America should look like Gus Walz His display of vulnerability revealed the nation's flaws

Whether in Chicago last week or Milwaukee last month, the obscurity of American politics these days makes one turn to illuminations from the past. Trump expatiating lengthily on his injured ear during his speech at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee called to mind some lines from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Returning wounded and victorious from war, Coriolanus enters a Rome searching for a new Consul. The people need to be convinced that Coriolanus is the man for the job. Among other things, they expect him to fuse his will with theirs and show him his physical injuries, a bonding rite between leader and people. One Roman citizen says to the other: “for if he [Coriolanus] show us/his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our/tongues into those wounds and speak for them.” In other words; “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

A few weeks later and another line from the English canon sprang to mind. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the TV audience watched Gus Walz, Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son, who has a non-verbal learning disorder, turn frantically around, overstimulated, anxiety and uncertainty on his face. Tears ran down his cheeks as he clearly mouthed the words “That’s my Dad!” to his father, who stood on the stage accepting the nomination as Kamala Harris’s running mate. I have an experience of people with non-verbal learning disorders. Involuntarily, out of the depths, Milton’s immortal line from “Lycidas” came into my mind: “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.” Politicians are fond of quoting Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”, especially Obama, whose almost obsessive identification with Lincoln is provocative, to put it mildly. But the angel America needs is not an admonitory angel. It is an angel whose gaze starts from the mortal core of being human, groupless, as it were, and irreducibly particular, and guides society from that place.

The media distracted itself with some vicious MAGA types, who mocked Gus Walz’s display of vulnerability. Right-wing agitator Ann Coulter posted a picture of Gus with the comment: “Talk about weird.” It was good to expose these social atrocities, if only to give a glimpse of the moral atmosphere that will prevail should Trump clamber once again to the top.

Other people have written about their own experiences with children who, as Tina Brown movingly put it in The New York Times, “struggle with being different”. Brown did not use the term “neurodivergent”. That was admirable. “Neurodivergent” is a precious replacement for some blind, ugly slur. At the same time, why should people who are unquantifiably different be quantified with a clinical term that establishes their “difference” irrefutably, narrowly, scientifically, for all time and on every occasion? Brown ended by gratifyingly calling for national attention to be paid to human beings like her son.

There was also another way to regard the revelation of Tim Walz’s son. He is what progressives have desperately needed. Gus was not vulnerable because he belonged to a racial, or biological, or sexual group; he wasn’t vulnerable because the planet is in jeopardy; he wasn’t vulnerable because history had been unfair to people like him. He was vulnerable because he was entirely, specifically, uniquely human. Cyril Connolly once quipped that imprisoned in every fat man is a thin one wildly signaling to be let out. Well, imprisoned in every supposedly “normal” person is a person like Gus. Mortality and circumstance guarantee that inner person’s eventual emergence.

At the heart of the “caring” society put forward by Harris is a long tradition of moral imagination, beginning with Christ’s injunction to do unto others what you would have them do unto you. That runs through Kant’s precept of acting as though what you did everyone should do, to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. Rawls’s concept is a thought experiment in which you imagine that you know nothing about yourself: your abilities, your class, your race, your sex, your nationality, even your taste. What you do know is that all those qualities are distributed unequally in the hard, brutal world. The experiment requires you to create a society based on your ignorance of your situation, and on your knowledge of the cold, cruel world. Of course, any rational person would create a society based both on Christ’s injunction, and Kant’s precept.

It’s a thought experiment that the MAGA tough guys, the sophisticated conservative liberal-eye-pokers, and the hillbilly elegists would do well to perform. They should not fear the onset of national weakness as a result. On the contrary, the protection of that figure of Gus deep within every person requires a powerful, protective state that seeks rational, peaceful authority among the world of nations in order to guarantee the safety of its citizens. A strong, stable society builds itself out from the image of Gus Walz, along the lines of a million strategies, some soft, some hard.

The progressive practitioners of piety politics would benefit from performing the experiment as well. Maybe the next time they hold a convention, they’ll discourage splintering the human experience into a thousand tales told by a thousand different identities.

“Caring” is a big word in America today, overtaking “empathy” as the concept du jour. But societies often publicly emphasise the very qualities they lack. The ancient Greeks, who were given to rages of unreason, celebrated the Golden Rule. “Indians” were sentimentalised as noble savages just as Native Americans were being exterminated. The state where I live, New Jersey, hit on the official moniker “Garden State” for itself at the very moment sufficient space for garbage disposal had become a crisis. “Caring” has become a war-cry just when people, withdrawn into screens, emotionally numbed by psychiatric drugs and carapaced in rebarbative ideologies, seem to care less about other people than ever before.

The fact is that in America, both Left and Right has forgotten how to care. Therefore, let both sides gaze upon Gus Walz’s face at the convention, reflect on his exclamation, “That’s my Dad!” and melt with ruth. In a time where God is absent, we are all, whether we know it or not, searching for that moment of grace.