Tim Walz Doesn’t Play Republican Games

Early on in analyzing the bad faith that defines modern conservative politics, I stumbled across an approach that gave me hope for a future that would not be dominated by right-wing politics. 

I call it, for lack of a better term, no-faith politics. It is a departure from the right’s bad faith – so honed, so practiced, lying at the foundation of every far-right policy stance and goal – and the left’s typical good faith, so easily manipulated and exploited by bad-faith actors who, when pressed, will identify these good faith tendances – known at BFT as Leslie Knope Syndrome – as a screaming weakness among those who believe government can and should be used to improve people’s lives. 

The early poster guy for the no-faith approach was the once-likable John Fetterman, whose campaign made very online jokes in his easy defeat of Dr. Oz in the 2022 midterms. Fetterman has since strayed from the good graces of Bad Faith Times and the left in general. That leaves a handful of figures as the standard bearers of no-faith politics. That includes a longtime BFT favorite, Tim Walz. 

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Walz is now the vice presidential nominee on a Democratic presidential ticket headed by a deft political operator in Kamala Harris. Her campaign is the most severely online and wonderful of any presidential candidate in my lifetime. The zoomers might say the Harris campaign is “whipping Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the QTs.”

Walz, a former school teacher and football coach and soldier and perhaps the most relatable major politician of the 21st century, is a sterling example of how Democratic governors can (and have) operated successfully in the Trump era. As the Republican Party has radicalized into an anti-democratic entity bent on ending the American republic, well-meaning Democrats like Walz have learned to ignore conservative lawmakers and activists who oppose liberal-left agendas. 

The Democratic base has responded with great exuberance to the embrace of no-nonsense, no-faith Democrats like Walz being embraced as party leaders. Within an hour of Harris naming Walz as her VP, ActBlue raised nearly $3 million, mostly from small donors. Within 12 hours the total eclipsed $10 million. Prominent Dems have made a series of correct decisions in a row and folks are excited. The clueless pundit class, encouraging Democrats to quickly and pointedly betray and alienate their base, is reeling. It’s a weird time. 

Walz does not play the Republican game. He does not pretend to “work across the aisle” or whatever other bullshit milquetoast centrist pundits like to say on Sunday morning news shows that no one watches anymore. Walz as governor of Minnesota did not pretend Republican policy stances were equal to Democratic stances: For instance, that refusing to provide food for school children was the same as providing food for school children. 

With the slimmest majority in the Minnesota legislature, Walz jammed through the following good-government policies without a shred of Republican support (the kids are calling him “based”): 

Walz and his Democratic colleagues in the Minnesota legislature are good reminders that better things are possible, but only if the left completely ignores right-wing whining and bad-faith attacks meant to sound like real policy critiques. After so many years of appealing to the referee and constantly pointing to the book of unwritten rules that Republicans haven’t followed since before Bill Clinton, Democrats have finally learned their lesson. 

Walz, along with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, have rejected Republican framing in favor of their own framing. These are not necessarily brutal political tacticians – although I would say Newsom has the dawg in ‘em – but rather cerebral, savvy politicians who rightfully see no reason to negotiate with Republicans who hold deeply unpopular, often inhumane views on the economy, health care, LGBTQ rights, and voting access. Successful bad-faith Republican politics require Democrats to play along, to believe, for instance, conservatives are truly concerned about the cleanliness of an abortion clinic. 

Walz and the no-faith gang have scoffed at this arrangement. No more games, these governors have said in one voice. It's a pronouncement for which we should all be grateful. 

Plainly And Simply, a Good Guy

The contrast between Harris’ vice presidential pick and Trump’s selection is evident to both the pundit class and normie American voters who in Walz see a fellow normie and in Vance see a painfully creepy weirdo who can’t stop saying weird shit. 

Imagine the vice presidential debate. You’ll have Vance on one side ranting and raving about reproductive health care being akin to the enslavement of human beings and taking away constitutional rights from Americans who don’t have children and joining the fascist cause of creepily fretting about birth rates. On the other side you’ll have Walz, aw-shucksing about worker-friendly economic policies and talking about his time as a high school football coach who played a lot of 4-4 defense. It will be Vance – the weird cousin you see at Christmas who reads fascist books as a hobby – versus Walz, the uncle you can’t wait to see at Christmas because he has good stories and listens to you and is quite normal and likable. A VP debate would pit Walz, who has a loving, respectful relationship with his 23-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, against Vance, who tells his little boy to shut the hell up when he takes a work call.

Walz rose to national prominence by calling Vance weird. Vance has cooperated by becoming ever weirder as the campaign rolls on. He’s now standing like the Big Boy, in case you missed it. 

Maybe we’ll get an unbecoming anecdote or two about Walz in the coming weeks as the Trump campaign looks for any way to attack Harris and her VP pick. Perhaps Walz has an unforeseen blemish or two (he was arrested for drunk driving in 1995, prompting him to stop drinking). 

