A happy marriage at the DNC—coastal liberalism and prairie progressivism

This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission.

If you did a word cloud diagram of the Democratic convention in Chicago, the two big words that appear would be “freedom” and “joy.” Less prominent, if it showed up at all, would be “progressive.” Yet the Democrats spent four long nights deploying the attractive concepts of freedom and joy to sell a progressive agenda to voters. Moreover, with the ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the Ds have bolstered this pitch by marrying coastal liberalism with prairie progressivism. This union offers a powerful punch to the party’s core message: Government ought to be proactively deployed to address the problems and challenges Americans face.

When Vice President Harris two weeks ago chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her campaign partner, there was much obvious commentary that he provided from-the-heartland balance to her California lineage and that his white-guy-dad-plaid-coach persona complemented her Black-Indian-Jamaican-woman identity. What drew less attention was how Walz’s selection reinforced the ideology and values message of the ticket. He and Harris are both progressive-minded politicians, but they hail from culturally different strains of liberalism.

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Harris, more or less, represents what many folks these days think of as a liberal. She’s from the Bay Area. She’s a person of color. She talks about helping marginalized communities and seeking economic justice. She crusades for abortion rights and LGBTQ rights. Her days as a prosecutor have caused some conflict with the left. But in general she fits the familiar mode—a Big City Lib, a Blue State Lib. There’s a reason why Donald Trump and JD Vance believe they can score points by falsely branding her a crazy “communist.” Not a real American, in their view.

Walz is not an easy-to-attack caricature. Nebraska-born, he’s a hunter and a former National Guard noncommissioned officer. He ice fishes. He wears flannel shirts. He could be in a truck commercial. And, yes, he coached high school football—and middle-school track and basketball—in a very red district, where he won his first election to Congress in 2006.

Yet as governor, Walz has assembled an impressive progressive record. He signed into law a measure that made abortion a “fundamental right” and guaranteed access to contraception, fertility treatments, sterilization, and other reproductive health care. Having been an advocate of gay rights as a high school teacher, he signed an executive order protecting access to gender-affirming care and a “Trans Refuge” bill that banned the enforcement of arrest warrants and extradition requests for those who traveled to Minnesota for such care. He okayed a package of gun safety measures. He approved a law implementing paid family and medical leave. He legalized recreational marijuana.

There’s more: He backed drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. (Advocates, including business leaders, said it would lead to safer roads and a better state economy.) He restored voting rights for former felons. He expanded access to health insurance, took steps to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, imposed stricter regulations on pollutants, and promoted electric vehicles. He signed a measure to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school children.

This is a list that these days might be equated with Blue State politicians. Yet Walz represents a long tradition of prairie progressivism.

Long before the nation’s political map ossified into Blue and Red territory, there was a vibrant history of Democratic and Republican progressivism in the Midwest. The National Grange, founded after the Civil War, lobbied for progressive measures to aid farmers and others. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska thrice ran for president as a fiery populist Democrat assailing corporate power. (He later became an anti-evolution crank.) Robert La Follette, a progressive and populist Republican, served as governor of Wisconsin and then a senator. He ran for president in 1924 to break up “the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people” and proposed a host of what now would be called liberal initiatives: pro-union laws, civil liberties protections, a prohibition on child labor, government ownership of railroads and electric utilities, and easy credit for farmers (He won 16.6 percent of the popular vote as a third-party candidate.)

Later in the 20th century, the Midwest produced a roster of progressive Democratic senators, including Frank Church (Idaho), Birch Bayh (Indiana), John Culver (Iowa), George McGovern (South Dakota), and Gaylord Nelson (Wisconsin), the founder of Earth Day. (This batch were wiped out during the 1980 election that landed Ronald Reagan in the White House) And today’s Minnesota Democratic Party is officially known as the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (or DFL) and is the result of the 1944 merger between the state’s Democrats and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a left-wing party that had tried to fuse the interests of rural farmers and urban laborers. The late Sen. Paul Wellstone, first elected in 1990, was a perfect symbol of the DFL. (A training camp established in Wellstone’s name after he died in a plane crash in 2002 helped Walz launch his first congressional campaign.)

Walz, now the leader of the DFL in Minnesota, is fully in sync with this legacy of prairie progressivism, which does overlap significantly with Big City liberalism. The difference may be in how key values and ideas are presented. For a long time, Democratic politicians have tiptoed around the issue of abortion, even when fully supporting reproductive rights. As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) told my colleague Abby Vesoulis this week, “For many years, people wouldn’t even say the word abortion out loud.” That’s clearly changing, with this Democratic convention full of explicit references to the procedure and citing the right to an abortion as a bedrock element of freedom. And Walz has embraced abortion rights with talk about as plain as it can be. As he put it in his acceptance speech in Chicago, “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business. And that includes IVF and fertility treatments.” This is taking a supposed heartland value—respecting neighbors—and applying it to a contentious issue.

Walz is unapologetic about his liberalism in a football-coach sort of way. He knows that right-wingers have attacked his school meal program as they do with many progressive proposals, deriding it as expensive big government spending. Here’s how he non-defensively defended it during that address at the convention: “And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day. So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.” In your face. No apologies.

For years—decades—Republicans have tried to stake a monopoly claim on the idea of freedom. (Cue Lee Greenwood.) But Walz, grabbing the main theme of the convention by its…well, you know, perfectly executed a jiu-jitsu move:

Freedom. When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations — free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall. 

As far as I can tell, there are no major policy differences between this veep candidate and the woman who picked him. (On the GOP side, JD Vance, a few years ago, was a Never-Trumper who compared his future running-mate to Hitler and who said some Trump backers were “racists” who voted for Trump for “racist reasons.”) And their publicly stated values are the same.

Toward the end of his speech, Walz expressed his goals. “We’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom.That’s how we make America a place where no child is left hungry. Where no community is left behind. Where nobody gets told they don’t belong. That’s how we’re going to fight.”

Any Blue State lib could say the same.

Vice presidential picks often expand the reach of a ticket in terms of geography, experience, or ideology. Barrack Obama, who had only two years of service in the US Senate when he ran president, tapped Joe Biden, the veteran legislator. Trump, a wild-card candidate, recruited Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a well-known Republican who some (foolishly) thought could be a reassuring figure. With Walz, Harris has amplified and diversified her message—and that of the Democratic Party.

When Harris delivered her big speech on Thursday night, she eloquently and fiercely reiterated her progressive stances on reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, gun safety, affordable housing, expanded health care access, climate change, taxes, and other matters, as she slammed Trump for being both “deeply unserious” and dangerous. There was nothing surprising in these policy statements. But one of the big accomplishments of the convention—which hit the mark on so many fronts—was to expand and bolster the progressive vision of the Democratic Party. With the Harris-Walz ticket, the Democrats have achieved both a synergy and a unity of purpose. In what will be a helluva fight over the next 10 weeks, this will afford them a clearer shot in the battle for joy and freedom.

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