“Tim Walz is an MSNBC anchor’s idea of a folksy politician who can appeal to Middle America.” So declared Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative political magazine National Review, on X, formerly known as Twitter, soon after Kamala Harris tapped the Minnesota governor to serve as her running mate. Lowry was superficially on the mark: liberal news anchors are indeed warmly covering Walz, as they would any Democrat running for veep.
But Lowry’s crack also betrayed an all-too-common misperception: that conservatism comes naturally to rural America, and that any backcountry politician who professes left-of-centre politics must be inauthentic. It’s an ahistorical stereotype prevalent not just among right-wingers like Lowry, but also some urban progressives, the kind who seize with anxiety the minute they spot a speeding Ford pick-up truck in the rearview mirror.
In fact, rural America has given rise to honourable traditions of egalitarian politics. Not all of rural America, to be sure: in the South, agrarian politics were often racist and reactionary. But farther north and especially in the Upper Great Plains region — composed of Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota — farmers have mounted class-based resistance against economic exploitation and cultural chauvinism, going back to the 19th century.
Confronting sharp social antagonism, the progressive farmers of the Plains didn’t succumb to the wistful romanticism so characteristic of the Southern spirit. Instead, they embraced technological progress and pragmatic reform, embracing railroads, for example, 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 ’20s 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 major parties, Republicans and Democrats, as vehicles of the ruling class. The NPL vowed to support any political candidate who would advance agrarian socialism, regardless of party affiliation. In practice, league politicians ran as Republicans in 1916, taking the lower chamber of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion 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).
In rural Nebraska, where Tim Walz was born, the NPL had its best performance in the 1920 elections, in which the state’s large German-American population, tired of accusations of disloyalty over the course of World War One, rallied to the league as a defender of civil liberties. (They did so, even though the leagues’ advocacy of prohibition and women’s suffrage irritated the Germans’ communal customs.) The NPL’s stark radicalism can startle us to this day. During World War One, for example, the party argued that 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 that would make any old Leaguer proud, including new workplace standards for nursing homes; a ban against so-called noncompete agreements that prevent workers from seeking employment at other firms or starting their own; and rules against captive-audience meetings, in which employers compel employees to sit through 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”.
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