Among the over a dozen folks who have announced themselves as candidates for president in the Democratic Party race, one who’s been getting a lot of attention is centrist Pete Buttigieg, the well-regarded “Mayor Pete” of South Bend, Indiana. Having launched an exploratory committee in January, Buttigieg announced a fundraising total of 7 million dollars by April. This was followed up by a CNN town hall event in which Buttigieg’s performance impressed a lot of people, leading to greater press coverage and favorable attention.
This has led to consternation in some quarters. Paste Magazine writer Jacob Weindling, a self-declared socialist, wrote an article last week on the subject that “Pete Buttigieg Is Not a Progressive.” In the lead paragraph, Weindling lays out his thesis: “The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo. “
But that just gets to the point. I am NOT a “progressive.” I am not a Socialist. I am a conservative in the sense that I want to preserve the American system of government. I am a libertarian in the sense that I believe in The Law of Unintended Consequences, and in the sense of Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least” and what someone else believes “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words I am what Jefferson and F.A. Hayek would call a liberal.
But if “conservatism” has degenerated into the power-worship of wannabe fascists, the term liberalism has been co-opted by what would properly be regarded as social democracy in Western Europe. And really, it has even less to do with that than what Weindling describes as “the attitude that the status quo is the problem” because when American leftists talk about how (say) national health care is a radical leftist position here but a mainstream position in Europe, they elide the point that a social safety net IS a mainstream position in Europe – which in some cases has conservative roots. This model is certainly more redistributionist than how things are done in America, and thus problematic to the Right, but it is not “socialist” in the Leninist or even anarchist sense, because it does not result in the workers seizing the means of production – at best, workers’ parties seize control of the government and it redistributes the profits of business. The point is, you can’t redistribute capital if there is no capital to redistribute. European systems preserve the “status quo” that actual socialists wish to destroy because you can’t have all the things they say are good about socialism without a capitalist system to finance them.
To say nothing of the other issue with “progressivism”, a term I normally use only in quotes. The progressive movement is so devoted to its own analytic concept of “justice as fairness” that it disregards the context of things, such as, that not everybody regards the leftist position as self-evidently good, that not everybody agrees with the current fashions of gender theory, the demand for reparations, socialist economics, and so forth, and that even those who are moderate and tolerant will eventually be alienated by a movement that demands everything go its way. The words of Hayek are relevant here: “To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion. This may also explain why it seems to be so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal.”
Because the Left has that illiberal, fundamentally anti-American dark side – however sublimated it appears in comparison with right-wing lunacy – Republicans can still try to make hay out of how “socialist” the new generation of Democrats are. It’s just that that party has staked its future, and the world’s future, on the risk that their precious little boy will literally shit himself on national TV, which he figuratively did this week.
By contrast to Weidling, Andrew Sullivan had a Friday column in nymag.com that presented Buttigieg in a more positive light. Sullivan being Sullivan, he frets that any candidate who cannot address the immigration issue will lose to Trump, but he thinks that Buttigieg seems to be the most likely to support e-verification and a path to citizenship as opposed to effectively open borders. He also appreciates his demographics (‘my gay hack for pronouncing his name is to think of him as a ‘booty judge.’) and sees his political career so far as proof, like Obama’s, that “in America, we can still unite in a more humane consensus.” This is perhaps better explained in an earlier New York article by Ed Kilgore, “Without a Plausible ‘Theory of Change,’ Progressive Ideas Are Just Fantasies.” This piece in turn analyzed the interview that Buttigieg did with Ezra Klein at Vox, quoting Buttigieg as saying that the central lesson of Barack Obama’s presidency is that “any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.”
This just gets to the point that the two-party process has reached its limit of absurdity as Republicans in particular campaign only on negative terms and in office can only act to stymie Democratic initiatives. Even if some Republicans knew better, they don’t want to be part of a process where a Democrat president could take credit for the results, and they certainly don’t want to be primaried out of office by people who think that Rush Limbaugh is a pinko. Now, I didn’t always agree with Obama, but I think he was temperamentally the sort of president I could get behind. It’s just that the Republican Party had already decided on its radical course by the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and they were going to oppose Obama for being a Democrat even if he wasn’t young and black (though obviously that didn’t help). I argued that Obama’s (generically) conservative temperament was good on the whole but left him unable to challenge his enemies even when it was clear that they wanted to destroy everything he supported. In his article, Kilgore says that the most important matter for the next president is not so much what a candidate wants to do as how they plan to do it, pointing out that Buttigieg, for one, would endorse “process” changes like eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster so that the results of the popular vote are better expressed in action, whereas the “radical progressive” Bernie Sanders would keep both institutions as they are, and thus be less likely to succeed in a country where Republicans have any support at all. The articles on Buttigieg aren’t very clear on exactly how he would enact these changes, since they would require both houses of Congress, but he is at least trying to size up the issue when Obama didn’t even seem to recognize it.
