This article is worth quoting further (thanks for posting):
RocketMan » Thu Apr 04, 2019 9:01 pm wrote:Nathan J. Robinson already did a deep dive.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/all-about-peteAll About PeteIf you know only one thing about Pete Buttigieg, it’s that he’s The Small-Town Mayor Who Is Making A Splash. If you know half a dozen things about Pete Buttigieg, it’s that he’s also young, gay, a Rhodes Scholar, an Arabic-speaking polyglot, and an Afghanistan veteran. If you know anything more than that about Pete Buttigieg, you probably live in South Bend, Indiana. This is a little strange: These are all facts about him, but they don’t tell us much about what he believes or what he advocates. The nationwide attention to Buttigieg seems more to be due to “the fact that he is a highly-credentialed Rust Belt mayor” rather than “what he has actually said and done.” He’s a gay millennial from Indiana, yes. But should he be President of the United States?
...
But it’s not fair to fully judge a person by a single comment in an interview. Pete Buttigieg has just published a campaign book, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, that gives a much fuller insight into the way he thinks about himself, his ideals, and his plans. It has been called the “best political autobiography since Barack Obama,” revealing Buttigieg as a “president in waiting.” Indeed, I recommend that anyone considering supporting Buttigieg read it from from cover to cover. It is very personal, very well-written, and lays out a narrative that makes Buttigieg seem a natural and qualified candidate for the presidency.
It also provides irrefutable evidence that no serious progressive should want Pete Buttigieg anywhere near national public office.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/all-about-peteBold emphasis is mine:
When he is asked about what his actual policies are, Buttigieg has often been evasive. He has mentioned getting rid of the electoral college and expanding the Supreme Court, but his speech is often abstract. In this exchange, for instance, a VICE reporter pressed Buttigieg to better specify his commitments:
VICE: I listened to you talk today. On the one hand, you definitely speak very progressively. But you don’t have a lot of super-specific policy ideas.
BUTTIGIEG: Part of where the left and the center-left have gone wrong is that we’ve been so policy-led that we haven’t been as philosophical. We like to think of ourselves as the intellectual ones. But the truth is that the right has done a better job, in my lifetime, of connecting up its philosophy and its values to its politics. Right now I think we need to articulate the values, lay out our philosophical commitments and then develop policies off of that. And I’m working very hard not to put the cart before the horse.
VICE: Is there time for that? They want the list. They want to know exactly what you’re going to do.
BUTTIGIEG: I think it can actually be a little bit dishonest to think you have it all figured out on day 1. I think anybody in this race is going to be a lot more specific or policy-oriented than the current president. But I don’t think we ought to have that all locked in on day 1.
This is extremely fishy. First, while there’s a valid argument that “technocratic liberal wonkery” disconnected from values is uninspiring and useless, the left is not usually accused of being too specific on policy. Quite the opposite: The common critique is that behind the mushy values talk there are too few substantive solutions to social problems. Why does Buttigieg think telling people your values and coming up with plans are mutually exclusive? Why does he think having a platform means you believe you’ve got it “all figured out on Day 1”? Why treat policy advocates as “dishonest”? Why mention the extremely low bar of being “more policy-oriented than the current president?” And what use are values statements if you don’t tell people what the values mean for action? I’ve seen plenty of progressive policy agendas that don’t sacrifice values (e.g., Abdul El-Sayed’s plans, the U.K. Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto). A candidate who replies to this question with this answer should set off alarm bells.
[...] let me be up front about my bias. I don’t trust former McKinsey consultants. I don’t trust military intelligence officers. And I don’t trust the type of people likely to appear on “40 under 40” lists, the valedictorian-to-Harvard-to-Rhodes-Scholarship types who populate the American elite. I don’t trust people who get flattering reams of newspaper profiles and are pitched as the Next Big Thing That You Must Pay Attention To, and I don’t trust wunderkinds who become successful too early. Why? Because I am somewhat cynical about the United States meritocracy. Few people amass these kind of résumés if they are the type to openly challenge authority. Noam Chomsky says that the factors predicting success in our “meritocracy” are a “combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of curiosity and independence of mind, [and] self-serving disregard for others.” So when journalists see “Harvard” and think “impressive,” I see it and think “uh-oh.”
He mentions the newsstand where you can “get exotic newspapers like La Repubblica or Le Monde” and the motley mix of characters he saw, like the “teenage punks” and someone passing out flyers for “something edgy like a Lyndon LaRouche for President rally or a Chomsky talk down at MIT.” (Same kind of thing, apparently.) There’s something amiss here though. These are indeed some of the impressions you might get setting foot in the Square. But there’s another fact about the world outside the Harvard gates that is instantly apparent to most newcomers: It has long had a substantial population of homeless people. In fact, it’s a scene as grotesque as it is eclectic: Directly outside the Corinthian columns of the richest university on earth, people wrapped in dirty coats are begging for a buck or two from passing students. Most of the university population has trained themselves to ignore this sub-caste, to the point where they don’t even see them at all, and Buttigieg is no different. The closest he gets is reporting “a mix of postdocs, autodidact geniuses, and drifters” at the Au Bon Pain. He doesn’t mention seeing injustice.
