‘We Just Build Roads, and We Build Schools’. The Atlantic - Politics by Claire Potter

Aug 18, 2024 at 10:03 PM//keep unread//hide

The word people keep using to describe Tim Walz—whether they mean it as insult or praise—is progressive. Since Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate, he’s been called “a true progressive”; “a far-left progressive”; “extremely progressive.”

But this isn’t right. Walz was a Blue Dog Democrat through his many years in Congress. In his six years as governor of Minnesota, he has sometimes opposed progressive legislation that businesses warned would cost jobs, and has developed a reputation for pragmatism, respect for the individual, and state-funded civic investment. So why not call him a liberal?

One reason is that the word liberal has fallen out of fashion. Liberalism’s great achievements—the welfare state, infrastructure investment, civil rights, and taxpayer-funded investments in health, education, and social welfare—never became universal, as they did in other countries. Then, despite their pronounced commitments to social movements, liberals were too slow to deliver change, and left too many behind. By the 1990s, neoliberalism—a philosophy of free-market deregulation—undid, or weakened, many of the Democratic Party’s postwar liberal achievements. Rightly or wrongly, activists in the social-justice, labor, feminist, and LGBTQ movements began to reclaim those principles, labeling them with a new term associated with 20th-century left-wing reform and a commitment to identity politics: progressive.

The word liberal is still widely used to describe political places west of conservative and east of radical, but it has been emptied of meaning. Walz’s record, however, is a good primer on what liberalism stands for: the belief that the government can improve lives by strengthening institutions and guaranteeing individual freedoms. As Harris and Walz move to unite the party’s factions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, they should take the opportunity to name this ethic for what it is: liberalism.

As governor, Walz signed a $93 million bill to improve mental-health care. His administration guaranteed universal free breakfast and lunch in school, and access to free menstrual products. He signed three bills that banned conversion therapy for children, improved access to gender-affirming health care, and protected access to abortion. This year, Walz delivered his State of the State address in a brand-new high school built by public and private funds, and spoke of Minnesota’s investments in children, including a $5.5 billion education bill.

These policies fit squarely within the Democratic Party’s tradition of liberalism that was born in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, consolidated in Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and flowered in Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. The same liberal spirit animated Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Walz’s link to this tradition is real: He got his start in politics with Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), a liberal New Deal–era alliance of rural and urban voters, traditional Democrats, and prairie populists.

Somewhere in the hereafter, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the first Minnesotan to be elevated to a national ticket, grins as he looks down on a white Minnesotan barnstorming the country with a Black woman. Known as the “Boy Mayor” because he entered office at a youthful-looking 34, Humphrey led the effort to fuse the state’s weak Democratic Party with the Farmer-Labor Party; he then expelled Communists from the coalition after they sought to turn it to their own purposes.

Humphrey had a clear vision for liberal governance, one forged in the effort to unite his state’s moderate farmers, small-town businessmen, and industrial workers. In 1948 he gave a speech at the DNC calling on the party to adopt, for the first time, a civil-rights plank in its platform. He was virtually unknown outside the state at the time, but when the plank passed, it boosted him into the Senate, where he pushed for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Johnson’s vice president, he was instrumental in passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act too.

Humphrey was implicated in some of liberalism’s great mistakes, including the failure to adequately address poverty and racial violence, and the escalation of war in Vietnam. But he always believed that liberalism could connect the state to its citizens by guaranteeing their well-being. The “moral test” of a government, he told his colleagues, was how it cared for citizens at every stage of life, and embraced the most vulnerable.

Humphrey’s DFL heirs have repeatedly brought liberalism’s commitments back to the national stage. “Humphrey begat Walter Mondale, who begat Paul Wellstone, who begat Amy Klobuchar and Walz,” James Traub, a Humphrey biographer, told me. “That genetic code fuses the prairie-populist belief in the little guy, the farmer and worker; FDR’s faith in the activist state; and Truman and JFK’s internationalism.”

Liberalism is also a political style, one that seeks to resolve disputes—a contrast to a Republican Party in a perpetual rage, whether about what books are in the library or who is in the adjoining bathroom stall. “These guys are just weird,” Walz said—now famously—in an MSNBC interview. He talked instead about “decency” and Democrats’ “positive future for America,” about bringing back manufacturing jobs and investing in infrastructure: policies brought about through “collective effort.” Republicans’ criticism of such initiatives was, he argued, hysterical. “They scream socialism,” Walz said. “We just build roads, and we build schools, and we build prosperity.”

Progressives have good reasons to embrace Walz, but he does not belong to their wing of the party. Democrats should refer to him proudly as what he is: a liberal. Progressivism may signal a meaningful identity, but liberalism is a philosophy of governance, and Democrats will need it to create a united front against Trumpism. Choosing Tim Walz as her vice-presidential nominee is an important sign that Harris is committed to this vision, and that Democrats can make the compromises necessary to win. Liberalism, after all, isn’t the absence of conflict: It’s how Americans work across differences to advance human welfare.