The fact that Buttigieg is gay and married to a man is by now incidential to most people, and obviously doesn’t give him extra weight with “progressives,” even as it would drive most “conservatives” up a wall. In that, Buttigieg resembles Obama, since most people didn’t care about his race, “progressives” still found reason to criticize him even though he was the first black president, but the conservative faction was driven literally insane by his very existence. What this really comes down to is not that the country is becoming “polarized” or skewing to the Left. Again, liberals: most of the country doesn’t agree with you, either. If you’ve now come to believe that a financially corrupt poon hound is unfit to be president, and that his presence in the office coarsens the culture, maybe you now realize that the conservatives were right about Clinton then. It’s just that since 1998, conservatives took the wrong lesson from that. Now they’ve come to believe that since power justifies everything, everything is justified for the sake of power. And if the rest of the country seems to be going more Left, it’s only because the Right is already radicalized and cannot be dealt with in good faith.
The other thing is that the setting is different than the 2016 election. Whereas the Democrats’ position in 2016 was “you’ll get meatloaf again, and like it” now you have the opposite problem where voters have a surfeit of choices. And in this case, every Democrat currently running in 2016, possibly including Joe Biden, could be nitpicked to death by “progressive” purists. But every one of them, including Biden, has a more actually progressive policy record than Hillary Clinton, and any one of them arguably has a better resume.
So Pete Buttigieg isn’t a progressive. Who cares? And why should anyone care if Joe Biden apologizes for being handsy? When the orange toadstool in the White House actually brags about how awful he is? Most of my social media friends don’t talk about Biden’s reputation with women, or Cory Booker’s history with Big Pharma, or Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of staff. They ask, “is this person better than Trump? And could they beat Trump?” The first goes without saying, the second has to be determined.
To reiterate: I’m not a Democrat. I am not a liberal in the American sense of the term, because I am not a “progressive.” So I don’t think I am going to change my Libertarian registration to vote in the Democratic caucus/primary round, because any one of these people not only would be better than Trump, more to the point they would be a better president than Hillary Clinton, and would be more likely to run a better campaign than Hillary Clinton. Ironically that’s why I gave up my principles and temporarily joined the Democratic Party in 2016, specifically to vote for Bernie Sanders, because if the binary thinkers are right in assuming that a third-party candidate can’t win, and the non-Democratic candidate was A, Republican, and B, Trump, that made it imperative that the Democrats nominated someone who could deal with Trump, and Hillary wasn’t it. If anything my resentment of Hillary was based on the suspicion in the back of my mind that Bill and Hillary’s old friend Trump was coached to be an anti-Hillary “straight out of Central Casting” to rally her feminist base and discredit the Republicans once and for all. What she didn’t anticipate is that Trump got more attention and praise than he deserved precisely because he was the anti-Hillary and could present himself as the opposite of what everyone hated about her. If Sanders had been nominated, that wouldn’t have guaranteed he’d win, but he would have had the populist credentials to compete with Trump on that level and would not have had the baggage that Hillary had and that Trump took so much advantage of. The other point in this coming election is that Trump no longer has the advantage of asking “what have you got to lose?” After two years of seeing what he’s actually like with power, a lot of people know exactly what they have to lose, and if all Trump had to do was present himself as the opposite of Hillary, it doesn’t matter how “socialist” or leftist or moderate the Democratic nominee is, since Republicans will present that person as the Commie Antichrist anyway. All said Democrat needs is to be the opposite of Trump.
In this regard, I don’t know if I’d put all my chips on Pete Buttigieg. He is still obscure, but unless we’re talking about Biden, or Bernie Sanders (or unless you watch a lot of MSNBC) most of these guys are obscure. He is not a progressive (at least if you’re one of those folks who defines ‘fascist’ as anything to the right of Che Guevara) but this whole year of pre-primary politics is about Democrats deciding if that’s the direction they want to go. But Buttigieg seems to have the qualities that I (and much of the country) liked about Barack Obama, along with an understanding of the current political situation that Obama didn’t have, and that the next president will need. That’s why I would keep an eye on him.
But I must confess, the real reason I’d like Pete Buttigieg to get the Democratic nomination is so that Donald Trump would have to spend the second half of 2020 trying to pronounce “butty geeg.”