Sheehy and national unity

by Will Walker, Hamilton

​​For us Americans, the past few years have been tough. Our standards of living are decreasing, prices are rising tremendously, and the schism between the left and the right grows larger every day. We have become disillusioned with our institutions and our politicians; it hardly feels that our government has our interests in mind at all anymore. That’s really significant, and you should think for a moment about what that means. Our country is founded on the principle of self-governance through democratically elected officials. This all works only because we believe it does.

Because of this loss of faith in our government, many Americans are entertaining politicians who are promising to break up the establishment and restore the nation to its former glory. In Montana, that politician is Tim Sheehy – business owner, former Navy Seal, and “conservative outsider.” Tim is running against Jon Tester for one of the hottest Senate seats of the 2024 election cycle, and, naturally, the fighting is getting dirty. 

Tim leans hard into the culture warrior handbook, talking a lot about the “war” that we are in with the radical left. His mode of politics is not to reach across the aisle and bridge the divide in our nation, but to dominate the opposition. Politics is not war. These people that he is so eager to “fight” are our own countrymen. The more we labor on the idea that we are battling each other, the weaker the unity this country was founded on becomes. It is something we can lose, and it is not easily regained.

Let’s look at how Tim responds to legitimate criticism. When the Daily Beast linked a vehemently racist online footprint to one of his staffers, the Sheehy campaign responded to requests for comment with a statement filled with lots of this:

“The liberal media is at it again. First, they do Jon Tester’s bidding by attacking decorated combat veteran Tim Sheehy and now they are trying to attack a young field staffer. We get it that Jon Tester doesn’t want to talk about his vote against deporting illegal immigrants or why he supports Biden’s radical open border agenda or why he votes with Biden over 91 percent of the time but trying to tear down a 21-year-old is just sad.”

The statement never addresses the actual issue. Instead, he deflects, talking about his service record and how Jon Tester is Joe Biden’s lapdog. No one is asking him about Tester here! They’re asking him why he paid $8,000 to someone who says that the races are better off segregated. We know that he knows it’s a bad look, because that very same staffer’s online accounts were scrubbed after the Daily Beast reached out to his campaign. 

Did Tim grow up in the rural countryside? No, he grew up in a house worth millions in a Minnesota suburb, and went to an elite private high school. Is the bullet in his arm from friendly fire that he hid from his superiors, so as to not incriminate his comrades in arms? No, he shot himself in Glacier Park in 2015. Did he bring up his $900 million aerospace company all by himself, as he said he did? No, he used family money.

This is the cloak and dagger politics that Sheehy claims to be fighting. He’s counting on Montanans to not ask questions and assume that he has our best interests in mind. When someone brings up the discrepancies in his narrative, he slings mud at them and reminisces about his combat service, but never actually answers the question. Our grievances with the state of the Union are real, but that does not mean that we can afford to elect authoritarians or liars as our representatives. We may never get the chance to choose one again.