Walter Kirn On The Midwest, Walz, Trump

The writer defends the flyover states.

Walter is a novelist, literary critic, and journalist. He’s written eight books, most famously Up in the Air, which became a film starring George Clooney. He’s now the editor-at-large for County Highway and co-hosts a weekly podcast with Matt Taibbi, “America This Week.” Way back in the day, I edited his work for The New Republic, and he guest-blogged for the Dish.

You can listen to the episode in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on Tim Walz as a “white minstrel” of a Midwesterner, and Walter watching speeches by Obama and Trump on LSD — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Walter’s upbringing in rural Minnesota — “a Huckleberry Finn life”; the colorful characters of his small town; the humanist rear-admiral and feminist librarian who mentored him; learning horses from the Amish; his father the “short-haired hippie”; transferring to Princeton — “the coldest bath of my life”; the snobbery of his rich roommates; wanting to be a poet; his scholarship to Oxford; the anti-Americanism there; Shakespeare; drinking culture in London; working as a private eye; teaching immigrants to read in NYC; working at Vanity Fair with Tina Brown and the “Eurotrash elite”; The Great Gatsby; Gore Vidal on homosexuality; the overblown fear of militias in ‘90s America; the Matthew Shepard myths; the history of progressive populism in the Midwest; Gus Hall and Eugene McCarthy; towns decimated by NAFTA; Trump turning on Iraq War; the Pentagon Papers; Harris’ interview on 60 Minutes; her passing on Josh Shapiro; the phoniness of Walz; his fascination with China; disinformation and free speech; the Twitter Files; demonizing rural people during Covid; the “information engineering” in the pandemic; Jay Bhattacharya’s dissent; sex changes for minors; Helene and FEMA; immigration in small towns; Mickey Kaus; how the elite loathe Vance; Stop the Steal; and Walter living in Montana.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Tina Brown on her new substack, Musa al-Gharbi on wokeness, Sam Harris for our quadrennial chat before Election Day, and Damon Linker on the election results. Wait, there’s more: Peggy Noonan on America, Anderson Cooper on grief, Christine Rosen on humanness in a digital world, Mary Matalin on anything but politics, and John Gray on, well, everything.

Please send any guest recommendations, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. From a fan of last week’s episode with Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik on animal welfare:

When I heard this topic would be discussed, I was a little underwhelmed, as I thought it would be a little preachy and boring. I was currently out fishing, and my hunting dogs nailed a possum — a pest here in New Zealand — and I listened to the episode while walking the river. I’m glad I did, because it was nothing like what I had imagined — not at all preachy, and wonderfully interesting. Please keep interviewing such interesting and engaging people who tell such great stories.

Cheers. I do what I can to highlight environment or animal welfare writers who are not preachy, boring or devoid of perspective. Bill and Monica filled the bill — and then some. On a few recent pods:

During your episode with David Frum, I was very much taken aback by his assertion that the best years of his life are behind him, as if that is a truism for men his age. (Maybe he was speaking from a place of grief.) I’m a 58-year-old man and, while many of the joys of youth are gone and now memories, I feel quite often that experience and wisdom bring me a deeper and richer experience of life. I expect my life to get better and better.

During your episode with Michelle Goldberg, which I thoroughly enjoyed, the topic of abortion came up. Maybe I missed an article or podcast, but I feel that you never really challenge anyone on that topic. The premise seems to be accepted that making abortion illegal is obviously a bad thing for society in general and women in particular.

I am against abortion. I eschew “pro-life” and ”pro-choice” because both of those are silly labels that are used to box in people politically in an unfair way — the way Kendi claims that people who agree with him are “anti-racist.” My opposition is abortion is coincidental to my religious faith, not a direct result of it — the way I am opposed to other obvious wrongs, such as slavery, physical abuse, theft, etc.

People often argue, like Michelle did, about how they accompanied someone to an abortion, or had scares themselves, as if that is somehow a justification for glossing over the act itself. Therefore they are deeply emotionally attached to their position and cannot even contemplate considering that abortion could be the brutal ending of a human life. To do so would mean acknowledging that they — or someone who is otherwise a wonderful, beautiful, incredible human being whom they love — did something horrible, so it cannot be allowed to enter their minds.

I find it exasperating that people frame the abortion debate as religion vs. freedom. It’s a false framing that the pro-abortion side brilliantly set up decades ago, and the media parrots it. I was appreciative of Bill Maher openly stating that it is the killing of a person, and that he supports it. That, to me, is the honest position.

