A Good Man

How Tim Walz — and "Ted Lasso"— embody a welcome change to American masculinity.

Over the past few years, as men like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kanye West have sucked up far more than their fair share of air in American life, and I have simultaneously been raising two boys as a father, I have been pondering what it means to be a man. 

A few years back, I came across a great article about a professor named Michael Kimmel who asked his students to describe characteristics that would ideally describe two categories of men: a Real Man and a Good Man.  A Real Man, Kimmel’s students told him, avoided weakness at all costs.  A Good Man, meanwhile, was caring and honest and put others’ needs before their own.  Unsurprisingly, there was little overlap between the two. 

I couldn’t help but notice recently that many level-headed friends and acquaintances of mine were losing their shit in the best possible way over the selection of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as Kamala Harris’ running mate.  People would describe Walz as a popular governor, a moderate Democrat, a hunter, a football coach, a veteran, but would keep circling back to the notion of Walz as an affable, encouraging Midwestern dad. 

Jokes were made about Walz being the guy who would fix your carburetor without being asked, give you advice about what kind of wrench you needed for the job, or tell you to shut the door while the AC was on.  (He was, literally, the guy posting on Facebook about setting up his daughter’s stereo in her college dorm room: “Quality speaker wire matters people!”) 

It is telling that even when speaking to people who knew Walz personally, they reach for pop-culture analogues to describe him.  One of his former players described him to the Washington Post as “like Coach Taylor…only a bit kinder and nicer.” 

Walz took the stage at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night to accept his party’s nomination for vice president and described a society where “everybody belongs, and everybody has a responsibility to contribute.”  He laid out his vision of a life governed by “the belief that a single person can make a real difference for their neighbors.” 

After listening to the governor tell us that our job “is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling.  One inch at a time, one yard at a time, one phone call at a time…We’re going to leave it on the field,” I was ready to strap on a helmet myself, run onto the field, and pile-drive one of those tackling dummies until it knocked over the opposing team’s uprights. If your children are crying with joy at seeing you accept the VP nomination, you have perhaps done something right in your life.

As a culture, we are yearning to teach the next generation—to teach ourselves! —how to be Good Men and not Real Men, how to serve others with relentless cheer and optimism and forthrightness and dignity.  We all know that we need a positive vision of masculinity to offer to boys, one that is more than a list of rules to follow or crimes to avoid. 

And man, is that a hard job. 

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Walz’s surprise ascent from little-known Midwestern governor to vice-presidential candidate got me thinking about the collected works of Bill Lawrence, perhaps television’s patron saint of non-toxic masculinity.  Both soccer coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) and therapist Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) of Shrinking seek to repair what is broken around them—a team, a workplace, a family—by listening curiously, by tending to themselves and others, by walking in the direction of hurt and need rather than shying away from it. 

In perhaps my favorite moment of Ted Lasso, Ted uses a halftime speech as an opportunity to deliver a succinct summary of what being a Good Man might consist of: “Embracing change.  Being brave.  Doing whatever you have to so that

everyone in your life can move forward with theirs.” 

Jimmy is grieving and trapped in a self-defeating rut, but embraces change by breaking with therapeutic protocol and simply telling his patients what to do: reveal more of themselves to their dates, leave their partners, cope with their PTSD.  Ethically, this is a mess—both in real life, and within the world of the show—but it speaks to Lawrence’s abiding interest in men who view the struggles of others as something beyond Not My Problem.  (Harrison Ford, playing Jimmy’s mentor Paul, similarly elides our expectations, playing an ornery boomer who is hellbent on changing for the better.)

Ted and Jimmy are imperfect.  They are flawed fathers and often difficult colleagues.  The women in their lives sometimes find them frustrating.  But what we feel, more than anything, is their yearning to be of service.  They know that the sole reason they are here—in this room, in these professions, in this life—is to help others. 

I don’t think I would vote for Jimmy for vice president (Ted, maybe, especially if Coach Beard would serve as his chief of staff), but the vibes Walz shares with the Lawrence heroes is that they all know that the world is shifting around them, that everything is not as it was, and rather than retreating into empty Trumpian rhetoric about the imaginary glories of the past, they simply roll with it.  They know they are needed.  Everything else can be figured out as they go along.  “Most of the time,” Ted says in that same halftime speech, “change is a good thing.”

