The deep history of Tim Walz’s populist roots

Kamala Harris’s running mate hails from a region with a long-running tradition of egalitarian politics.

After Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative political magazine National Review, declared on X, formerly Twitter, that the Minnesota governor “is an MSNBC anchor’s idea of a folksy politician who can appeal to Middle America”. Lowry was superficially accurate: liberal news anchors cover Walz warmly, as they would any Democrat running for vice-president.

But Lowry’s jibe also betrayed a common misperception: that conservatism comes naturally to rural America, and that any back-country politician who professes left-of-centre politics must be inauthentic. It’s an ahistorical stereotype also prevalent with some urban progressives, the kind who seize up whenever they spot a speeding Ford pick-up in the rear-view mirror.

In fact, rural America has given rise to honourable traditions of egalitarian politics. Not all of it, to be sure: in the South, agrarian politics were often racist and reactionary. But further north and especially in the Upper Great Plains region – composed of Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota – farmers mounted class-based resistance against economic exploitation and cultural chauvinism going back to the 19th century.

Confronting social antagonism, the progressive farmers of the Plains didn’t succumb to the wistful romanticism characteristic of the Southern spirit. They embraced technological progress and pragmatic reform, welcoming railroads but also insisting on regulating their power. It was likely no accident that these places were typically settled by even-tempered, solidaristic-minded Nordic and German migrants with last names like Walz.

Yet the socialist and progressive past of the Great Plains is almost completely occluded by the fog of historical amnesia that clouds the American mind. You can catch a glimpse of that past in the 1978 independent film Northern Lights, which tells the thinly fictionalised story of the Nonpartisan League, or NPL, the socialist agrarian movement that swept the region in the 1910s and 1920s and whose influence decisively shaped the political economy of North Dakota. In those days, as the farmer protagonist recalls in a flashback voiceover, “we had the powers that be on the run”, referring to urban banks, insurers, railroads, and food processors who had until then controlled the local economy.

The NPL was born in 1915 in North Dakota as a movement of disaffected farmers fed up with the control exerted over their economic lives by outside capitalists. The movement gathered “an immense following,” as one Great Plains historian has written, and its programme soon included “state ownership and operation of terminal elevators, flour mills, packing houses, and cold-storage plants; a state hail-insurance plan; the exemption of farm tools from taxation; and cooperative rural banks”.

League leaders viewed both Republicans and Democrats as vehicles of the ruling class, but vowed to support any political candidate who would advance agrarian socialism. In practice, its politicians ran as Republicans in 1916, taking the governor’s mansion and the state’s lower legislature, and sending a representative to Washington.

Two years later, NPL lawmakers swept both chambers and soon enacted much of the movement’s agenda. In the years that followed, the league extended its reach into other Great Plains states and even across the border into Canada, though its successes remained modest outside North Dakota, where the state’s Democratic Party is still officially known as the North Dakota Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party (the more pro-union and radical elements of the NPL eventually aligned themselves with the Democrats after the movement’s heyday).

The NPL had its best performance in rural Nebraska, where Walz was born, in the 1920 elections. Its large German-American population, tired of accusations of disloyalty throughout the First World War, rallied to the league as a defender of civil liberties – even though the NPL’s advocacy of prohibition and women’s suffrage irritated their communal customs. The NPL’s stark radicalism still startles: during the First World War, the party argued corporate America was “ten times worse than the German autocrats”.

Is Walz, then, a direct heir to this tradition? No. He’s mostly a standard-issue modern Democrat, a loyalist who, as one liberal activist told me, signs whatever bills the party puts in front of him. But there are things about him that are reminiscent of those Great Plains traditions. There is the fact that he doesn’t own any equities or even real estate (his assets seem entirely to be bound up in public pension plans), or the fact that he charmingly equates socialism with “neighbourliness”.

Last year, he signed into a law a sweeping package of pro-labour and pro-family reforms, including new workplace standards for nursing homes; a ban against so-called non-compete agreements that prevent workers from seeking employment at other firms or starting their own; and rules against captive-audience meetings, in which employees are compelled to attend partisan or anti-union messaging on pain of losing their livelihoods.

If Walz leans into this sort of bread-and-butter left populism, he can pose a formidable threat to the right populism represented by the Trump movement. The danger for the Minnesota governor is that, rather than renewing the spirit of his own region’s traditions of egalitarian politics and bringing them to the national stage, he will play another, less worthy rural stereotype: the with-it schoolteacher in a red state who, unlike his uncouth and ignorant neighbours, studiously upholds the fashions of the metropole (often adopted a couple seasons too late).

America could very much use a left populist with rural roots, drawing on the rich history of the region. What it doesn’t need is a “hick lib”.