Former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently told an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School that former Vice President Kamala Harris chose him as a running mate because of his uncanny ability to connect with the average Caucasian cisgender dude. “I could code talk to white guys — watching football, fixing their truck,” he explained. “I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”

It’s true, all the fellas are talking about “permission structures” these days.

Alas, the White Guy Whisperer didn’t really help the Democratic Party ticket at all in 2024. Part of the problem, one imagines, is that the governor of Minnesota has an utterly deluded conception of himself as the embodiment of the working-class male. Though even if he were, few would have cared. Blatant pandering doesn’t go over well with any race or gender.

For one thing, guys who talk to guys never talk about how good they are at talking to them. Say what you will about President Donald Trump, he doesn’t “code” his language to appeal to the working class or anyone else. When he slams general managers for passing on Shedeur Sanders in the NFL draft, for example, you know the comment hasn’t been vetted by a bunch of pinhead pollsters or risk-averse handlers.

Yet, authenticity is about the last thing that came to mind watching Walz’s ham-fisted manly media stunts in 2024 — not during his cringy Madden video game contest with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or his hunting outing where he struggled with a shotgun.

Never mind, the notion of “white guys” being transfixed by a candidate simply because he also watches football is awfully insulting. Just because a couple of white guys talk about trucks doesn’t mean they agree on foreign policy.

Now, we might have a propensity to read too much into things politicians say, but I think Walz’s white-guy code comment also speaks to one of the big problems hampering Democrats. They have an unnatural obsession with identitarianism.

It is tragically stupid and wholly un-American to approach people by race. On the most basic level, voters who define themselves, or let others define them, by immutable characteristics undermine their self-worth and free will.

There’s no such thing as “white guys” in anything but a physiological sense. Trump and I are both white guys born in Queens, though, admittedly, one of us has been marginally more successful. Still, a white Southern Baptist from Georgia probably gets Trump, a billionaire who’s lived a gold-plated existence, in ways I don’t. And a white Evangelical guy from rural South Carolina, a Catholic white guy from Arizona or an atheist white guy from Oregon all have different sets of cultural values, interests and quirks.

A minuscule number of racists find their identity in being “white.” I’ve never once in my life wondered what other “white people” were thinking or doing or saying, nor has a normal person.

Yet, the Democratic Party is a coalition cobbled together by identity politics. It’s one of the reasons they are compelled to expend so much energy painting the opposition as a bigoted enemy.

The left has gambled on the idea that ethnic demographics would transform the electorate and destroy the “white” Republican Party. No such luck. Democrats see the world in swaths of color and believe everyone has a similarly blinkered view of the world.

For years, Republicans pandered to Hispanics and black voters to try to expand their coalition, altering policy and lifting minority candidates for the sole purpose of connecting to voters through identity.

It never works because identity politics have always been overrated. Generational voting patterns and regionalism have far more powerful effects on who we support. And citizens in urban areas tend to vote for Democrats who align with their moral outlook. Urban areas have more minorities. The rural public votes for more traditional values. The political conflict isn’t about color but worldview. If racial divisions exist, it’s often because they are lumped together by the modern left.

Incidentally, one of the benefits of federalism and local control is that it allows these disparate people to live under a single federal government that upholds some basic ideals. Democrats have spent years trying to centralize the federal government and appropriate institutions to compel people to adopt their own increasingly narrow and unhinged liberal sensibilities.

And one of the most corrosive aspects of that worldview is projecting your own racial views onto others.

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