal freedoms instead - “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business.” So, with this choice, Trump is not a representative of real conservative values and Vance isn’t a real hillbilly. But Walz is both. Overnight, the Democratic ticket has become the perfect foil to the Republican ticket - if Trump/Vance are weird, then Harris/Walz are…regular.