The word that people keep using to describe Tim Walz – whether they mean it as an insult or as a compliment – is progressive. Since Kamala Harris named him her running mate, he has been called a “true progressive,” “far-left progressive,” and “extremely progressive.”
But that’s not right. Walz was a Democratic Party Democrat during his many years in Congress. In his six years as Minnesota governor, he sometimes opposed progressive legislation that businesses warned would cost jobs, and he earned a reputation for pragmatism, respect for the individual and government-funded investment in civil society. So why not call him a liberal?
One reason for this is that the word liberal has gone out of style. The great achievements of liberalism—the welfare state, investment in infrastructure, civil rights, and taxpayer-funded investments in health, education, and social welfare—never became universal as they have in other countries. Despite their strong commitment to social movements, liberals were too slow to make changes and left too many behind. In the 1990s, neoliberalism—a philosophy of free-market deregulation—undid or weakened many of the postwar liberal gains of the Democratic Party. Rightly or wrongly, activists in the social, labor, feminist, and LGBTQ movements began to reclaim these principles, rebranding them with a new term associated with 20th-century leftist reforms and a commitment to identity politics: progressive.
The word liberal is still commonly used to describe political places west of conservative and east of radical, but it has become meaningless. Walz’s record, however, is a good introduction to what liberalism stands for: the belief that government can improve lives by strengthening institutions and guaranteeing individual freedoms. If Harris and Walz want to unite the party’s factions at the Democratic convention in Chicago, they should take the opportunity to call that ethic what it is: liberalism.
As governor, Walz signed a $93 million bill to improve mental health care. His administration guaranteed free breakfast and lunch at school for all children, as well as free access to menstrual products. He signed three bills banning conversion therapy for children, improving access to gender-affirming health care, and protecting access to abortion. This year, Walz delivered his State of the State address in a brand new high school built with public and private money, and spoke about Minnesota’s investments in children, including a $5.5 billion education bill.
These policies fit perfectly into the liberal tradition of the Democratic Party, which began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, solidified in Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and culminated 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 connection to that tradition is real: He began his political career in Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), a liberal alliance of rural and urban voters, traditional Democrats, and New Deal-era prairie populists.
Somewhere in the afterlife, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the first Minnesotan to win the national nomination, grins as he looks down on a white Minnesotan traveling across the country with a black woman. Known as the “Boy Mayor” because he took office at the youthful age of 34, Humphrey led the effort to merge the state’s weak Democratic Party with the Farmer-Labor Party; then expelled communists from the coalition after they tried to use it for their own ends.
Humphrey had a clear vision for liberal governance, forged in his effort to unite his state’s moderate farmers, small-town businessmen, and industrial workers. In 1948, he gave a speech to the DNC calling for the party to include a civil rights issue in its platform for the first time. He was virtually unknown outside the state at the time, but when the issue passed, it helped him enter the Senate, where he worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As Johnson’s vice president, he was also instrumental in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Humphrey was complicit in some of liberalism’s greatest mistakes, including the failure to adequately address poverty and racial violence and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Yet 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 its citizens at every stage of life, and how it cared for the most vulnerable.
Humphrey’s DFL heirs have repeatedly brought liberalism’s commitments back to the national stage. “Humphrey begot Walter Mondale, who begot Paul Wellstone, who begot Amy Klobuchar and Walz,” James Traub, a Humphrey biographer, told me. “This genetic code combines the prairie populists’ faith in the little man, the farmer and worker, FDR’s faith in the activist state, and Truman’s and JFK’s internationalism.”
Liberalism is also a political style that seeks to resolve disputes – a contrast to a Republican Party that is constantly in a rage, whether over the books in the library or who is in the adjacent bathroom stall. “These guys are just weird,” Walz – now famous – said in an MSNBC interview. He spoke instead of “decency” and the Democrats’ “positive future of America,” of reviving manufacturing jobs and investing in infrastructure: measures that come about through “joint efforts.” Republican criticism of such initiatives, he argued, is hysterical. “They scream socialism,” Walz said. “We just build roads, we build schools and we create wealth.”
Progressive politicians have good reasons to embrace Walz, but he is not part of their wing of the party. Democrats should proudly call him what he is: a liberal. Progressivism may signal a meaningful identity, but liberalism is a governing philosophy, and Democrats will need it to form a common front against Trumpism. Choosing Tim Walz as their vice presidential candidate is an important sign that Harris is committed to that vision and that Democrats can make the compromises necessary to win. Liberalism, after all, is not the absence of conflict: It is the way Americans work together across differences to advance human well-being.
