Why the Left Shouldn’t Get Too Carried Away by the Harris-Walz Hype

The optimistic interpretation of all this is that progressives’ enthusiasm for these normie politicians reflects their pragmatic willingness to embrace the best available candidates for the job. These officials and their aides have taken note of this ironic goodwill as a sign that people to their left might be worth welcoming—or at least not actively despising. The cynical interpretation is that the audience that feeds on memes about Kamala being a kid and Tim Walz being a dad is extremely small; that the far more important factor in Harris’s choice of Walz was behind-the-scenes squabbles between figures like Nancy Pelosi and John Fetterman.

It’s enjoyable and generally harmless to have fun online and take a victory lap in the midst of a worsening planetary catastrophe. At the risk of creating a buzz, however, the shitposting community shouldn’t get so caught up in all the hype surrounding Harris and Walz that they forget who they really are or how little power we have. After initially voicing his opposition, for example, Walz green light an expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, which was widely opposed by indigenous tribes and environmentalists. His government was criticaland for allowing industrial polluters to have too close a relationship with Minnesota’s environmental regulators. These are not reasons to object to Walz’s place on the ticket! He’s probably the best person Harris could have chosen, and a Trump presidency promises to reverse the modest progress made on climate at the federal level — and then reverse it in 2011. in disturbing new ways.

But you don’t have to go far back in history to find an example of overwhelming online support for a popular, little-known politician gone sour. Fetterman repeatedly courted progressives and ran a meme-driven campaign for his Senate seat, trolling his Republican opponent, Dr. Oz, as an out-of-touch, out-of-state ghoul. Then Fetterman turned out to be a ghoul himself, cutting ties with the progressives who helped elect him to become one of his party’s most vocal supporters of Israel’s brutal war on the Palestinians. He has continued to become increasingly vocal about his right-wing views on everything from lab-grown meat to energy policy.