Could you have a guest on who is opposed to abortion from a purely humanistic, scientific, liberty perspective and leave religion out of it? That is where I am coming from, and I think it deserves more of a hearing than it gets.

Any suggestions? Jill Filipovic discussed abortion on the Dishcast last year. Here’s a recommendation for a future guest:

I’ve encouraged you to address the events transpiring in Iran because you wrote so beautifully about the 2009 Green Movement there. More recently, the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement has directly challenged the Iranian government. And now Iran is being drawn into the conflict in Israel/Palestine.

I suggest as a guest Masih Alinejad. She articulates what is happening in Iran very clearly and directly, she has been targeted in the US by the Iranian government, and the topic is both timely and deserving of greater public awareness. I know folks are constantly pushing you to have certain guests, so this is my two cents.

The Dish has a deep connection to the struggle for freedom in Iran. We’ll check Masih out. Another rec:

I recommend you invite Jeff Maurer on your podcast! He’s witty and hilarious and definitely to the left of you, but with no patience for excessively woke nonsense. I think it would be a good conversation.

A topic rec comes from a listener who “shares your agony of someone who loathes Trump but can’t rally behind Harris”:

I would greatly appreciate it if you dedicated a Dishcast or column to the various COVID policies implemented in the US (by Trump, Biden, different state governors, etc), and how they might be impacting moods toward the upcoming election. I am surprised some kind of reckoning has not happened in American politics over this — as it has in other places, including your home country — and I’m wondering if, like the Trump phenomenon at the outset, the COVID fallout lies just underneath the surface.

I say this as someone who initially went along with everything I was told: social distancing, lockdowns, masking, vaccines, etc. I may have even scolded others for not being more cautious (I live in New York, where the first wave was bleak). But as time went on, the non-aligned part of me — the part that voted for a third party candidate in 2016 and Biden in 2020 — couldn’t help but notice most of our pandemic policies were more ideological than they were practical. Everyone I knew was very cautious and got the virus anyway, some of them badly. That wasn’t what we were told would happen.

But instead of demonstrating humility and changing the recommendations based on the data, public officials turned the whole thing into a dangerous test of ideological purity. Many of my friends fell for the same trap, judging anyone who dared question things like the virus’s origin, school closures, or whether vaccines prevent transmission.

Meanwhile, the socioeconomic damage done by the policies were immense. For many, they turned out worse than the virus itself, provided they didn’t have a strong comorbidity. With the benefit of hindsight, we know the overreaction was a mistake. There is virtually no difference in terms of virus-related outcomes between states (or nations) that had the most draconian lockdowns/mandates and those that didn’t. But there was a major difference in every other kind of outcome, particularly for kids, the poor, and other underprivileged populations.

My hunch is that outrage over this is one reason Trump remains close in this race, despite all of his terrible flaws and the relatively strong Biden economy. Trump also failed on Covid in many ways, but he was only in charge for a part of it, and gets a pass because it was the most uncertain part. Hidden anger also explains certain demographic changes, like the Blacks and Latinos — particularly men — who are now more Trump-leaning than many would have thought. It wasn’t that long ago when Biden tried to pass a new rule that would bar millions of unvaccinated people from working — many of them black men — only to be shot down by the Supreme Court.

Anyway, I’m not looking for “I Told You Sos” here, but a proper reckoning — particularly for a leadership class that to this day refuses to acknowledge that it was wrong about anything, despite the terrible toll some of their mistakes took on the basic fabric of society. Regardless of what happens in November, our society will be reeling from this for a long time to come.

You describe my arc as well. I gave government a pass at first because no governments handle plagues well at the start. But, yes, the stark reality of an over-extended lockdown, and the high human cost, especially to children, slowly sunk in with me as well. It doesn’t feature that prominently in my thoughts this election season, but I can imagine that for man, it does.

A reader dissents:

I take issue with your disregard of the reality that FEMA is out of money partly because it’s being used for migrant housing and care. That is messed up; I’m upset that resources are not available for Americans in need. You ignored this reality because of the mouth it came out of. Just because Trump said it in his usual, coarse, inflammatory way doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I also don’t agree with your reference to Jack Smith’s one-sided court filing and its contents. This was so obviously released to influence the election (doesn’t that bother you?), and it’s filled with accusations that Trump has no opportunity to dispute. This is not justice; it’s sad partisanship in the Justice Department, which frightens me.

This is one of many reasons why I will swallow the bile in the back of my throat and vote for Trump. I’m with others who fear our future more with the left in charge, and this is based on recent history of both sides.

