Tim Walz is Weird

I have to write about the American vice presidential debate. I’m sorry about this. I try to let Americans talk about American politics, and also I think debates are dumb. They matter far less than many claim, and I generally find the discourse they encourage shallow and irrelevant. The J.D. Vance vs. Tim Walz debate was probably typical, at least in the first respect, but for once I found it oddly entrancing – and not because Vance easily outclassed his opponent, “winning” the performance by pretty much any definition of the term.

No, that’s not what interested me; I expected Vance to do well. What really surprised me was Tim Walz – the things he said, sure, but also his weird gestures, his weird facial expressions and his weird syntactic entanglements. He’s just so bizarre, in many ways an unusual specimen. Exactly what’s wrong with him is hard to identify, but after much pondering I’ve decided that his strangeness has two elements:

Firstly, he is an archetypal gelded progressivoid male, of the kind I came to know well during my years in American academia. Universities are full of male professors stitched after the pattern of Tim Walz. They labour under grievous testosterone deficiencies, they are terrified of conflict and they are embarrassed about their own masculinity. They are the kind of men who sit with their thighs pressed together so as not to manspread. You always think they’re harmless, because all it takes is a few sharp words to get them to shut up and because in personal conversation they have nothing to offer but slavering flattery and deference. In my experience, however, this breed is likely to be malign and dangerous. Everything you say to them goes in a little file that they use for their petty plotting. They’re always triangulating and scheming, they’re terrible gossips, and they’re perfectly happy to hurt themselves if only they can hurt you too.

Secondly, Walz is a nearly perfect example of a political phenomenon that has interested me since I’ve been paying attention to politics. This is the weaponised mediocrity and the depressing sameness of establishment Western politicians. They’re all focus-grouped to the gills. Everything they say is a tiresome rehearsal of things you’ve heard a million times before. From Angela Merkel to Tony Blair to Barack Obama, none of them ever come out with anything original. Occasionally, a new buzz phrase will enter the political lexicon and they’ll all start repeating it within days of each other, like a human botnet. They’re over-practised and deeply generic, like a bunch of D-list actors in a tiresome made-for-TV drama reading lines that somebody else wrote. A major reason for the intense personal popularity that many populist, anti-establishment political figures enjoy – from Nigel Farage to Alice Weidel to Donald Trump – is simply their deviation from these grey and dystopian tendencies. They say new, original things and they seem to have real personalities. Even if you don’t like them, even if you’ll never vote for them, it’s such a relief to encounter any sentient being at all in this desert world.

Tim Walz obviously provides no such relief. In fact he’s at the other extreme. He’s taken the mimeographed late-liberal political act and pushed it almost into the realm of parody. I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally, Western politics gives us actors who are trying to play the role of politicians. Walz is like an actor who is trying to play the role of an actor trying to play the role of a politician. Almost everything about him is just a few degrees off-centre. He’s like what would happen if you endowed Chat GPT with a human body and sent it off to campaign for political office.

What lends Walz his odd large-language-model aspect, is the fact that his artificiality has a subtlety to it. If he’s just talking on the television in the background while you’re texting your friends you won’t notice he’s weird. If you like to cook while grazing the evening news, he’ll come off like every other politician. But when you start paying attention, Walz often stops making sense. He comes to resemble a robot who almost, but not quite, passes the Turing Test. The more you listen to him – the more closely you parse his words – the more creeped out you get.

It’s like the man has been programmed to mimic the aesthetic of political discourse without having any native understanding of the words. He moves from canned, pre-prepared speech to canned, pre-prepared speech, trying to glue these prefabricated text blocks together with random verbiage that he picks up from the immediate context. Now and again, when he’s forced to go off script, the whole charade falls apart, and he finds himself uttering disconnected noun phrases that go nowhere and mean nothing. And all the while, there’s his face, man. His face. His expressions are just too exaggerated, too transparent, too bizarre.

We’re going to go through this whole debate. I’m going to explain to you in gruesome detail what I mean.