Gus Walz is the 17-year-old son of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. At the convention this week, Gus had an intense teary public reaction to his father.
Gus Walz is neurodivergent. He deals with ADHD, anxiety, and a nonverbal learning disorder. Kids and teens like Gus might struggle with controlling their feelings in social situations. pic.twitter.com/l4Y3SO1Rkh
— Sophie Rain Thread 🔥❤️ (@SophieRainForum) August 22, 2024
It would take great restraint to not comment on Gus’s emotional display. I share that the moral ideal is not to pick on children and the disabled, but Gus is 17, he’s not a child. Ideally, we don’t pick on candidate’s kids. That’s an awesome ideal. That’s the civil thing to do. But when do that civil thing, we’re also losing something in truth. The natural reaction is to note Gus’s reaction. The casual thing is to comment on Gus’s display, but the disciplined reflexive thing is to speak with care about members of a protected class.
Similarly, when Joe Biden seems senile and Kamala sounds drunk, the natural thing is to describe what you sense, while the civil thing is to not comment.
I love civility and I love truth and often they are in conflict and sometimes truth is more important than civility and sometimes civility is more important than truth. Stand-up comics are great in part for sharing forbidden truths. I would like a wider Overton window. If politicians display their spouse and kids, then those people become more likely to catch flak. There are advantages and disadvantages from the being the spouse and child of somebody famous.
Criticizing Gus’s outburst is not hate. It is a normal natural human reaction to mock Gus. It is also a normal natural human reaction to like Gus and to want to protect him.
When I put “Gus Walz hate” into Google News (without quotation marks), it receives dozens of results of the MSM condemning right-wing reactions to Gus as hateful. I think that’s a bogus critique. Ideally, people wouldn’t criticize the kid, but the amount of restraint that would take for many people would reduce their humanity. There are many ugly things about criticizing Gus, but there are many ugly things I see in the loss of spontaneity and humanity that results from harsh criticism of those who mocked Gus.
We would have been better off as a nation if we had practiced less civility with Joe Biden’s long stretches of senility and used more truth to talk about what was happening. That type of raw reaction that describes what you see and how you feel about it will come with upsides and downsides. In public discussion, we’re ratcheted too much towards civility and away from truth.
July 6, I blogged: “Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes”
One way of reconciling the competing values of civility and truth in such instances is to publicly note them without mocking them. You can describe Biden’s seeming senility, Kamala’s seeming drunkeness, and Gus’s outburst without adding ridicule and vitriol.
The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.” In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline. The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation.
Calling for watchfulness and self-discipline, CCD [culture of critical discourse] is productive of intellectual reflexivity and the loss of warmth and spontaneity. Moreover, that very reflexivity stresses the importance of adjusting action to some pattern of propriety. There is, therefore, a structured inflexibility when facing changing situations; there is a certain disregard of the differences in situations, and an insistence on hewing to the required rule.
