Leadership in the 21st Century, or Why America Needed Coach Tim

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Let me confess something to you. I love Tim Walz. I bet that you do, too. That’s an incredibly rare and weird thing, at least for me. I don’t often feel much for politicians. And neither do most people. Except when it comes to demagogues.

But Tim Walz is different, and we’re going to discuss why, going way deep, into the heart of existential thinking itself, what life its, what it’s for, the point and purpose of us. The audience at the DNC, and millions around the globe, responded to him, his family, his kids, his story, with a en emotional outpouring. They cried, they cheered, they laughed. It hit them right down in the soul.

Something special is going on here. Let me say it again, to establish the point up front. We don’t often feel much for politicians these days, except demagogues. We regard them, especially if we’re educated and thoughtful and so forth, with suspicion, hesitancy, and even cynicism. Now think about how you, I, people, feel about Tim Walz.

This is the antidote to demagoguery. This is how it happens. Let me explain, and if I’ve made my point successfully, you have an inkling of where I’m going.

What is Leadership in the 21st Century, Anyways?

Here’s a man of the people. In a textbook way. A teacher. A teacher. Where does our political class come from? It comes from what’s by now a well-established set of elites, who’ve gone to the right schools, then made enough money on their own to run for office almost as a hobby, along the way parlaying connections with a similar group of people into power, being groomed by those who’ve trodden this path before them for high office.

A…teacher. A coach. A father. Just…a guy. A completely normal guy, and I’m going to discuss in a second why that’s deceptively powerful, real, meaningful, but first I want you to see something important. 

Demagogues pretend to be men of the people, and when people buy that claim, then they position themselves as strongmen for the people. But it’s a pack of lies, that’s also a house of cards. Demagogues aren’t men of the people at all. Trump pretends to be, of course, but he’s as far from an average person as you can get, educated at Wharton, the scion of wealth, etcetera—yet his flock buys it, because he empathizes with them. So this house of cards works in a certain way. Being seen as a man of the people establishes the claim that you’re a strongman for the people.

Now think of Tim Walz again. What is he? He’s that rarest thing of all in contemporary politics: a genuine…”man of the people”…just an average working guy. Think about the world for a moment. I admire and respect Justin Trudeau immensely—he’s a visionary leader, and yet he’s the son of the man who made Canada a social democracy. You couldn’t come from a higher social class. Think about Emanuel Macron: educated at all of France’s best schools, trained and groomed from teenagerhood to ascend to the heights of power. Think even of Kamala, a career prosecutor turned politician, who climbed through the ranks.

Tim is different. He’s something incredibly rare, so rare, we haven’t seen the like in contemporary politics almost anywhere in the world. Certainly not in America, in the modern era, perhaps not since Jimmy Carter, who was a greater President than Americans still yet recognize. Tim is a normal guy from normal society who did a normal job. He comes from a regular class in society, teachers being somewhere between working and middle class. His claims to authority and experience are being a coach and dad and husband and teacher.

They’re not, emphatically so, “I went to the right school,” or, “the right people groomed me,” or, “I was recognized from 12 years old as a future leader in society and trained to be in society’s elite classes.”

This is, again, incredibly rare.

The Dark Night of the Soul

So why does it matter? Because in Tim Walz we begin to see the antidote to demagoguery. A real man of the people. And a real man, too, in a more mature, sophisticated, earthier, truer, more powerful way. 

Tim, in his pain, reckoning, triumph, transcends the figure of the strongman. He is all of us, and we can all not just “see” that. We feel that. We feel it deep in our souls. 

And all of that defuses Donald Trump’s impact, his allure, his ability to cast the demagogue’s spell. Sure, he can still do it over his die-hards. But his campaign seems to be over. Nobody much pays attention. He rants and rages, and is met these days with…a deafening silence. He is being transcended. On the one side, by Kamala’s joy—but on the other side, by Tim’s…

What, exactly?

Now we’re going to go deep, and I’m going to tell you a story or two.

Tim is all of us. We cry when when we see his son, struggling for the words, say: “that’s my dad!!” Why? Why is that such a poignant, heartbreaking, beautiful, touching moment? Why do we weep?

Because of the struggle.

Tim and his wife struggled to have children, as we all know. Meanwhile, he was a teacher, working every day with…kids. A coach, and even more amazingly, he coached to help pay a student’s “lunch debt.” Imagine doing all that while you were failing to have kids of your own. I don’t have to tell you, because any sane adult can already feel that pain. That desolation. That sense of emptiness and failure and loss and grief.

In Tim, we see our own struggles. And we also see that we can triumph. Not “over” them, but through them. And as we do that, we can gain something that makes us richer than money, true wealth. We gain maturity. Through all that pain, that terrible strife, all those dark nights of the soul?

We grow. In our capacity to love.

Maturity, or Where the Power to Love Comes From

That is what maturity is. It is what growing beyond adolescence means. We gain the capacity to love in richer, deeper, more sophisticated ways, as our struggles attune us to the ocean of suffering not just in our lives, but in every life. We look around us, and we begin to discern that every person struggles as we do, though it may be over something else—yet the pain, the heartbreak, the desolation: they remain, fissuring every human heart, dropping each of us to ur knees. Until we cry out to the heavens for relief, for consolation, for salvation. Until we weep and rage and and shake before the stars and dust and time, humbled, knowing our fragility, mortality, littleness, finitude.

