As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring—though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.
Sticking to his recent mission of rescuing the Democratic Party from its progressive flirtations in the face of the Trump juggernaut, Buttigieg said: “I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s and Bernie Sanders with the nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s.” His campaign quickly captured the moment in a tweet, slightly revising to argue that the result was a scenario “we can’t afford.” Buttigieg was specifically referencing recent attacks on Sanders’ history of making statements that were less than categorically hostile to leftist authoritarian governments like that of Cuba, but in trying to bring back the language of the Cold War, he landed on a much more sweeping rejection of the 1960s.
Because Buttigieg, at 41, is an old millennial; because as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he got a first in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), the trademark degree for Labour-party elites of the Tony Blair era; because he worked optimizing grocery-store pricing at McKinsey; because he joined the Navy in hopes of promoting democracy in Afghanistan; because he got gay-married to his partner Chasten in 2018; and because, as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he agitated to bring hipster entrepreneurism and “high-tech investment” to his rust-belt hometown, I had to ask him about neoliberalism, the happy idea that consumer markets and liberal democracy will always expand, and will always expand together.
Over the past few months, political commentators have struggled to explain why many LGBTQ people, especially younger cohorts, have not enthusiastically lined up behind Pete Buttigieg’s historic campaign to be the first openly gay nominee for president.
(Surveys of the group have shown him trailing Sanders and Warren.) Most recently, the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen offered an explanation for this apparent surprise, generalizing a broad divide in the community between queers who believe their queerness has a clear political component—one that happens to align more with the party’s left-wing vision of radical societal change—and those who view it merely as a demographic, “small part of me” detail that need not speak to anything other than basic gender identity or sexual orientation. Buttigieg has shown himself consistently to be the avatar of the latter camp, and in Tuesday night’s debate in Charleston, South Carolina, he made a strikingly transparent statement that should clarify the issue for anyone still confused.
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