It can’t be denied, however, that Walz is a genuinely good person. Consider: Walz as a school teacher in 1999 sponsored his school’s first gay-straight alliance, and he did so because he was well positioned to help students hoping to normalize LGBTQ students at a time when queer students were anything but normalized in American culture. Walz said he sponsored the alliance because he was the football coach and a former National Guard soldier and a straight married man. He was eager to use his status and privilege and the public regard of his life as “normal” to help LGBTQ students and their heterosexual allies form a group and become more authentic about their identities in public spaces.

The zoomers might not remember, but I very much recall the late 1990s, and I can report – along with my fellow older millennials – that queer identity was not at all acceptable in mainstream political and cultural circles. Precious few (if any) national politicians were outwardly supportive of same-sex marriage at the time – and if they were, they were screaming about it from the political fringes – and a Democratic president had triangulated his way to an abhorrent anti-LGBTQ policy stance. As a high school junior, I thought it respectable to say something along the lines of, “Gay unions are fine, but marriage is an institution that shouldn’t be messed with.” I even said this in front of a good friend whose dad was in a long-term relationship with a man. I knew them. They were a lovely couple and I wished my parents could see how normal they were.

Making pronouncements about which rights gay folks should and should not have elicited many approving head nods from my peers and adults alike and made me feel smart and wise. Ah yes, it’s me, the politics knower. Sure, we had a few openly gay TV characters in our lives, and some of our relatives were more open about their sexuality after being a deep, dark family secret in the 80s, but a full embrace of LGBTQ rights was far off in the political distance. 

At 16, I was willing to grant LGBTQ folks some rights, but not all of them. This is what we called reasonable. It’s all so embarrassing and shameful in hindsight. I’ll use the copout that the culture was different back then. It wasn’t until the 2012 election cycle that we had candidates enthusiastically supporting same-sex marriage and LGBTQ adoption rights. 

Walz’s support for his school’s gay-straight alliance should be seen in this light. It’s one of the reasons Walz strikes me as an empathetic figure who will do what is right, not what is politically expedient. He fought against Bill Clinton’s backward and discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the 90s and helped ban “conversion” therapy in Minnesota. Walz in this way reminds me of Bernie Sanders, who staked out a number of so-called radical policy stances in 2015 and 2016 that quickly became the Democratic Party norm. By 2020, the party's platform was shaped by Sanders' vision for a fairer, freer United States. Without Bernie’s unapologetic progressivism, there is no Walz as a vice presidential nominee. 

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There’s another, less-publicized reason for Walz’s likability. Walz, as one TikTok poster recently pointed out, is something of a stand-in for the fathers millennials and zoomers have lost to radicalization during the Trump era. Red pilling has taken away so many of our loved ones over the past decade as otherwise normal and formerly apolitical folks ingest a firehose of far-right propaganda that can’t be stopped. It is tragically a universal experience for Americans in their 30s and 40s: Watching as their dads (and moms) are immersed in the most toxic political messaging imaginable and seeing them turn into paranoid, hateful husks of their former selves. Walz looks exactly like your horrifically red-pilled uncle or father who refused to wear a mask during COVID because he believes Anthony Fauci is a Chinese Communist Party sleeper agent, or insists the January 6 insurrection never happened. But Walz is not that. Because he’s good. 

If Walz can serve as a stand-in for the radicalized loved ones we’ve lost in the Trump era, so be it. 

Walz in many ways is an existential threat to the American right wing and its calcified views of masculinity. He is and has been, by all accounts, inclusive and has tremendous empathy for those in need, and those who don't look like him or love like him. This is the very antithesis of what the right says about men. In their warped and toxic view, men are the natural rulers of humankind, dominators blessed by God himself (God is a dude) to take charge by any means necessary, including and especially violence.

Defining masculinity in this narrow way offers the right an excuse to act how they want to act. Domination, these men say, is just in my nature. I was born to be the boss, to tell women and children what to do, to be a remorseless authoritarian. It's all bullshit, of course, but it's a nice cover story if you're dead set on being a total asshole. Walz's modeling of a different and far more humane masculinity undercuts the right's entire worldview. A football coach, a military veteran, a regular guy with glasses and a potbelly, Walz shows men can be good if they want to be good. Men like him are destroyers of the far-right imaginary world in which they want us to live. Walz is a threat to the pitch-black vision of masculinity that the right holds so dear. He shows a better man is possible.

Walz is almost aggressively likable and normal and, best of all, a good guy ready and willing to fight the bad guys. That a no-faith Democrat like Walz has risen so quickly to the top of the party is very much a hopeful sign that the post-Biden, post-Obama, post-Clinton Democrats are done playing the stupid Republican game, which has resulted in nothing but stupid prizes. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads and X at @CDCarter13.