A few days ago, Kamala Harris announced Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as her party’s nominee for vice president. At once, the leftward end of the internet exploded with praise for Walz, as people from all over said that with the Walz pick, the Democrats were offering exhausted Americans a return to normalcy after the chaos of the Trump years.
If one knew nothing about Tim Walz’s politics, then his personal background would probably earn him respect among Middle Americans. He joined the National Guard at age 17 and served for 24 years, finally retiring with the rank of command sergeant major. He worked as a geography teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School, and he won the Minnesota state championship in 1999. He married Gwen Whipple at age 30, and the couple are still married, now with two children. In 2006, he was elected to Congress as a Democrat, and in 2018, he was elected governor of Minnesota.
The idea that Tim Walz is a moderate Democrat who will appeal to centrist voters comes from (1) his personal aesthetics and (2) bipartisanship scores like this one that show him to the right of about 90 percent of House Democrats, based on his having cosponsored a lot of bills with Republicans.
Of course, if you want to argue that Walz is actually an extremist, as many right-wing commentators are doing, then you will have plenty of material to work with. Not only did Walz get a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood when he was in Congress, but as governor of Minnesota he signed legislation to legalize abortion at any point in pregnancy, and also to let minors get abortions without notifying their parents.
Before entering politics, Walz served as the first faculty adviser to his high school’s gay-straight alliance. This was a bold move for its time, but I suppose that if some angry parent had confronted him back then and said, “If people keep giving your movement what it wants, then 25 years from now, you’ll be saying that middle school girls and boys have a right to get their breasts and balls cut off,” Coach Walz would have said something like “You’re a delusional nutcase.”
Lo and behold, as governor, Tim Walz signed legislation not only to ensure that both chemical and surgical mutilation for minors will be legal in Minnesota, but also to make Minnesota a “sanctuary state” that won’t return runaway children to their parents in other states should they flee to Minnesota to get these procedures. (To add insult to injury, he has stocked the boys’ restrooms at public schools with tampons.)
Walz’s record on the George Floyd Riots is also disturbing; like most Democratic governors and mayors, he dragged his feet when responding to the violence. Also, he gave confidential information about the police response to his teenage daughter, who shared it with the rioters. His wife admitted on video to having kept the windows open in the governor’s mansion because she liked to “smell the burning tires.”
And yet, at the same time, Tim Walz seems to have centrist positions on a lot of economic issues. Walz is in favour of nuclear power, and he’s also signed legislation to reduce the regulatory burden on apartment construction. Unlike many Democrats, he recognizes that excessive zoning and permitting laws, plus environmental lawsuits, are the biggest obstacles to reducing housing costs, building clean energy infrastructure, and doing a lot of other things that Democrats talk about doing but struggle to follow through on. Walz has also simplified Minnesota’s tax filing system and signed modest tax cuts.
So, although I have no intention of actually voting for Harris/Walz, or any other Democratic candidates, in this year’s elections, I also don’t accept the idea that there’s no such thing as a moderate Democrat. The Democrat party, like any large group of people, has internal variations, and there are plenty of nutty things that some Democrats believe and others don’t. After all, even Joe Biden copied many of Donald Trump’s successful trade policies (without giving Trump credit for them), and for every hardcore leftist like Kamala Harris, there’s a Democrat with a few reasonable ideas, like Tim Walz, or like Cory Booker, whose pragmatic approach to policing while he was mayor of Newark reduced crime in that city. (Booker had to disown his own record when he ran for president in 2020, and he was never considered for Harris’s V.P. — the Democrats decided early on that, to balance out the black woman at the top of the ticket, they needed a white man at the bottom.)
And yet, although I freely admit that moderate Democrats exist, I’m still cynical about their relevance. Basically, our whole political system is structured in such a way that it doesn’t matter which Democrats are moderate.
This will make sense when you think about just how little of the Democrats’ agenda has had to be approved by elected officials in order to become law.
Usually, when leftists want to impose some new policy on the American people, they will (1) ask a federal court to declare that the Constitution or laws already require the government to do the thing they’re trying to make it do or (2) ask one of the dozens of regulatory agencies in Washington to use its broad rule-writing power (granted under some vague statute passed decades in the past) to make the desired change or (3) just refuse to enforce the law, like with illegal immigration and the Floyd Riots. Actually winning elections or passing legislation is a last resort.
The Democrats are the party of the permanent civil service — that is, the people in government who can’t be voted out of office. Most judges are to the left of the average American, and the situation is even worse in the administrative state, where the regulatory burden almost always increases year over year for the simple reason that agency directors are strongly biased toward “solving” every problem in a way that makes their own agencies more powerful.
And elected Democrats, be they hard-left or moderate, will always do their best to give more power to the leftmost actors within the administrative state — who will then advance policies that couldn’t have gotten even a bare majority if they had to go to a fair vote.