Perhaps just an oversight, though every time I’ve passed through Harvard Square it has been my signature impression. But there was soon something even more disquieting. Talking about politics on campus, Buttigieg says:
In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters.
Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House [Zuckerberg et al.]
I find this short passage very weird. See the way Buttigieg thinks here. He dismisses student labor activists with the right-wing pejorative “social justice warriors.” But more importantly, to this day it hasn’t even entered his mind that he could have joined the PSLM in the fight for a living wage. Activists are an alien species, one he “strides past” to go to “Pizza & Politics” sessions with governors and New York Times journalists. He didn’t consider, and still hasn’t considered, the moral quandary that should come with being a student at an elite school that doesn’t pay its janitors a living wage. (In fact, years later Harvard was still refusing to pay its workers decently.)
Buttigieg’s thesis was in part about Vietnam, which he calls a “doomed errand into the jungle.” The liberal vocabulary on wars like Vietnam and Iraq should trouble us. It says things like “doomed” and “mistaken,” (“a lethal blunder” that “collapsed into chaos,” to quote Buttigieg) its judgments pragmatic rather than moral. In doing so, it fails to reckon with the full scale of the atrocities brought about by U.S. government policy.
It also treats America as an innocent blundering giant with “the best of intentions.” Buttigieg quotes Graham Greene: “Innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
After Harvard, it is off to Oxford, where Buttigieg takes up his Rhodes Scholarship with pride. This period of the Buttigieg bildungsroman flits by quickly, but we should pause to note something about the function of Rhodes Scholarships in elite credentialing. Andrew Sullivan—of all people!—wrote a 1988 article poking fun at this sought-after honor (“there is no more glittering prize a young American can win”), and noting that those who win it seem to possess “fecklessness, excessive concern that peasants be aware of their achievement, and a certain hemophilia of character.” They are chosen “not for their creative brilliance but for their slogging ability to make all the right career moves and please their elders.”
The Rhodes recipient, he wrote, is the“apotheosis of the hustling apple-polisher, the résumé-obsessed goody goody,” honorees often having a kind of “bland eugenic perfection.” They “are good at seeking and getting approval. They were good boys at every stage. They were the kind of guys who were editor of the yearbook in high school.” (Or the president of the senior class.) From Oxford, he said, the Scholars tend to take up unexciting but well-paying professional positions, such as working for McKinsey & Company. Sullivan predicted that a Rhodes scholar could never be president, because being president involves making decisions, which they would be unable to do. (Four years later, with the election of Bill Clinton, he was proved both wrong and right.)
I recall the last time we had a Rhodes Scholar Democrat for president: the repeal of Glass-Steagall, critically setting the stage for the ensuing GFC pickpocket; an economic recession triggered by stingy fiscal policies; NAFTA; the Branch Davidian mass murder of 76 people; secret meetings with insurance executives crafting 'Hillarycare'; 500,000 children killed by U.S. bombs and sanctions, considered "worth it"; the bombing of Yugoslavia and organizing "the base" of Islamic fighters that formed Al Qaeda. There's a blowjob joke here somewhere, too, but the real joke was on us hopey-changey voters.
Buttigieg's obedience training goes even further than Clinton's:
Knowing I would head back to America meant that there was less at stake for me in the grade, but I took pride in it even while sensing that the time had come to learn what wasn’t on the page and get an education in the real world.
Which is why I went to McKinsey.
I got curious about McKinsey awhile back:
McKinsey & Company - strategy consultants.
Okay, pause for a moment. If you are Pete Buttigieg, at this point in your life you have the ability to take almost any job you want. These schools open doors, and you pick which one you go through. (Ask yourself: If I could do anything I wanted for a living, what would I do?) Pete Buttigieg looked inside himself and decided he belonged at… the world’s most sinister and amoral management consulting company.
McKinsey is in the news almost every week for some new horrendous deed, from advising Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales to counseling dictators worldwide on how to build more efficient autocracies. A former McKinsey consultant recently wrote a long exposé of the firm’s crimes for Current Affairs. The writer did not equivocate:
[If you believe that capitalism’s] continued practice poses an existential threat to governments, the biosphere, and poor people the world over, then the firm’s role is that of a co-conspirator to a crime in which we are all victims. McKinsey is capitalism distilled. It is global, mobile, flexible, and unabashedly pro-market and pro-management. The firm has an enormous stake in things continuing more or less as they are. Working for all sides, McKinsey’s only allegiance is to capital. As capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know. The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo.
Pete Buttigieg does not recall his time at McKinsey with a sense of moral ambivalence. Today he says it might have been his most “intellectually informing experience,” and by that he doesn’t mean that he saw the dark underbelly of American business. No, he was “learning about the nature of data.” It was a thoroughly neutral experience, “a place to learn.” The most critical thing he will say is that he was “sympathetic” to those who think consulting careers less worthy than “public service.” But ultimately, Buttigieg only left McKinsey because it “could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.” His sense of purpose. Have a look at the book: See if you can find a single qualm, even a moment’s interrogation of the nature of the company he worked for.
