Tim Walz, Gen-X Libs and a New New Sincerity
It might be okay if Tim creeps you out for no reason.
The usual disclaimer: this is not really a political post. I don’t care who you vote for. Well, I do. But that’s not what The Middlebrow is for.
The Renaissance Wife and I have had to confront our mutual and probably unfair unease over Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz. We just don’t like the guy. I’m always worried he’s going to snap and yell that if I don’t take his advice, I’ll find myself living in a van, down by the river.
I thought we were alone in this, but then a friend, also Gen-X, texted:
“Tim Walz makes me feel so decadent. And not in a good way. How strange that we’ve become the party of football champions and not the outcasts sharing a joint under the bleachers!”
For those of us who grew up claiming our weirdness as a virtue, it’s jarring to have a pair of unabashedly normal folks leading our political charge, buttoning their shirts all the way up and saying “fudge” instead of F-bombing. The Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket is as if Election were rewritten so that Tracy Flick and the jock joined forces, which is just way too much like what happens in real life.
This is not what the weird revolution had in mind.
Some of this is just about the left getting a lot of what it wanted out of the culture wars. After decades of “let your freak flag fly,” we got the culture to finally concede that drag queens aren’t hurting anybody and that what’s really weird is obsessing over where and how they go to the bathroom. We should take the win and move on, but also never forget that the fight was about making weird acceptable, not about making a new normal.
I think there’s something more going on here, though. Those of us who have been around a bit know that if Walz had shown up on the national scene 15 years ago, he would have been shredded by a still vibrant online media that was not afraid to press back against mainstream opinion. His white guy folksiness and sensitive coach persona would have attracted Gawker’s attention immediately. They would not be keen to let him wash his car in the afternoon sun, spend some time building model airplanes and then work a quick shift at the suicide prevention hotline before bed. Gawker would have seen Walz and seen smarm.
In the snark vs. smarm war, Gawker was team snark for the very good reason that they saw the polite friendships between journalists as bad for politics, the economy and culture. A guy like Walz showing up to replace Tom Hanks as America’s dad would have raised alarm.
This was part of a bigger argument being waged in literature and entertainment — writers like David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and Heidi Julavits all believed that people were harming themselves by hiding their humanity behind a veil of detached irony. Ironists, of course, all believed that they were piercing a veil of illusion, like Hunter S. Thompson using drugs to find the root of the American Dream in Las Vegas. Call it the Heathers crowd vs. The Silver Linings Playbook bunch.
The ironists ruled after the U.S. invaded Iraq, and peaked at the Financial Crisis. Then billionaire Peter Thiel used Hulk Hogan to destroy Gawker and Democrats, for the second time in two decades, lost a presidential election while winning the popular vote. A cultural lesson learned was that Jon Stewart mocking something was a surrogate, and a damned poor one, for solving problems and winning power.
In such circumstances, the refuge of the ironist is detachment — have your elections, fight your war, you’re all corrupt anyway. The response of the sincerity crowd is to enthusiastically embrace what’s in front of them for what it is. They join the Harris/Walz good vibes tribe and commit to enjoying it. That can be powerful. It’s what Sarah Palin missed when she dismissed Barack Obama’s “hopey/changey thing,” Ironically, given that Palin’s head would explode if she had to define irony, she was an ironist politician, more concerned with what she had to say to win than any conviction or passion. Obama was a sincerity candidate who saw both the Clintons as ironists. Reagan was a total ironist. George HW Bush was a sincerity type. His son was led by ironists who thought they could use their cynicism to reshape reality.
We all know Jimmy Carter was a sincerity guy. Donald Trump’s an ironist. Richard Nixon? Probably sincere. None of these labels make you a good or bad person, you see. It’s about how you see the world and what motivates you.
There is still a lot of election to go, and we don’t need to get into that here. But if something about Tim Walz just bugs you — if you think he’s too normal or if you think, “I didn’t want anything to do with the football coach when I was in high school and I don’t want a coach as my leader now,” or if you just never feel comfortable with his elbows off the dinner table/one glass of milk a day/you can get a tattoo when you’re living under your own roof persona, it’s okay because Walz is just not for you.
My advice? Put in an old Richard Linklater movie, let the election play out, vote your conscience early or in person, and then let’s see what we’ve got.
I hesitate to get into this, Michigander/Midwesterner that I am, because I like youse guys, I really, really like you!
But really? You don't like Coach Walz?
I get it that he can be kind of irritating with those prayerful hands going on all the time, and that open mouthed grin and those nods and that finger pointing to someone in the audience, but here's what I think is happening here:
Sure, he's been in the military for years, and then he was a teacher standing up in front of a classroom, and then he was a congressman, and now he's a governor. Which means he should have left 'hayseed' behind long ago. But he's a Minnesotan. He's a natural hayseed. And he still can't get over being picked as Kamala's running mate.
He's terrified. He's in awe of her and everything that's happening. He's blind-sided by all of the attention, and if his movements and his talk seem exaggerated, it's because there's a kind of Midwestern modesty playing games with his head right now. He honestly doesn't know how to act. He's trying everything out.
I kind of love that about him. You see it as 'smarmy' but the rest of us who live in those states see it as genuine. It's the way we would be, too. He knows he's important right now and the more applause he gets the more uncomfortable it makes him. I watched him stare at the audience when he was on stage that last night, The look he gave them said "I don't know what I did to make you like me but now I'm going to have to keep on doing it and it's killing me!"
So cut the poor guy some slack, okay? He'll get it. He's a good man. He'll be a good vice president. And he'll calm down. This is just his manic phase.
For the sake of your argument, it'd be convenient if Wallz rhymed with schmalz, but unfortunately it doesn't. I'm just happy to have a guy running for office who knows where Afghanistan and Iran are on a map.