When Tim Walz was tipped as Kamala Harris’s running mate, some on the left described his selection as an attempt to unite Democrats. Walz has certainly tried to play on that reputation along the way, and now he’s trying to convince American voters as a whole to return to a less divided politics. But unity is easier said than done.
In a speech in Rochester, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, Walz reminded his audience of a time when friends and family could gather for Thanksgiving and “not have to complain about politics all the time.” What was different then? Walz continued:
You shared a commitment to democracy, a commitment to personal freedoms
…
We don’t call each other names. We don’t. And we don’t use the least fortunate among us as the punch line for our jokes, because they are our neighbors. They are our neighbors.
On Wednesday night, he reiterated his stance on neighborliness during his speech at the Democratic National Convention:
When you grow up in a small town like that, you learn to take care of each other. That family down the road — they may not think like you, they may not pray like you, they may not love each other like you, but they’re your neighbors. And you take care of them, and they take care of you. Everybody’s included.
Lowering the political temperature and envisioning a greater sense of national solidarity is a welcome development in an era of increasing polarization. Nice is nice, at least in theory. But forging shared bonds and fostering genuine neighborliness in politics is much harder than Walz and other Democrats let on. They have made it harder in the past.
Take the first shared commitment that Walz cited in Rochester. He is certainly right to suggest how unfortunate it is, to say the least, that the two-thirds of Republicans who believe the 2020 election was stolen do not seem particularly committed to democracy. But it is not as if Americans were always reverent of the democratic process before 2020.
That goes for Democrats, too. Stacey Abrams spent years denying her 2018 loss as governor of Georgia, even claiming more than once that she “won” the election. That same year, Hillary Clinton reflected on her 2016 loss and claimed that people who voted for Donald Trump did so because they “didn’t want black people to have rights” or women to “get jobs.” Blaming an election defeat on bigotry doesn’t exactly scream “commitment to democracy.”
To be clear, Walz’s sentiment — that a shared commitment to democracy is crucial to our body politic — is correct. And he is certainly not responsible for poor past statements by members of his party. And yes, Trump’s denial of the election is considerably more troubling. But Walz is to imagine a united past that never really was. Political ambition has long found a way to create caveats and loopholes in our “shared commitment to democracy.”
There is a similar problem with Walz’s remarks about a previous “commitment to personal liberties.” It is fair to conclude that Walz is referring to abortion and reproductive rights, both because the issues have been a cornerstone of the Harris-Walz campaign and because he raised them in Rochester and at the DNC. But here too, the previous unity has proven illusory. Roe vs. Wade began an era of increased polarization by removing the issue from the democratic process. Abortion has been consistently divisive in the decades since, even beforeDobbswith no sense of national shared commitment in sight. What’s more, the division over abortion highlights a second problem with Walz’s plea for unity: that his appeal to neighborliness rings hollow.
At their best, reasonable people of good will and common sense can recognize the tension underlying the abortion debate, between a compelling desire to protect unborn children on the one hand, and a compelling recognition of the physical toll of pregnancy and the way it has been used to limit women’s agency on the other (among other compelling reasons). A genuine effort at unity, a genuine respect for political neighbors, would take that tension into account; Walz leaves it out. “When Republicans [the word ‘freedom’]They mean the government should be free to raid your doctor’s office,” he said at the DNC. For Walz (and virtually all Democrats), people oppose abortion only because oppose personal freedomGiven the wholesale rejection of even an iota of validity in the pro-life position, it is not surprising that pro-life Democrats are essentially extinct.
Walz has similarly lashed out at Republicans for their perceived opposition to IVF. “Mind your own business,” he said at the DNC. This framing underplays the fact that some of the most conservative senators have sponsored legislation to protect the practice. But more importantly, it shows another example of Walz choosing demonization over unifying neighborliness. (Not to mention his problem with truth.)
IVF opponents are a significant minority of the public: just 8 percent of Americans, according to a May Pew poll. But here’s the crucial part: Aren’t they Walz’s—and our—neighbors, too? What would a neighborly approach require? Again, a sincere attempt to at least acknowledge their concerns. It might acknowledge, as author Luke Burgis has suggested, that there are arguments for better science to reduce the number of embryos discarded in the practice. It would avoid simply dismissing these concerns as “weird.”
Despite Walz’s myopic references to imagined “shared bonds” and half-hearted, selective neighborliness, conservatives who value pluralism should recognize that he pays at least lip service to unity. Meanwhile, the Trump-era right has consistently painted the country in Manichean, apocalyptic terms, in which a woke who remakes or even destroys America justifies viewing fellow citizens as enemy combatants.
That Republicans from Donald Trump to J.D. Vance are far more divisive does not mean that Democrats like Walz have been exemplars of bridge-building. For those conservatives who find themselves on the wrong side of issues, particularly social issues, neighborliness is rarely extended.
Yet Walz is right in this regard: Americans Are hungry for unity. While our politics are often driven by the loudest and most extreme voices, most Americans belong by some measures to an exhausted majority that rejects the “sky is falling” vision of the world. But a more confident pluralism will require more than just talk of unity; it will depend on actually acknowledging the concerns of our political opponents, even amid deep-seated, often irreconcilable differences.
It’s a tall order, but it’s necessary for a more united democracy — and for a few less tense Thanksgivings.
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