The ultimate goal is to punch holes in the “real man” credentials of someone like Walz, and thereby undermine his popularity with men.
When right-wing activists and media personalities (falsely) accuse Tim Walz of deliberately misrepresenting his military record, they’re not just attacking his honor and integrity, and therefore his character. The actual—although unspoken—target of the attacks on Walz’s career in the Army National Guard is his masculinity.
The reason is straightforward: Military service confers a certain kind of masculine street cred on men who wear the uniform. As a result, when a male candidate has a record of service—especially if he’s a Democrat—right-wing operatives make it a point to plant seeds of doubt about whether they were truly worthy of that respect. It’s a battle tactic in the political war: The ultimate goal is to punch holes in the “real man” credentials of someone like Walz, and thereby undermine his popularity with men.
At its heart, the issue revolves around the story a candidate’s bio tells the electorate about them. Both sides, of course, have a stake in their version of the story. In this situation, one side wants to use a man’s connection to the military in order to bolster his masculine credibility, and the other side wants to poke holes in the story in order to diminish the political advantages it gives him.
Unfortunately, political commentators in the media rarely see fit to mention the gender angle—or seemingly even notice it. But any analysis on the topic of male candidates and military service that doesn’t talk about masculinity is superficial and incomplete. Militaries are deeply gendered institutions that both rely upon and help to generate normative ideas about masculinity and femininity, as the eminent feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe has long maintained.
The degree to which military service can help a male candidate for political office depends upon how people understand that service. Take the “controversy” over Tim Walz’s time in the Army National Guard, which has emerged over the past week as an important campaign issue and focus of massive media coverage. Right-wing strategists and opinion-makers realize that the Minnesota governor’s background disrupts a core feature of their business model, which is to market right-wing politics—and in the current political moment, identification with Trumpism—as fundamentally “masculine.”
From the moment he burst onto the national stage as Harris’ pick for VP, Walz has been described in terms that reinforce his positive and sometimes stereotypically masculine traits. He hunts, fishes and coached football. People say he has “big dad energy.” Obama strategist David Axelrod quipped on NPR that Walz is a “Norman Rockwell painting sprung to life.”
But for the right, the most troubling aspect of Walz’s resume is his military service, which carries with it many associations of duty, honor and patriotism, as well as physical bravery and a willingness to put oneself in harm’s way to protect the nation. If word gets out that men with liberal and progressive views also serve and have served in the military, it’s not as easy to make the facile and reductive claim that men who serve in the military—some of the toughest and bravest among us—necessarily have right-wing politics.
Some background is useful here. Over the past 50 years, when Republicans have won the presidency, it’s been largely by running up huge margins with white male voters, especially those with a high school education. According to 2020 exit polls, Trump beat Joe Biden 70 percent to 28 percent among these voters. To be sure, GOP strategists target other demographics as well. For example, they also win big with high school-educated white women, but less so than with the men, and for reasons that differ slightly.
But since 1980, GOP campaigns have primarily targeted white men. Their appeal to these men (especially working and middle-class white men) has been based on identity politics: coded and explicit messages to them as white men—not simply as white people—who have an identity investment in supporting a political movement and party that claims to speak for them and their interests.
Many analysts have sought to explain the ways in which a party whose main legislative priorities are tax and regulatory cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations manages to attract the votes of tens of millions of working people, whose economic interests clearly diverge from those of plutocrats. Why do so many blue-collar voters support the GOP, the (primary) party of Wall Street? Thomas Frank’s classic book What’s the Matter with Kansas? addressed this vexing question, along with a pile of other books and a mountain of political science research.
Frank and many others maintain that a big part of the problem is that political discourse in media and elsewhere often fails to address core economic issues and focuses instead on “social issues.” True enough, but let’s go one step further and stipulate that “social issues” is often shorthand for matters of race, gender and sexuality. Let’s go even further and say that for two generations, the GOP’s core electoral message to men—especially white men—has been: Real men vote Republican.
That was certainly the message of this summer’s Republican National Convention, a four-day extravaganza of chest-beating hypermasculinity, dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump is the living embodiment of a Marvel superhero, and that any man who planned to vote for Joe Biden (before he withdrew from the race) was an emasculated cuck.
… Which brings us back to right-wing attacks on Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s military service. Opponents of the Harris-Walz ticket want to put a dent in Walz’s growing popularity in these crucial early days of his candidacy, before he’s fully introduced to the nation.
What better way to damage his reputation than to claim—as Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance did last week—that despite 24 years of dedicated and highly successful military service, Walz is claiming to be “something he is not,” another scandalous instance of “stolen valor”?
Vance’s criticism is cynical and deeply disingenuous. Take, for example, the allegation of Vance and others that the Walz campaign bio said that he retired as a command sergeant major in the National Guard, the highest rank of non-commissioned officer. At the end of his career, he did serve as a command sergeant major. But because he left the Guard before he completed a required course, his official rank upon retirement (for benefits purposes) was master sergeant. At most this is a technical matter, unworthy of public controversy.
Vance also chastised Walz for claiming in a 2018 interview that he carried a weapon “in war,” when he had not served in combat. Walz acknowledged that this was a misstatement, which seems entirely plausible, especially since there have been no similar instances in his many years of public life.
