Tim Walz, ‘weird,’ and the undemocratic notion of a ‘legitimate public’

Plus: the last survivors of Hiroshima, revisiting an old COVID take, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Tim Walz, ‘weird,’ and the undemocratic notion of a ‘legitimate public’

(via)

Before he was given the vice presidential nod this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz coined his party’s new favorite attack line for GOP nominees Donald Trump and JD Vance. “These guys are just weird,” he said in a cable news appearance that went viral.

The line was a hit—possibly a real factor in his selection for the ticket—and immediately adopted by other Democratic politicians and their supporters. “‘Weird’ was the perfect put-down,” wrote Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty. “Not all that nasty or alarmist. More of an eye-roll than a frontal assault.”

Sure, maybe. I guess I appreciate the turn away from alarmism given how little Democrats’ warnings about the Fate of Democracy Itself seem to inform their own behavior. I can see why “weird” is popular, and I agree Trump is not normal and certainly shouldn’t be normative.

But this attack line rubs me the wrong way, not for what it says about Trump but for how it reeks of belief in a “legitimate public.”

This is maybe my most populist take, and I’ve mentioned it once before in a review of journalist Margaret Sullivan’s Newsroom Confidential for CT:

“Americans no longer share a common basis of reality,” Sullivan writes. This is right, and so is wanting to regain that basic agreement. But it’s difficult to conceive of that mission being accomplished with a phrase so unwittingly smug and epistemically blinkered as “reality-based media” (in a book without endnotes or any other formal citations, no less).

Of course, media should be reality-based—but “reality-based media” is part of the problem. [… It wrongly] assumes only one side cares about reality and therefore has permission to both claim its name and dismiss opponents as reprobates or retrograde idiots analogous—per Sullivan’s explicit comparison—to flat earthers.

Unfortunately, Sullivan’s media reforms for the sake of democracy have the same deficit of imagination. She envisions a “legitimate public” (my phrase, not hers) of people like her and gives proposals they’ll find appealing, like increasing demographic diversity in newsrooms and creating government subsidies for struggling outlets. Then there’s everyone else, who—despite comprising one third to one half of the demos, depending on how you count—are all but dismissed as a threat to democracy.

Now, I’m not the biggest democracy enthusiast in the world. I see real value in our Constitution’s republican measures to protect minorities against the whims of the majority, to force deliberation and nuance on a people in a reckless or ruthless mood. (I wrote about this in CT’s latest print issue.) I would take a liberal monarchy over an illiberal democracy, I suppose, were I forced to choose. But on balance, particularly given the realistically available alternatives, I’m pro-democracy and therefore uncomfortable with this implicit notion of a legitimate public.

Liberalism is the best thing going

Usually when you see a charge like this—that one side is treating the other as an illegitimate public—it flows from left to right. This is a common and frequently fair critique of right-wing birtherism, restrictive voting laws, and any kind of “real Americans” talk. Most recently, I’ve seen it in connection to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” bit and subsequent claims from his supporters that, actually, technically, really, he’s correct to swipe at them because the childless are naturally less invested in our country’s future since they won’t have kids around to enjoy or suffer it.

This is all pretty crude and sometimes racist and/or sexist stuff. The left’s version of a legitimate public assumption tends to be a bit subtler. Nothing so brazen and mean as denying people are “real Americans”—just a casual dad happening to notice that something is “weird.”

Not questioning the location of anyone’s birth, just, ya know, wondering whether those folks really understand what’s going on here, whether they’re perhaps a little confused, a little ignorant about the stakes of this election, whether they need to catch a bubble and let the reality-based media explain some things about the world, whether they’re delusional or evil, grifters or just garden-variety dummies who don’t care about truth and whose very votes are a danger to democracy.

Unconsidered is the possibility that they’re Americans with widely held views who care a lot about truth and other goods but express that concern in different ways because of their different—but again, very common, and by that measure objectively not weird—values and beliefs. And I’m just saying, maybe we’d get further with this whole politics thing if we all considered that explanation of those we’re inclined to deplore.

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Intake

• “We are imbeciles in the heart, and morons in the spirit,” via

  Michael Wear

• “The law as Justice Gorsuch sees it,” an interview by Rebecca J. Rosen at The Atlantic

Currently we have one in 47 Americans subjected to some form of correctional supervision. There are more people serving life sentences today in prison than there were serving any term of incarceration in the 1970s.

• “Selfishness and therapy culture,” by Freddie deBoer

Between said capitalist selfishness, helicopter parenting, social media platforms that inherently reward narcissism, and this whole bonkers quasi-feminist woowoo school of aspirational self help, there’s a never-ending supply of messages telling impressionable people that they should put themselves before others, inverting the most basic human moral principle.

• “Embracing sub-optimal relationships,” by

  L. M. Sacasas

• “The real reason people aren’t having kids,” by Christine Emba at The Atlantic

• “The last survivors of an atomic bomb have a story to tell,” by Kathleen Kingsbury et al. for The New York Times

Their skin would fall right off and hang off their hands at the fingernails, like an inside-out glove, all black from the mud and ash. It was almost like they had black seaweed hanging from their hands.

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Output

New work:

• Unsanction these sanctions | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

Speaking of the veep nominee, here’s a real throwback: Early in the pandemic, then a Minnesota resident, I praised Walz for his original COVID plan. Published at The Week, my piece was titled, “Why Minnesota’s coronavirus response is different.”

The idea at that point (late March of 2020) was a two-week stay-at-home order followed by just three (3!) weeks of social distancing to buy time for the state to expand hospital capacity by making temporary care facilities in local stadiums and hotels. Then—not that Walz put it in so many words—Minnesota was going to let ‘er rip, allowing COVID infections to run their course.

The thinking was that we’d all get COVID anyway, so as long as the hospitals had sufficient capacity to handle the worst cases and prevent deaths, we might as well get it all over with. Walz said infections were forecast to peak at the 14-week mark under his plan, which would’ve been in early July of 2020. After that, the infection rate was supposed to decline, presumably from herd immunity.

I liked this plan, as I wrote then:

[T]he fact that we have [a timeline] at all is a key distinction. Comparable orders in many states either have no expiration date (e.g. California) or have an expiration date much further out (e.g. Delaware, which started its shelter-in-place earlier and intends to continue until May 15). Minnesota's plan has not only a short period for the most stringent limits but also an end in sight for the lesser distancing measures to follow.

Also distinct is the promise of concrete action while the order is in place. […] [I]f we can expand our hospital capacity before the pandemic peaks, we have a shot at getting back to something approximating normalcy relatively quickly without paying an unacceptable human cost.

It’s weird to revisit this now. Obviously I wouldn’t—couldn’t—write the same piece today, but I’m not sure how to fairly critique it given the huge gap of knowledge and circumstances between then and now. Some of what I wrote I now believe is incorrect, but would that be my verdict were I working with only the info I had in March of 2020? I’m not sure.

I do think I was overeager to prove my non-COVID-denialist bona fides, but, well, that was the moment. It felt like any suggestion that we should not do lockdowns indefinitely had to be so carefully shored up with that kind of disclaimer.

Anyway, I reshare the piece in light of Walz’s selection. I think it may be the only thing I’ve ever written about him before today. And, well, suffice to say he did not exactly stick to that original COVID plan.

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