Walz’s mustache is metaphorical, not literal, but like Ted Lasso, he conveys a sense of plainspoken, workaday service.  Walz, many of us have learned over the past few weeks, has overseen a legislative session in Minnesota that offered those free lunches, along with family leave for new parents, tampons in school bathrooms, and abortion rights. (Calling him “Tampon Tim” seems more like a term of endearment than a sick burn.) Walz felt like a Good Man in the guise of a Real Man, a soldier who preferred talking about getting free breakfast and lunch for Minnesota’s children to JD Vance-style rhetoric about how childless women and immigrants were to blame for America’s ills.

Coach Walz, like the protagonist of Friday Night Lights before him, reflects a deep and unfulfilled yearning for masculine warmth and kindness.  It may sometimes be gruff, it may sometimes be a punch in the shoulder instead of a hug, but people are hungering for men who notice their triumphs and soothe their wounds, who find ways to build better young people and show up when showing up is what is needed, and Walz—in his comportment, his demeanor, his ready smile and his appearing to be a guy who likely turns off the lights in empty rooms with a sigh and has a favorite screwdriver he likes to talk about slightly too often—reminds many people of similar men, known only to their families and their communities, who played those essential roles in their lives.  (Even Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, wrote for the New York Times about the overlap between Coach Taylor and Coach Walz.)

We are in an era with a notable deficiency of admirable dads in the culture.  Television spent more than a decade studying men—Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper— whose moral rottenness hollowed out their families from within.  Politics has been dominated by Trump, who uses his children as occasional props and well-remunerated servants and little more.  As James Poniewozik points out in his essential book Audience of One, both Tony and Trump were products of television, our aesthetic preference for tough-talking antiheroes bleeding from fiction into reality.

The thing is—and I can say this with some certainty, having served as an unwilling test subject in an ongoing, decade-long, nationwide experiment in which we collectively agreed to devote outsize portions of our consciousness to pondering the inner landscape of one vicious, shallow, cruel man—jerks are actually very boring in real life.  We know, with some certainty, that jerks will find ways, in nearly every situation, to disappoint us, to look out only for themselves, to blame, to dissimulate, to castigate.  Tony Soprano may be captivating, but Donald Trump is unendingly tedious. 

You know what’s fascinating, though?  Curiosity is fascinating.  Being a good person is fascinating.  The question of what motivates people to find and nurture the kernels of decency within themselves in a society devoted to self-optimization, selfishness, and performative cruelty is just about the most interesting question I can think of.  Has anyone called Jason Sudeikis and seen if he might be available to get on the stump—or play Walz in the biopic?

I think Tim Walz has touched something profound for many people by being a distinctly 2024 combination of what we might think of as classical masculinity—soldier, football coach, governor, dad, middle-aged white guy with authority—and contemporary masculinity: affable, tolerant, seemingly thrilled to play a supporting role to a Black and South Asian woman.

Our culture has chosen to celebrate and elevate narcissistic, self-absorbed men who seem unable to discuss anything other than themselves, whose window on the world is a mirror, who feed off their ability to perform the grim rites of alpha-male domination. Most men, thankfully, are nothing like this, but what does it do to a culture when the impression we receive of what being a Real Man is like is Trump or Musk or Vance?

Surrounded, in our post-MeToo era, by endless examples of male boorishness, we are in search of men who might remind us how we could do better.  Watching videos of Walz bantering with his teenage daughter about whether turkey is meat or chatting with his dog as he signs bills into law, hearing stories of his cofounding his school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance, we are reminded that strength should never be about hectoring, needling, or hurting others, but about using all of our strengths—our wisdom, our influence, our rhetoric—to protect those who might need it. 

People like Walz because of his lack of frippery.  If he looks at Donald Trump and sees someone weird, that’s what he calls him.  But people have connected with Walz in ways that are reminiscent of Joe Biden circa 2020, or Ted Lasso circa 2021, because he radiates a fundamental decency that too many men have lost sight of, and that we hunger for.  I wanted Ted Lasso, seasons 2 and 3, to be better than it actually was because Ted—humane, nurturing, even-keeled— was so precisely the kind of character I yearned for as a viewer, and as an American in the era of Trump.  I think so many of us—perhaps especially women! —have connected with Tim Walz because he is a reminder that there are Good Men out there, and that we need them now as much as ever.