The Bouncing Balloon and the Fish Out of Water

A Roundup of Domestic News

At last, a candidate to represent the balding, pudgy, middle-aged dads.

I was on vacation at the beginning of this month, taking my kids on a tour of the Upper Midwest and helping my wife photograph Louis Sullivan banks. A lot of things happened while I was gone, and I’m going to try to get caught up on them all, but I’ll have to do it in two parts.

Today, I’ll respond to domestic news, and I’ll put off to the next edition my roundup of international news—though it will be hard to hold back talking about Kursk incursion.

This has been an unusually fast-paced election season. It was only a month ago that someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump, a story that faded surprisingly rapidly, mostly because the shooter does not seem to have had any ideological motive.

It is only three and a half weeks since Joe Biden withdrew from the race—but it seems like a year ago.

So it’s time to catch up.

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The Preamble

First, I want to repeat what I said about the election a few weeks ago, that “any discussion about Trump has to start and end with January 6.”

The riot at the Capitol was not a product just of some intemperate rhetoric from Trump at a rally. It was part of a protracted conspiracy to send fake electors to Congress in order to overturn the results of an election and remain in power against the wishes of the American people. This is a fundamental sin against life in a free society, and there can be no second chance after that.

Get used to seeing that preamble, because I will repeat it before every discussion of this year’s presidential election. In fact, I’m going to capitalize it: the Preamble. The only reason this election is at all close is because disengaged swing voters have the political memory of a goldfish and have forgotten anything that happened more than a few months ago. So my first task is to make sure people remember January 6, 2021, and its meaning. I suggest you do the same.

And since this goes above the paywall, let me say that if my mentioning this ticks you off—well, you know my style. The more people don’t want to hear a truth, the more insistently I will repeat it.

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The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Candidate

The big news that broke while I was gone is that Kamala Harris chose her vice-presidential running mate. It was widely expected that she would choose a moderate white guy from a swing state. She chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who seems to fit those criteria.

But it is a disappointing choice from my perspective, because Walz hasn’t been all that moderate as governor. He has a moderate manner and appearance—the look of a somewhat dowdy Midwestern dad, or your favorite high school teacher (both of which he is). And he has a long record of military service: 24 years in the National Guard.

It is good practice to assume that politicians have highly flexible ideologies, and the New York Times describes Walz as a moderate Democrat in Congress when he represented a swing district who turned left as his state’s politics turned left.

A former National Guardsman, high school teacher and football coach, Mr. Walz then sided with Republicans in the House over his five terms in office, earning a bipartisan reputation even as he largely voted along party lines. He received an A rating from the National Rifle Association. He voted yes on the Keystone XL petroleum pipeline from Canada, and supported tighter screening of refugees from Syria and Iraq. He opposed Obama-era regulations on wetlands and waterways, and voted no to bailing out banks and automakers in 2008 as the financial markets were in a tailspin.

He was elected governor in 2018, leaning into his small-town upbringing and the moderate credentials he had burnished in Washington.

But things changed in 2022 when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, or D.F.L., took complete control of the state government. The centrist governor transformed into a hero of the progressive left, enshrining abortion rights into law, legalizing marijuana, enacting a statewide paid family leave program, offering drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants, tightening gun control laws and passing climate goals.

In this regard, it makes sense that Harris would choose a politician from Minnesota, even though this is the swing state she was already most likely to win. Minnesota has a long history as one of the birthplaces of the so-called “Progressive” movement. Note that their state affiliate of the national Democratic Party is called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Crucially, Minnesota gave birth to Progressivism well before the rise of the 1960s counterculture. So it is one place where you can find people who are pretty far to the left without being academic Marxists or degenerate counterculture hippies living in polycules.

As I was writing this, Jonathan Last’s Bulwark newsletter popped into my inbox, where he states this point nicely.

When people say “progressive” they tend to think of either (1) CaliforniaLand big-government liberalism, or (2) Campus radical identitarianism. Walz doesn’t come from either of those schools.

He’s a product of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, which is its own culture…. The DFL/Wellstone branch of progressivism is a kind of third way for American liberalism. It’s neither neoliberalism, nor identity-politics Kulturkampf.

So Walz is calculated to be a candidate who will be acceptable to the Democratic Party’s left wing, while also reassuring moderate swing voters. For example, Walz used to be one of the few Democrats still endorsed by the National Rifle Association, but he has since embraced gun control. But look at how he talks about it.