Yes, the timing of the Smith filing certainly helps Trump’s case that it’s about politics, not the law. (It’s not.) And yes, using FEMA as a way to settle paroled migrants muddles its mission. I sympathize with your discontent with the powers that currently be, and your fear of re-electing them. If it were any but Trump, I might be voting GOP as well.

Another reader continues a debate from last week:

I feel compelled to dissent over the dissenter who wrote, “But now, I feel silly having invested so emotionally in you. For all the conflict you had with Jon Stewart and others, you ultimately end up voting for the same person who absolutely supports all the things that you are afraid of with gender critical psychosis/religion.”

I’m a center-left Democrat who is no friend of the excesses of the far left, but I get very frustrated when pro-trans ideology gets pinned onto the people at the top of the Democratic Party.

It is absolutely not the case that Dem leaders like Kamala Harris wake up in the morning with the intention of increasing the number of gender surgeries on pre-teens, the number of trans women on high school swim teams, and so forth. That’s the job of trans activists, and Harris and Biden (and so on) are not trans activists. These initiatives are not on their policy platforms, nor are they on their lists of accomplishments.

The reality for elected officials is, when trans issues come up in the course of their work, most Republicans voice revulsion and most Democrats voice a desire to “live and let live” (or “mind your own business,” in the words of Walz). I completely understand that this liberal-minded desire to permit others to “live their truth” is often co-opted by nefarious interests to push this ideology and increase the number of medical procedures for minors. But having a permissive or hands-off attitude is very different than being a “supporter” or an ideologue about it.

To me, this falls into the same bucket as “Democrats want minorities to burn down inner cities in riots” and “Republicans want people to die because of a preexisting condition.” It’s a smear that does not reflect reality outside of a few far-gone wackos.

I disagree. The Biden administration forthrightly defends the transing of minors as “settled science.” They have not addressed the Cass Review. And while Harris is not a trans activist, she does whatever they tell her to. The Democrats’ policy on this is determined entirely by the trans queer interest groups.

Here’s another reader-on-reader response:

Your listener compared immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, to Ron DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard airlift — “one of the more telling incidents in recent memory”:

Martha’s Vineyard … made sure to exercise their power to expel 50 migrants in a matter of days. Yet working-class towns like Springfield, Ohio are apparently expected to absorb 20,000 migrants in a short time ….

This incident is the opposite of “telling”. Haitian immigrants were given the opportunity to move to Springfield due to its having many available jobs (because of a labor shortage) and affordable housing. All of the groundwork to accommodate them was done in advance.

DeSantis, on the other hand, used Florida taxpayers’ money to transport Venezuelans from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard as a campaign stunt by lying to those immigrants about jobs and “working papers” supposedly waiting for them. He never told anyone in Martha’s Vineyard in advance, to make sure that no preparations could be made. He moved them at the end of the summer season when most of the jobs disappear. So there was absolutely nothing there for them, although the residents did all they could to help them. The island did not “expel” them; they were rescued from their ordeal and moved to a place where their needs could be met.

DeSantis abused these desperate people. I agree that too many foreigners arriving in too short of a time can be highly problematic, but your listener’s argument is bogus. Yet you called it “Beautifully put.” I dissent. DeSantis cynically made sure that disaster would ensue and that people like your listener would write criticisms of liberal “elites” like the one you published. His trap was clearly marked, but you both fell into it.

And another:

I have to express my astonishment at how fantastically deluded some of your readers are. Kamala Harris is going to lead America to communism? Give me a break! There is plenty to criticize Harris on, but it is certainly not that she is too far to the left. The Democratic Party is — and in my lifetime has always been — a center-right political party. They couldn’t even get universal healthcare passed, for goodness’ sake! The fact some people might believe otherwise just goes to show how spectacularly right-slanted the American political conversation is.

Aggrieved conservatives like to imagine they are the true victims of oppression because it fits their apocalyptic world view and dovetails neatly into their populist, fear-driven campaign strategy. Yet in reality, due to the undemocratic structure of the American political system, Republicans have disproportionately more political power than Democrats, so much so that anyone running on the federal level — like Harris — has to spend the entire campaign pandering to a tiny cohort of consequential voters who have been inundated by propaganda pushed on media platforms funded by right-wing billionaires. Meanwhile, the courts and the legislature already lean heavily conservative, so it’s risible to think they will suddenly flip to reveal their secret communist agendas if Harris were to be elected president.

