You can see why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate, and why Democrats have fallen in love with him. The guy delivers a stemwinder in the tradition of the great plains populists, full of passion and humor and plain-spoken defiance.
By Matt Bai
We’ve seen Donald Trump meander and contradict his way through endless stretches at a lectern. You’ll soon see Harris capably work her way through an amalgamation of platitudes and applause lines.
But in the contrasting rhetoric of Walz and Vance, in particular, we get a much sharper sense of what’s really being litigated in this election: two sharply contrasting views of what being American actually means.
The most important passage in Vance’s convention speech last month was the one where he described the country as something physical, rather than an abstraction. “America is not just an idea,” Vance said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.”
Literally speaking, this is not debatable; America exists, it is a nation and it has a history. But Vance isn’t being literal. He is articulating the central idea that animates all forms of nationalism (including the white variety), as well as the Trump movement. He is arguing that there is such thing as a common American culture, with its own language (English), its own religious ethos (Judeo-Christian) and its own concept of family (heterosexual, with naturally conceived children).
Of course there’s room for immigration and racial diversity in Vance’s worldview; his own wife is of Indian descent. But in his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity.
What Walz articulates — about as clearly as anyone has in the party since Barack Obama arrived on the scene 20 years ago — is a competing view that says, no, actually America is very much an idea. Alone among nations, we have from the very start been a collection of immigrants and outsiders, bound together not by any common origin or culture, but rather by a common set of laws and values and institutions — what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion.” (This is the liberal version of “American Exceptionalism” — the thing that makes us different from everyplace else.)
In the America Walz described in his convention speech, it doesn’t matter what language you speak at home or what god (if any) you worship, or whether you have kids (naturally or otherwise). Because as long as you believe in the American promise of liberty and adhere to its laws, you’re just as American as anyone else, and anybody who doesn’t like it should “mind their own damn business.”
Community, in Walz’s telling, isn’t defined by somebody’s idea of cultural norms, but rather by your connection to your neighbors. If you’re willing to help out with a stranded car or a bake sale, then he doesn’t care if you’re an atheist or a cat-owner (or, God forbid, both).
In a campaign season that may already feel small and shallow, this is a very big disagreement, and I would argue that it’s more important than any one policy having to do with the price of groceries or the tax code. It is an argument that will shape the way we govern ourselves for years to come — whether we conceive of American liberty as something that exists chiefly to protect White, Christian Americans from having their culture trampled, or whether we understand liberty to mean the freedom to choose whatever culture you like, as long as you respect the Constitution while you do it.
I come down firmly on the Harris-Walz side here. My own sense is that historians in the distant future will place the Trump movement among periodic eruptions in our history of the basest kind of nativism — Know-Nothings, the Immigration Restriction League, the Japanese American internment, Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. How significant this eruption will be in that continuum depends, I suppose, on whether Trump is elected a second time.
But I’m glad we have candidates for vice president, if not at the top of the ticket, who are able and willing to engage in that theoretical argument, and I can’t wait for their scheduled debate in October. The only thing more depressing to me than arguing about the merits of rising nationalism would be never getting to argue about it at all.