Paradoxically, from our existential powerlessness comes our only real power in this life. To love.

To love.

Tim is a figure of great and resounding love. This is why we love him back. Because he models for us a higher love. Especially than that of the demagogue, which is infantile need, cloying necessity, perpetual narcissism. Tim shows us that a higher love is there, waiting for us, that of the coach, the father, the husband. Tim models for us a kind of unconditional love. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, more powerful, more mature, more adult, than that.

Think of the way the students he coached into football players circled around him on stage, as if to say: here was a man who loved us. Who helped shape us into the men we are. Through all our mistakes and follies and when we lost our way. They love him. Because he loved them.

How powerful is that? And in politics—how rare is that?

And all that is what it means not just to be “a man,” though that’s certainly true, but something even bigger than that.

The Universal Human Story (Lives in Each of Us)

Tim Walz’s story teaches us something, and that’s fitting, because he’s a teacher, but this lesson goes all the way deep, and hits us in our souls, because it is the universal lesson of what it means to be a human being. It is the deepest existential lesson of all.

Yes, in our lives, there will be pain. That pain will break us. We will not emerge the same. We’ll cry out in despair: why me, Lord? Where are you? Why have these things gone wrong for me? Where is my child, my harvest, my garden? Why does my soil yield only bitter fruit? 

This is the dark night of the soul. This it the valley of the shadow of the death. And each and every one of us must make the journey through it. Life shows us no mercy, no remorse, it spares not a single one of us this challenge. It asks us: you must take this journey. I will knock to your knees, and make you pray, weep, rage. I will break you apart like you were nothing at all.

Will you take this journey with me?

We don’t have a choice, you see. If we resist, what happens? We stay trapped, right there, in the dark night of the soul, in the valley of the shadow of death. Forever. For a lifetime. That’s where Donald Trump is. There’s no need for hell. Life itself is hell enough. Existence itself, the universal journey of the human being, it takes us to places that make hell itself look like heaven.

The secret is this. All the sages and prophets knew it. If we take the journey, as painful as it is, as hard as it is, something happens to us. We’re broken, but we’re remade. That dark night of the soul kills parts of us that we needed to let go, to become whole, wise, strong, noble, just. The journey itself is a rebirth. Every step we take along this journey of suffering—and we don’t know it at the time—fills us with something new. Higher qualities. Grace. Beauty. Truth. Goodness.

We are growing in our capacity to love. Because this experience of mortification, of wounding, of having one’s heart broken—it is universal, we understand, and as we do, we understand, with a fierce devotion, that our truest obligation is to love. To love.

Not all of us make it this far, if I’m honest. Many of us can’t complete the journey from pain to grace. The pain is too much, and we remain trapped by it, overwhelmed, crushed by its weight, our bones turned to dust by its lacerations. 

Those of us who do find the truest reward of all. As our capacity to love unfolds, life rewards us in the ways of true wealth. Our families love us, they don’t just put up with us. Other who aren’t our blood think of us as their mothers, fathers, parents. We are loved back, in ways deeper and more profound than we ever hoped for, and the more that love us back, the richer our lives feel.

This is the story of a life well lived. The dark night of the soul. The valley of the shadow of death. The reward at the end is only ourselves. Becoming the highest self there is, which is a loving one. The more you suffer, the greater your capacity to love unconditionally—if you can just keep going, and emerge on the other side of the valley. The garden. If you can just make it to daybreak in the dark night. And if you gain that power, my friends, then life itself becomes your reward.

What Leadership is in the 21st Century

This is the universal story of existence. We “relate” this deeply to Tim Walz because his life is a lesson in it. He is teaching us something deeper than we yet know: what it means to be here, now, in this life, so full of hurt, strife, to be wounded so deeply you think you’ll never love again, and yet, if you persevere, every step you take opens your heart wider and wider, until at last, you and your life are an example of love. You are loved, because you are capable of love, and in that, every soul is struck, compared to that, money and power look small, and from that comes a higher power. 

This is why we’re hit deep down in the gut by Tim Walz.

I love the guy. Me? I’ve often told you the story of my high school years. A skinny, frail, “brown” kid. I was tormented and abused. Just going to class was hell on earth. And my tormentor, in fact, wasn’t even the kids—they were just sort of following orders. It was…my coach. The guy who was supposed to nurture me. Instead, he’d spit when he said my name, and laugh as the kids did what he said, which was to beat the hell out of me, over and over again. I’ve told you too, that escaping to gay clubs, though I’m not gay, was the only way I survived all that.

Little me? He could’ve used a Coach Tim in his life. To stop all that. And big me? He understands the wisdom and grace and power in Coach Tim. What life taught him, why it matters, and why it makes him so very special. America needs a figure like Coach Tim, because for too long? It’s been like little me. The abused kid, preyed on by those who should have cared for it. This higher power to love is what we respond to when we see Coach Tim. Because the truth is, my friends, that rarely has a nation needed it more.

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