This is how a seemingly minor law like Title IX — which was signed by Richard Nixon in 1972 and whose actual text simply requires that no one be excluded from a federally funded educational program on the basis of sex — has been interpreted to require, among other things, that every large university in the country set up an expensive Title IX compliance bureaucracy; that sexual harassment allegations at colleges be handled by an elaborate parallel court system, where the accused has fewer rights than in a real trial; and that if too few girls voluntarily join high school or college sports teams, the school must achieve “balance” by cutting popular boys’ sports like wrestling.
None of those things could have won over the support of enough moderates to get approved by an actual legislative body. But they didn’t have to. It was enough that the Democrats hand over unchecked power to left-leaning bureaucrats and judges. And pretty much all Democrats are in favor of that, since, after all, if your overall preference were that the country move right rather than left, you wouldn’t be a Democrat.
The same pattern repeats itself in every facet of our country’s politics. Most Americans didn’t support abortion in 1972 — indeed, an attempt to legalize it that November in Michigan by referendum failed, 61 percent to 39 percent, and most states wouldn’t even put it on the ballot in the first place — but when the Supreme Court legalized abortion anyway a few months later, there was no meaningful resistance. The moderate Democrats of the day had already voted down the conservative judges whom Nixon had tried to appoint to the Court a few years earlier, leaving him to appoint judges of unknown beliefs in their place. Nor did these people have any interest in the radical reforms that would have been needed to strip the Court of the dictatorial powers it was now granting itself.
Now repeat this process over and over again for the other judicial power-grabs: forced bussing, the ban on school prayer, getting rid of capital punishment for rapists and pedophiles, the right of illegal aliens to attend school in the U.S., gay-straight alliances, redefining marriage, and now the cases where the left is trying to create a constitutional right to castrate one’s child. If you want to keep the radicals out of power, it won’t do to vote for moderate Democrats, or even moderate Republicans. Indeed, Donald Trump is the only Republican president since Herbert Hoover who hasn’t appointed at least one pro-choice justice to the Supreme Court.
Thanks to Trump putting a spine back into the Republican party, conservatives now control the Supreme Court and have successfully overturned Roe v. Wade and the Chevron decision — the one that required the other courts to defer to regulatory bodies’ interpretations of their own governing statutes most of the time, even when said interpretations clearly went beyond Congress’s original intentions.
(At times, Chevron deference could go to absurd lengths — in 2021, the CDC director tried to put a nationwide moratorium on evictions on the grounds that this was necessary to deal with the COVID pandemic and lost only 6-3 when the case went to SCOTUS. Needless to say, an actual bill to make the CDC director “Dictator of America for the Duration of the Crisis” would not have passed through Congress, but then again, if the Democrats had had two more seats on the Court, it wouldn’t have needed to.)
But these are doomed to be hollow victories if Democrats — even moderate Democrats like Tim Walz — win too many elections. After all, the Loper Bright decision, which overturned Chevron, makes it easier for lower courts to overturn administrative law, but unless they’re filled with textualist, pro-business judges, they’ll usually find ways to avoid doing so. Likewise, the thousands of frivolous environmental lawsuits filed under NEPA, which have destroyed millions of jobs and frozen our country’s infrastructure at the level it was at in the 1970s, can’t be stopped by SCOTUS alone if the lower courts don’t cooperate.
And Democrats — even moderate Democrats like Walz — will do their utmost to make sure that the leftmost possible people are appointed to the Judiciary and the regulatory agencies.
It’s easy to imagine Tim Walz someday becoming president. (Indeed, all six Democrat vice presidents since Lyndon Johnson were later nominated to run for president in their own right.) And it’s easy to imagine President Walz signing laws that he thinks are going to reduce the number of years required to build an apartment building, or to revive nuclear power in a country that hasn’t powered up any new nuclear plants since 1996.
Meanwhile, Walz will appoint judges and bureaucrats whose views on every issue are far to the left of the average American’s, because after all these are the people who agree with him on abortion and crime and LGBT and the other issues that progressives get excited about. And then the Walz appointees will reinterpret the new permitting laws so that they’re just as complicated as the old ones and strangle the nuclear power revival with decades-long lawsuits.
This is the dirty secret of the Democrat party. Despite their name, the Democrats don’t actually believe in democracy. Rather, they believe that the common people are too stupid or bigoted to be trusted with any serious amount of political power. And so, once in office, they do their best to hand off the lion’s share of decision-making to the permanent government — the judges, the civil service, and so forth. Elected officials like Tim Walz are mere gatekeepers, whose purpose is to swing the gate wide open to bureaucratic and judicial tyranny and leave it open. And once you’ve handed off power to someone who isn’t accountable to the electorate the way that you are, it doesn’t matter how many of your own opinions are reasonable and moderate.
Twilight Patriot is the pen name of a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. You can read more of his writings at his Substack.
Tim Walz, public domain.
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