The 20th century was still petering out when the issue of American masculinity popped up in the very first season of The Sopranos, as Tony, the ultimate alpha and putative crime boss, despairingly asked his psychiatrist, Dr Melfi: “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong silent type. Now there was an American.”
One of the curiosities of this year’s vice-presidential rivalry is that both the Democrats and Republicans have turned to the heartland and thrust two relatively obscure sons of the Midwest into the bright lights to try to define exactly what it means to be an American man.
Soprano’s fretting about the disappearance of Gary Cooper types presaged a national – and loudening – conversation about the complex struggle many of America’s young men face as they size up the prospect of how to be men in a society that suddenly seemed suspicious of the old traits. The generation Z-ers were literally paying for the sins of their fathers. The value and prestige placed on jobs requiring physical strength and dexterity have been eroded. The culture has championed the gauche rise of tech bros, where the Elons and the Zucks are the new kings of the world – the ultimate revenge of the nerd. The aspiration of house-owning and raising a family through what were referred to as blue-collar jobs is becoming elusive rather than common.
“What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality,” Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, said last year.
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“We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a pro-social masculinity for a post-feminist world, and we need it soon.”
It’s an observation with which both Tim Walz and JD Vance might agree, even if both men house diametrically opposed views on what that vision should be. One thing that can be said of both Walz and Vance is that they are definitely not Gary Cooper. Both of those boys can talk, and ever since they were chosen as running mates they have been chattering away in a diverting subplot to the primordial main battle between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
The other thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that they truly dislike each other. Their mutual disdain is one of the reasons why this evening’s CBS debate in New York (2am Irish time) promises to be one of the liveliest vice-presidential debates in history. Given that Trump has batted away Harris’s repeated call – or dare – for a second debate, this may well be the final time the Republicans and Democrats engage directly. So, it could also be the most consequential of all vice-presidential debates.
It will be a hazy memory to many Americans now, but when Vance was chosen by Trump as running mate, on the Monday afternoon of the July Republican convention in Milwaukee, the GOP was riding the crest of a tsunami. Trump had miraculously survived an assassin’s bullet two days earlier and the Democratic campaign, in a state of undisguised gloom as Joe Biden’s ratings plummeted, was in turmoil.
Still, the selection of Vance raised a few eyebrows. It was difficult to immediately identify what he would bring to the party besides a compelling life story: a Rust Belt fringe kid who served in Iraq, went to Yale and turned his life around. Vance was a relatively low-profile Ohio senator who had been championed by the liberal media for his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy and who moved from virulent criticism of Trump to emerging as one of his chief guard dogs and defenders in recent years. Controversy has followed him, from the resurfacing of an old comment he made about “childless cat ladies” – which created a Democratic slogan – and his doubling-down on the unfounded claim about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Nobody could accuse Vance of being vanilla.
Walz was not the most obvious choice for Harris, but after she selected him, it immediately made sense. Even on paper, the Minnesotan ticked off a range of reliable archetypes: a governor and senator in recent years but for decades also a teacher, a member of the army national guard and, best of all for the story-making, a high-school football coach. Walz champions progressive values but also possesses a box of tricks that must have delighted the Democratic strategists – a gun owner with a crack shot; a military man; a social media natural. And on his very first public rally with Harris, in Philadelphia, he unleashed the line that sent the Republicans into a tailspin when he said of Trump and Vance: “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.”
It was such a fiendishly simple line of attack that it completely disarmed the Republicans. Trump, rarely stuck for a retort, was so obviously and hilariously hurt by the connotations the word carries that he quickly distanced himself from the point of the criticism. “Not about me,” he said when a donor asked him about it at a public meeting. “They are saying it about JD,” he clarified, and left the matter hang there, as if to suggest that it might be fair enough. It took the Republicans weeks to arrive at a strategy to deal with what the Harris/Walz proposition threw at them: laughter and ridicule. It stung.
[ ‘I’m not weird. He is.’ Why does one word rattle Donald Trump so much?Opens in new window ]
Ultimately, the response was a relentless and increasingly dark line of rhetoric, with Trump touring the battleground states to warn of the apocalyptic outcome of a Harris victory, even attacking his rival as “mentally disabled” in a particularly vicious speech this weekend.
So on Tuesday night, both vice-presidents will do their master’s bidding. High on the agenda will be immigration and the economy, the causes to which the Trump campaign is increasingly hitching its wagon. Vance will try to home in on Walz’s record as Minnesota governor during the Covid crisis. Walz, who has championed women’s reproductive rights, will attempt to make Vance squirm over his stance on abortion and IVF treatment.
Since the first vice-presidential debate in 1976, the consensus is that they seldom achieve anything of significance. But there is a great deal of curiosity about both Vance and Walz. As ever, this television show will be about appearances and, so far, Walz, with his easy-going bar-stool way of communicating, has been the front-runner in polling. The question of why, exactly, Trump picked Vance is still bouncing about and the Ohioan knows that his boss will be tuning in to see if he himself can answer it over the 90 minutes.
And this square-off does represent a chance for Vance. For all his folksy authenticity, Walz is reportedly nervous about what will be a formal structure against an opponent who honed a fast and aggressive debating style during his time at Yale law school.
“He’s a strong person,” said Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar of Walz this week.
“He’s just not a lawyer-debater type. It’s not like he was dreaming of debates when he was in first grade.”
In a presidential race that has become suffocatingly close, then, an unusual weight has been placed on a meeting between two Midwesterners with starkly different beliefs as to how America should progress.
It promises to be riveting.
“There ain’t never a horse that never been rode,” Cooper was fond of quoting on the rare occasions when he did speak, “and never a rider that couldn’t be throwed”.
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