On the third night of the DNC, in his speech accepting the nomination for vice-president, Tim Walz was Mr. Walz, the teacher who’d paid for a student’s school-lunch debt; he was Coach Walz, defensive coordinator for a state-championship-winning football team, now giving a pep talk to the nation; and, in a moment of near atomic love and affection, he was “dad.” Shortly retelling the now-familiar story of his daughter Hope’s conception after years of fertility treatments, Walz turned to his family in the audience, took a moment to hold back his tears, and said, “Hope, Gus, and Gwen, you are my entire world, and I love you.” Hope, a social worker and co-star of many of the charming videos that helped rocket Walz to stardom this summer, struggled to contain her own tearful joy. Seventeen-year-old Gus — who is neurodivergent and deals with ADHD, anxiety, and a nonverbal learning disorder — shot up from his seat, openly weeping with pride and love, and shouted to the audience, “That’s my dad!”
It was an almost unbearably touching moment, and it was a neat distillation of much of the public reaction to Walz over the past few weeks. Social-media feeds have been filled with fanfic-style memes casting Walz as the ultimate contemporary dad, a role defined by warmth, self-deprecating playfulness, casual authority, and earnest engagement in the act of parenting — a figure borne of people’s personal experience, media consumption, and a certain amount of emotional wish-casting. An old camo ball cap Walz wore for a video showing him accepting Harris’s offer to join the ticket — a standard “dad hat” — encapsulated the idea of this character: soft, comfortable, perhaps not quite so strong (or at least so rigid) as it used to be, but reliable, and, for the moment, quite stylish. As the dad memes proliferated, numerous commenters proposed that Walz’s brand of dad-ness was especially appealing to those liberal voters who’d “lost” their own fathers to Fox News and related brain worms. Several posters described the new VP pick as radiating “tonic masculinity”: a soothing alternative to the painfully insecure, violently performed machismo of the Trump era.
To some extent, the cultural figure of the modern dad, which first really took off in the 1950s, has always served to provide this type of relief. “Dad” was long an informal term of affection, but in the mid-century, middle-class American suburbs, the character took hold as a repudiation of the stern Victorian patriarch. This figure was in part a product of television, but the family dramas and domestic sitcoms that popularized the trope — a father sometimes wise, sometimes inept, but always meaningfully involved in family life — drew off of big changes in the cultural conception of parenthood at the time. The years before the war had seen the rise of “New Fatherhood,” a philosophy that suggested that male parents needed to nurture rather than command, that a good father was a friend and a member of the household, not the harsh disciplinarian in control of the hearth.
This new, softer character was in many ways still a conservative one. The modern dad, even if bumbling or comically ancillary to the day-to-day functioning of the home, stabilized the idea of the nuclear family as it faced and repeatedly resisted the currents of social change over the following decades. As men lost sole claim to breadwinner status over the latter part of the 20th century, the dad helped to maintain a key role for the patriarch in the domestic space. But it also became a positive way for American men to come to terms with the social upheavals of feminism. TV dads of the ’50s, like Ward Cleaver, were authoritative without being authoritarian, and even less powerful but lovable onscreen dads of the ’60s, like Herman Munster, offered a vision of what it might look like for men to cede domestic authority to their wives or even to their children. The Cosby-sweater-clad, dad-joke-telling TV fathers that followed in the ’80s thrived in dual-income households and embraced the role of co-parent and partner. Some viewers saw, and some likely still see, these changes as losses — as humiliations and violations. But dads on TV and in popular culture made a tacit argument for what could be gained by these shifts: a greater voice for other members of the family, a greater voice for the women and children of society, and a more socially and emotionally responsible role for men themselves. In this way, the modern dad was a messenger of a better future for everybody. At the same time, these dads, by virtue of being men who would voluntarily cede domestic control, also obtained a special kind of moral authority.
In the late ’80s and ’90s, when the concept of the dad joke was first named, “dad” became an adjective, and in the 21st century, a viral signifier: dad rock, dad bod. It’s now an extremely malleable cultural descriptor, but it always carries some mostly joking self-aware nostalgia — an ironic hat-tip to a time when the term meant something more distinct and homogenous.
While Walz has been crowned the “dad” in this race, his opponent, J.D. Vance, is a father too, a young, millennial one, and Vance has made use of the malleability of dad energy. Vance talks about tucking his kids into bed at night, and he co-parents with his wife, Usha, a highly successful professional. In his speech at the RNC, he said, “My most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad.” A couple weeks ago, a video of Vance fondly remembering Trump calling to offer him the VP slot went viral. In it, Vance retells the story of standing in a hotel room, on the phone with the former president, as his 7-year-old son tries to talk to him about Pokémon cards. Eventually, Vance says, he told his kid to “shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu.” Liberal commenters were quick to criticize (Vance was characteristically unable to deliver the line naturally), but relaying this story — joking about telling the kid you love to shut the hell up — is Contemporary Ironized Dad 101. And the fact that Vance could accurately name a Pokémon character suggested he might actually be engaged with his kids at home. The troubling thing to me wasn’t what Vance had said, but the greater scene: How did he reconcile who he was on that phone call — a man advancing Trumpism and Project 2025 — with who he was to his kid? Seeking to abolish IVF, limit birth-control access, punish childlessness, police children’s gender expression — the conservatism pushing these policies is fundamentally uninterested in the everyday material concerns of parents and the everyday act of parenting. While Tim Walz’s recognizable identity as a contemporary dad helps him establish himself as an authentic communicator on behalf of family-friendly programs, radical conservatives like Vance use that same image to mask the fundamental family unfriendliness of their own plans.
As a dad-bod-having, dad-joke-telling middle-aged father myself, I have to admit that I find this slipperiness of the dad unsettling. As much as Vance’s use of his dadly identity seems hypocritical to me, I wonder whether I’m actually the one who’s out of place here. When I think of the dads I’ve encountered most frequently in the pop culture of my lifetime, it’s hard not to notice a pattern: Cosby invented the modern sitcom dad all while he was drugging and assaulting dozens of women; Bill Clinton was the first dad president of my lifetime, and his legacy now stands as a tawdry disgrace; Louis C.K. reframed fatherhood in loving and irreverent ways in his act and on his show, all while he was harassing and intimidating women offstage; Matt Lauer popularized the newscaster as “America’s Dad” all while he was abusing his power behind the scenes. Kobe Bryant became the ultimate “Girl Dad” after publicly dodging a credible rape accusation. Even among its standard-bearers — maybe especially among its standard bearers — dad culture has always had a dark side. The dad has allowed for the progressive reinvention of masculinity, and it’s often, and for that same reason, been a shield for old-fashioned misogyny.
As Tim Walz’s children stood to cry and applaud him last Wednesday night, Walz’s loving, dadly nature appeared to be as authentic as might ever be possible when being watched by millions of people on live TV. It seems like Walz might really be this guy. It’s a deeply comforting idea — that a scene this cozy could carry us forward, that the “dad” could be a truly progressive force. And the unembarrassed care Walz models is in fact reflected in the Democratic ticket’s approach to domestic economic and social policy. But as the Walzes overflowed with love, it was impossible not to think, too, of the platform’s far less soft approach to families attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, trumpeted earlier from the same stage, or of the thousands of children killed in Gaza, and the DNC’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to the podium to talk about that violence — violence our government is funding. Walz’s hit dad show lends Democrats a compellingly warm, nurturing aesthetic, one that can run interference for the very coldest policies as easily as it can celebrate the child tax credit. Still, Walz’s dadliness got me. Watching him and his family at the DNC, I felt a foolish optimism that the substance of the Democratic presidential campaign might eventually live up to the promise of its style.