As for the charge that Walz left his unit before a crucial overseas deployment, Walz retired almost a full year before that occurred, but only after agonizing over the decision. He knew that his battalion faced a possible deployment to Iraq at some point soon. But he was 41 years old, had been in the Guard 24 years and was exploring a run for Congress.
“In talking with him, it was a hard decision,” Joseph Eustice, a soldier who served under Walz, told The New York Times. “The guy I knew in the Guard, I’d walk through a wall for.”
Soon after Walz was announced as Harris’ VP pick, right-wing media outlets scrambled to find former military members willing and eager to discredit him by casting aspersions on various details of his military record. Other military veterans defended him.
One of them was former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura (I), himself a former Navy Seal. Ventura, who supports the Harris-Walz ticket, was highly critical of the way in which JD Vance, who served four years in the Marines, criticized Walz’s service. In blunt language delivered with force and passion, Ventura told CNN’s Laura Coates that Vance’s negative comments about his fellow veteran were “shameful,” and a “disservice” to himself and the United States Marine Corps. “I know a lot of Marines,” he said, “and Marines show respect… Vance is not showing respect.”
The insinuation that Walz abandoned his brothers and sisters in arms at a critical moment is an intentional distortion, more on the level of manipulative propaganda than a statement of fact. There was little surprise, then, that the name of Donald Trump’s senior advisor and co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita came up in relation to this sordid affair.
LaCivita is one of the people responsible for the infamous “Swift Boat” ad smear campaign in the 2004 presidential campaign, in which the decorated Vietnam War combat veteran former Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) was challenging incumbent Republican President George W. Bush. Over the past week, many commentators have noted that the current right-wing effort to delegitimize Walz’s military bona fides is reminiscent of the “Swift Boat” episode, with LaCivita at the center of both efforts, then and now. Attacking the masculinity of liberal and progressive men appears to be in his professional DNA.
In a Mother Jones piece, Stephanie Mencimer quoted LaCivita’s friend Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic operative who directs Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.
“Chris is one of the most effective campaign operatives I have ever known,” Elleithee said. “He is a brass knuckle brawler who understands what moves voters better than almost any operative I have ever known on either side of the aisle. And he pulls no punches.”
It seems that LaCivita, a former Marine, knows exactly what he’s doing: driving a wedge between Democratic candidates and potential male voters by attacking the candidate’s manhood through criticism of his military record. It’s a key tactic in the right-wing campaign strategist playbook. But few people in the mainstream political commentariat appear willing or able to analyze the deeper gendered meanings of political attacks on the credibility of a man’s military service, by LaCivita or anyone else.
What can Democrats do about this line of attack? It matters how the candidate and his surrogates respond. If they don’t react forcefully, people begin to wonder if the charges are true. Perhaps even more damaging, failure to fight back can leave the impression that the candidate is not tough enough to defend his own honor and reputation. The message is clear: If he can’t fight for himself, how can he fight for you?
For whatever reason, Kerry did not mount a forceful defense of his record in 2004. His campaign said it was due to the high cost of advertising, a shortage of available funds, and the need to conserve resources for a final ad push in the fall. Robert Shrum, a senior advisor on the Kerry campaign, acknowledged in his memoir that they should have “hit back hard and early.”
But nowhere in Shrum’s public comments or published writing have I come across any indication that he or others on the campaign understood that the failure to do so damaged perceptions about Kerry’s masculinity, especially among the male voters he needed to chip away at Bush’s large lead among men.
The entry of Walz into the race, and the emergence of organizations like White Dudes for Harris, have generated a newfound appreciation of the need for the Democrats to speak directly to the concerns and interests of men.
A hopeful sign in the current moment is that Walz has strongly defended his record, as have many of his political surrogates, along with untold numbers of veterans and non-veterans on TV and all over social media, where posts defending and praising his service have proliferated.
Another way for the Harris-Walz team and other Democrats to forcefully counter these charges (as Kerry failed to do) is to take them at their word that evaluating the military service of candidates—or how candidates responded when called to war—is fair game and important.
They might consider talking about the well-documented deceptions and lies Donald Trump used to get out of serving during the Vietnam War (“bone spurs”). Or about the many ways in which Trump has shown contempt over the years for those who have served—especially those who were wounded or made the ultimate sacrifice.
Until very recently, few Democratic Party strategists and consultants have seemed to grasp the central role of masculinity in presidential politics. One exception is James Carville, whose pointed comments in June about the Democrats’ “huge male problem” were overshadowed by his use of demeaning language when he criticized the “preachy females” in the party who are partly responsible.
The entry of Walz into the race, and the emergence of organizations like White Dudes for Harris, have generated a newfound appreciation of the need for the Democrats to speak directly to the concerns and interests of men. Not incidentally, these developments have come at a time when it has become increasingly clear to liberals and progressives that millions of men and young men are struggling, and as a result are especially susceptible to manipulative charlatans and authoritarian demagogues.
The good news is that the enthusiastic response Harris and Walz have been getting at rallies across the country—including in battleground states—suggests that many men are open to hearing about and participating in a more aspirational and hopeful story about the ways in which they can do their part as men to create a more inclusive, healthier and safer society.
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