Maybe you should invite some actual socialists or communists onto the pod so your readers can understand just how very, very far away from that any of the Democrats running for office in the US really are. Or at least speak to people who have lived as adults under actual authoritarian regimes so they can shed some light on what a real institutional crackdown on political dissent looks like. (Hint: it’s nothing like the US, or Canada, or the UK.)

On a recent column:

I appreciated your “anguished” piece explaining why you plan to vote for Harris. For me, it’s a no-brainer that I can’t vote for Trump. He broke, as David Frum put it, the “indispensable norm” with his behavior after the 2020 election. I’ve never thought of myself as someone who particularly cared about character in elected officials — some pretty despicable human beings seem to be able to make reasonably competent politicians — but I’ve never witnessed a public figure with a character so repugnant as Trump’s. I wouldn’t vote for him for town councilman, let alone POTUS.

That said, the thought of voting for Harris really sticks in my craw. It isn’t so much her wokeness that bothers me (though it does). While I’m sure her true self is to the left of me politically, I think she’s more of a cynical opportunist than a committed leftist; I put her 2019 positions down to ambition much more than conviction.

What really bothers me is the thought of rewarding the Democratic Party for its cynicism and smugness. The Dems have been saying for years that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. I actually think they may be right, but they sure don’t behave like they think they’re right.

In the face of abnormal threats, political parties are supposed to stop behaving normally — to put national unity ahead of party unity. The Dems have done the opposite, as the NYT argued in a long article some months ago about how Biden has governed: after running as a national-unity candidate, he prioritized party unity. That speech he gave at Independence Hall warning about the MAGA threat was par for the course. It was completely fine for him to argue that MAGA poses an abnormal threat, but it wasn’t fine for him to him to lump being pro-life in with the MAGA threat to democracy. Obstructing the peaceful transition of power threatens basic liberal-democratic guardrails; being pro-life does not (and I say that as someone who’s pro-choice). It belies the Dems’ message about the abnormal threat from Trump to use it to advance a normal pro-choice agenda.

Their smugness compounds my fury. Michelle Goldberg perfectly captured that smugness when she responded to your expression of reservations about Harris by saying, “But do you care?” As in, “Given how awful Trump is, it’s obviously ridiculous to expect his opponent to stand for anything other than being Not Trump, you silly peasant. Stop trying to use your brain or to have principles.” The Dems appear to truly believe that anti-Trump Americans neither feel nor have any right to feel insulted at being taken for granted. And then they gaslight us by claiming that they’re not taking us for granted. Weirdly, this treatment does not make me excited to vote for Harris.

I’d feel better about voting for her if she showed the slightest flicker of understanding that the Dems need an internal reckoning almost as much as the GOP does. But she doesn’t. As demonstrated by her pivot towards the center, she supplies no grounds for confidence that the pivot is anything other than superficial and tactical. She would need to provide an explanation for the changes in her positions, and better yet to express regret for having taken such far-left positions in 2019, but she doesn’t

I have no more sympathy for the argument that Harris just did what a Dem had to do to get ahead in 2019 than I do for Republicans who try to justify their Trump apologism by arguing that they’re just doing what a Republican has to do to get ahead in the Trump era. Such arguments are threadbare rationalizations for moral cowardice.

The bare minimum for any Dem to earn my respect is to acknowledge that woke cancel culture and 2020 riots hurt innocent people. (And if I were one of the people who had my store burned down or lost my job, I’d want a hell of a lot more than an acknowledgement.) If Trump loses, and Republicans no longer feel the need to kowtow to him, the bare minimum for JD Vance to earn my respect will be to apologize for his January 6th apologetics. (And if I were, say, Mike Pence or Adam Kinzinger, I’d want a hell of a lot more than an apology.)

With Harris, the threat isn’t so much what she’ll do but what she won’t do. She won’t push back against left-wing bias in the nation’s epistemic institutions on the principle that it poses a relatively slow but profoundly dangerous threat to liberal democracy. She won’t demand that the left balance its rhetorical egalitarianism with a commitment to standards and excellence. She won’t try to secure the border on the principle that border control is part of Sovereignty 101; at most, she’ll take some lukewarm actions to reduce the Dems’ political vulnerability.

In short, she won’t do anything to arrest or reverse the nation’s drift and decline. and she might even speed it up a bit. I think Trump would speed it up even faster.

The bottom line is, both candidates and both parties stink. SMH, FML, etc.

