Progressives have bet a little too much on this idea.
Progressives have bet a little too much on this idea.
T here has been something strange and novel about the Kamala Harris campaign and its attitude toward white voters, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was almost as if there were a subtle, subversive, but unspeakable message going out.
It was in evidence in the weird race-segregated Zoom calls and merchandise like “White Dudes for Harris.” It was in the strange way they had cast Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, as an avatar of white maleness. They like to call him “Coach” (he was an assistant coach). The message was something like, “It’s okay to be a white — well, let’s not say ‘man,’ let’s say ‘dude.’”
Then the campaign went and admitted it to some degree. In a pre-debate expectations-lowering piece for CNN, a senior Harris campaign aide said of Walz, “People assume that he is a walking permission structure for rural, exurban, White male hunters. . . . Yes, for the 1 or 2 points of those we want to move. But it’s much deeper than that: He’s a walking permission structure for people to feel joyful and hopeful themselves.”
The progressive Left is well aware that it has a theory of history and privilege that presents problems for them with white men. If you cast all present-day “white men” as possessing the semi-demoniacal impulse to oppress and as the witless inheritors of unearned privilege that came with oppression such that even their non-white friends and acquaintances can be found guilty of being too “white-adjacent,” it might disincline some white men from voting to empower progressives even more. That whole moral story sounds as if the only use for white men is to dispossess them of their illusions, their privileges, and any resources lest they, in Biden’s word, “put y’all back in chains.”
Walz as a “permission structure” makes a kind of sense. It’s an admission that white men can now have a role in multiculturalism as something other than Emmanuel Goldstein. They can be a white dude, a kind of harmless supporting ally. His hobbies — whether hunting or following professional sports — serve only to make him into a more blobby caricature of himself. He doesn’t have ideas of his own. He doesn’t aspire to lead, only to listen, to follow, to support. Maybe he wears a “My Daughter Is My Hero” T-shirt. Not because he has a child who survived something traumatic, but just because his worldly-wise wife bought it for him.
Walz has been routinely deployed as a kind of sitcom-level, white-dad cluelessness. “Like, I have white guy tacos, and —,” Walz said in a video, when Harris interrupted and said, “What does that mean? Like, mayonnaise and tuna?” Ha ha ha ha ha! No, it turns out he just likes ground beef and cheese. Poor, unfortunate white soul! He’s afraid of chilies and cilantro.
Conservatives and progressives respond differently to dog-breed descriptions. Progressives report liking breeds that are friendly to everyone. Conservatives are drawn to breeds that look to their owners for cues about the status of strangers. Something similar is at work in the response to white dudes. Walz’s “I’m harmless fun” act is a kind of ritual of neighborliness among progressives. Among conservatives it reads as a symbolic inversion of male roles.
Is Walz a kind of model man of the multicultural future? Progressives have bet a little too much on the proposition.