Reading Buttigieg-A former teacher's perspective

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https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/reading-buttigieg

Reading Buttigieg
A former teacher’s perspective
By James T. Kloppenberg
January 28, 2020


Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. (Chuck Kennedy / Courtesy of Pete For America)

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As he has been saying since he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Buttigieg believes that the challenge facing Democrats is to engage with people across the nation, people with very different cultural values, by connecting the aspirations of our politics with “the richness of everyday life.” Otherwise the party might be able to satisfy self-righteous coastal elites, but it will continue to fail to generate majorities in diverse communities across the nation. It is paradoxical that the sharpest criticism Buttigieg has received has come from just those coastal elites, particularly members of his generation and younger, while his greatest strength has come from older voters, many of whom are tired of the familiar contenders and ready to welcome this likeable newcomer. The divided perceptions of Buttigieg between younger and older left-leaning voters itself illustrates some of the mistrust and animosity that he has identified as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest problems.

One of the striking features of Buttigieg’s hundreds of campaign appearances has been their consistency. He does not appear to worry about tailoring his appeal to any particular group; his message has been the same wherever he goes. His consistent emphasis on bringing together different American voters around a common agenda does not depend on demonizing others. Instead, he lays out his own vision of a nation committed less to individual success and unregulated free enterprise than to the values of compassion, strength, and morality that he articulated almost two decades ago and continues to cherish. Residual dissatisfaction with Obama, the belief that he squandered the few opportunities he enjoyed by wasting too much time and energy on conciliation, also helps explain the uneasiness of many young people on the left when they hear Buttigieg use that language rather than Warren’s or Sanders’s calls to battle.

Buttigieg laughed when he admitted to me that he did not expect, when he declared his candidacy, to be the “the religion guy.” His frequent invocations of his Christian faith strike me as sincere rather than strategic. When he discusses climate change, he talks about our duty to be stewards of God’s creation. When he discusses immigration and poverty, he invokes the Beatitudes. When he discusses gender and sexuality, he says his own orientation is not his choice but that of his creator. Everyone I have talked with agrees that nobody—by his own account even including Buttigieg himself—was aware he was gay until shortly before he came out during his campaign for reelection as mayor of South Bend. The cultural and legal changes that made his marriage as well as his reelection possible have been so rapid that we can forget he would have been ostracized at St. Joseph High School had he come out as a teenager in the 1990s. As far as I can tell, no one who knew him at Harvard or Oxford, including his male friends Sitaraman, Warren, Rahman, and Liscow, and his female friends such as my students Roxie Myhrum and Sandhya Ramadas, had any inkling of Buttigieg’s orientation. I saw only one reference to the subject in his Crimson columns: “public morality includes acknowledging the humanity and rights of homosexuals, though peddlers of hate invoke it to do the opposite.” Obama, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren have also spoken frequently about the link between their Christian faith and their progressive politics, but no Democrat in recent decades has spoken about the connection more often, more forcefully, or in relation to as many particular issues as has Buttigieg.

The most durable goal of American democracy has always been the common good, not the rights of individuals or the good of particular segments of the population. Buttigieg shares that commitment. I find it odd that it infuriates so many Democrats, who do not share his belief in the possibility of constructing a shared public interest through democratic deliberation. Yet that ideal is deeply rooted in American history. When skeptics express their concern that a thirty-eight year old has the experience necessary for the presidency, I remind them that another champion of the idea of the common good, James Madison, was thirty-six years old in 1787, when he played a pivotal role at the Constitutional Convention and wrote his perennially influential essays in The Federalist. Youth does not necessarily mean immaturity, nor—as we see demonstrated every day by our president’s tweets, taunts, tantrums, boasts, and recklessness—does good judgment necessarily come with age.

Despite his considerable strengths, Buttigieg is of course highly unlikely to be elected president in 2020. But we could—and possibly will—do worse. Whatever the outcome, Buttigieg has shown sufficient strength to suggest that he will be a figure to reckon with for decades to come. As he is fond of pointing out, he will not reach the age of the current president (or, one might add, some of his rivals for the Democratic nomination), until well after 2050. Buttigieg’s intelligence, calm, quick wittedness, idealism, and hopefulness all remind me of Obama’s most notable characteristics. Unfortunately, any Democrat elected president in 2020 will almost certainly face a House of Representatives as polarized as the one that stymied Obama throughout his two terms in office and a Senate as stubbornly partisan as the one that now protects Donald Trump from the consequences of his corruption. Like Obama, though, and unlike the most strident of his critics on the left, who see Buttigieg as nothing more than a moderate who lacks convictions, he understands that hatred and intransigence are not the cure for what ails American politics. They are the disease.