Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, is a magnet for internet comparisons, memes, and clichés: he’s the Midwestern dad you always wanted, he’s Friday Night Lights’ Coach Taylor, he’s a fount of avuncular normal-guy aphorisms.
But to me, Tim Walz is an archetype I first encountered twenty years ago at an eerily similar political fork in Democrats’ road. His vice-presidential nomination this week once again offers a glimmer of hope for a new path — even amid warning signs that the party will take the old path.
In 2004, I helped elect that era’s version of Tim Walz to the governorship of deep-red Montana. Save for the military service, Brian Schweitzer was all the adjectives now used to describe Walz — small-town, blunt, plainspoken, pragmatic. In an election year when Democrats got destroyed up and down the ballot, Schweitzer pulled off his seemingly impossible victory by being decidedly populist and normal (read: not weird).
As I suggested in the American Prospect and Washington Monthly after the 2004 election, Schweitzer’s cultural signaling gave him wide room to campaign on economic populism — which he brought into the governor’s office.
At the time, I thought Schweitzer could be the beginning of a new era of revived prairie populism that had been championed by Democrats like Byron Dorgan, Dave Obey, Andy Jacobs, Cecil Andrus, and Paul Wellstone. But that’s not how things turned out.
Schweitzer ended up being an anomaly. His politics clashed with the ascendant Barack Obama–branded neoliberalism of the post–George Bush era, and his Montana success proved to be more like a last gasp of prairie populism rather than a revival of it. Obama-ism’s mix of identity politics, corporatism, and good vibes won out — and the party became more urban, more coastal, and less populist, while losing lots of elections in the heartland.
Fast forward two decades, and Walz cuts a similar…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: David Sirota