My reader’s email is eerily close to my own inner monologue. But I’m a grownup, and will do the distasteful but necessary thing. This next reader is much more bullish on Harris:

I am tired of hearing you call Kamala Harris an empty vessel. She’s 60. She’s had a life and a very public career. She’s pro-reproductive freedom. Anti-capital punishment. Prefers needs-based federal support. Equity is a dream, but she knows it’s not a realistic goal. America will always have its one-percenters — the Musks and Gates and Swifts. She just wants more equitable outcomes. You see the income gaps. It’s not sustainable.

I see a deeply pragmatic person in Harris. Not an ideologue. She probably will annoy progressives by cutting deals to get things done. She will change her position — she did on fracking, obviously.

You spoke a lot about Obama’s temperament (I’m a longtime reader). Please consider hers. She has a thick skin. She has humor. She has avoided identity politics within reason. Writers keep saying she grew up in a bubble. Tell me, what bubble protects a South-Asian/Black kid growing up in a middle-class household? Maybe a middle-class bubble, but many people have that advantage. She had smart parents, which seems like a good thing. But she probably dealt with crap all minority women face. Hence her very thick skin.

Happy to air your perspective. But I’m afraid she is no Obama. Another dissent:

There is so much wrong with your claim that the 2017 tax cut “benefited the wealthy far more than the middle class.” If a small percentage change for the very wealthy means more dollars saved than a large percentage change for the average taxpayer, the wealthy person has not benefitted “far more.”

As example, if we cut the taxes of the top .001% by one percentage point, they would save almost $2 million. If we took an earner smack in the middle of the income spectrum and gave him 10X his earnings as a bonus, he would receive around $450,000. Has the wealthy taxpayer gotten “far more” benefit in this example, or have you failed to appreciate the staggering amount of tax burden shouldered by the top earners?

The arguments you link to in the CBPP article are also quite deceptive. They don’t want you to know that federal revenue increased after the tax cuts. They make the argument that the tax cuts led to a reduction in revenue as a percentage of GDP, which is an argument for the cuts. Why wouldn’t they want more revenue and more GDP? They don’t say. Government spending in the US is clocking in at over $800 per person per day. That means that a family of four is accounting for over $1.1 million per year in government spending. If more money could solve our problems, why haven’t they been solved?

In other words, we don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem.

Lastly, people calling for higher taxes are failing to understand human nature and the driving force of incentives. When tax rates are high, people are rewarded for finding ways around them, and they frequently succeed in doing so. If taxes were lower, so too would the incentive be to alter behavior. Tax advocates say they want more revenue for the government, but I’d bet my tax return that they could get there by simplifying and reducing taxes to the point where individuals and businesses are no longer incentivized to avoid them.

On a personal note, I was puzzled to see people saying they are “abandoning” you because you endorsed Harris. Don’t forget there are many of us who value voices we disagree with, and maybe we just don’t say so enough. Don’t let them get you down. (I doubt you need the encouragement, but it never hurts.)

I hope at this point Dish readers are not subscribing because they agree with me on everything. Au contraire. One more dissenter looks across the Pond:

You recently claimed that you would have voted Tory because of the immigration issue. But it was under the Tories that we saw the huge migration spike:

Whilst the Tories may have made huge political noise about stopping illegal immigration, 90+% of this spike is legal immigration — those arriving in the UK at the government’s consent and/or request, propping up the care and health sectors and providing what money folk call “stealth stimuli” to the economy.

Also, your recent diatribes about London being unrecognisable and overwhelmed by migrants were irrational and perplexing. You were visiting as a tourist and therefore your experience is totally different to someone who lives there. And how were you able to determine which people were migrants and which were tourists? Central London, like the centre of any other world city, has always been heavily dominated by both tourists and migrants.

I have been relentless in pointing out the Tories’ failure on legal immigration. I’ve taken Boris to the woodshed several times. So you’re wrong on that. As for London, I compare it to the many visits I’ve had since I left 40 years ago. And the data show that 40 percent of Londoners were not born in the UK — a historically unprecedented number. What struck me most in my recent visits was how my small hometown in rural England was also so multiracial: barely an English accent among retailers on the High Street. England has been transformed as the English are being replaced by newcomers in a way unheard of in 2000 years. Maybe that’s a good or necessary thing (although at the recent pace, it’s nuts). But it sure is seismic, and anyone who thinks it won’t cause a reaction is dreaming.

Thanks as always for the dissents and other emails, and send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com so we can keep the debate going. Until then, Truman needs a walk — he’s staring me down right now:

Another really enjoys the VFYW contest:

I went to the archives and skimmed through the early years of window contest! How interesting to see the evolution and be a part of such fun, because Chris and the early sleuths stuck with it. Congrats on something that you, I’m sure, never guessed would become what it is now.

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