In fact, Buttigieg was asked in an interview what he thought of the company’s misdeeds. On the work pushing OxyContin, he replied that he “hadn’t followed the story.” On collaborating with the murderous Saudi government:
I think you have a lot of smart, well-intentioned people who sometimes view the world in a very innocent way. I wrote my thesis on Graham Greene, who said that innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
The dumb leper again! Man, Buttigieg never misses a chance to cite that thesis. Vietnam was poor innocent America wandering the earth and accidentally causing a million deaths. McKinsey consultants are poor, innocent, leprous invalids, too sweet and unworldly to notice that their client is Mohammed bin Salman.
FWIW, Buttigieg was working at McKinsey when "
McKinsey is said to have played a significant role in the 2008 financial crisis by promoting the securitization of mortgage assets and encouraged the banks to fund their balance sheets with debt."
As mayor, he says, he was “tech-oriented.” He was “fresh from a job in management consulting and eager to unlock whatever efficiencies could be found.” He wanted to “follow the data where it leads.” What does that mean? Buttigieg cites “app for pothole detection” and his “smart sewers” that used wi-fi-enabled sensors to more efficiently control wastewater flow. He was even willing to “follow the data” toward layoffs. He found that it would save money to put robotic arms on city garbage trucks and fire human trash collectors. Buttigieg was “prepared to eliminate the jobs,” in part because the robots “led to lower injury rates” (fewer injuries being the predictable consequence of fewer jobs). Buttigieg’s ruthlessly quantitative approach to municipal government leads an acquaintance to compare him to Robert McNamara, which leads to another musing on the folly of well-intentioned planners.
Did you know there’s a giant racial wealth gap in South Bend? You won’t if all you read about South Bend is Shortest Way Home. Oh sure, he takes us on an ambling tour through the city, shows us people kayaking on the old industrial canal, wanders under the railroad bridge, takes us to see live music in an abandoned swimming pool. He tells us about twilight on the river, the fish-stealing heron on his running route (“To some he is a villain… but to me he is an elegant bird.”) But have a look at Prosperity Now’s “Racial Wealth Divide in South Bend” report and see if you think these should really be the mayor’s narrative priorities.
South Bend African Americans make ½ of what South Bend whites make. They’re twice as likely to be in liquid asset poverty as whites. Their unemployment rate is nearly twice as high. Moreover:
The median African American household income level in South Bend is $14,000 lower than African American national average and they hold an income poverty rate of 40.2%, which is almost two times higher than the country average for African Americans.
As the report makes clear, the situation for Hispanic residents of South Bend is similarly disturbing.
What did Mayor Pete do about this? Well, to do something about it he might have had to care about it, and there’s no evidence from his book that he’s ever even thought about it. In fact, as I started reading about South Bend after getting through Shortest Way Home, there was a lot Buttigieg had left out. The eviction rate has been nearly three times the national average, a “crisis” among the worst in the country. If the word “eviction” appears in Buttigieg’s book, I did not notice it. The opiate crisis, homelessness, and gentrification are all serious issues in South Bend, but Buttigieg mentions them offhandedly if at all.
All of this made me go back and rethink one of Buttigieg’s proudest stories. Every time the media talks about Buttigieg, if they mention anything other than his résumé, it’s his signature initiative to deal with “blight.” Buttigieg says that when he took office, there were “too many houses,” that the main complaint he received from residents was about the proliferation of vacant homes. His major policy goal, then, was to “repair or demolish” 1,000 homes in 1,000 days [...]
By leveling fees and fines, the city leaned on homeowners to make repairs or have their houses demolished. In many cases, Buttigieg said, the homeowners proved impossible to find amid a string of active and inactive investment companies. In other cases, he said, they were unwilling or unable to make repairs.
Make repairs or have your house flattened? Wait, who were these people who were “unable” to make repairs? Were they, by chance, poor? Also, how did these houses become vacant in the first place? Were people evicted or foreclosed on? Look a little deeper into the coverage and you’ll find that this was not simply a matter of “efficient and responsive government,” but a plan to coerce those who possessed dilapidated houses into either spending money or having the houses cleared away for development:
Community advocates in poorer, often African-American or Hispanic neighborhoods began to complain that the city was being too aggressive in fining property owners over code enforcement. The city leveled fines that added up to thousands of dollars, in certain cases, to pressure homeowners to make repairs or have their houses demolished.
Buttigieg’s autobiography does not discuss the social implications of his plan. He brags about his “audacious goals” and “ambitious initiatives,” but questions of justice and injustice are absent.
“I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.”
This was an odd remark by Pete Buttigieg. Assault weapons are fine for shooting foreigners abroad, just not Americans over here.
[...]
from Buttigieg’s account of his time in Afghanistan, it doesn’t seem as if he has thought very hard about American militarism or empire. Buttigieg served overseas for seven months with naval intelligence, taking a hiatus from his mayoral duties. By his account, it was mostly uneventful, as the U.S. war was winding down and he spent most of his time either doing analysis at a computer terminal or driving gear through the city. He did not apparently meet a single Afghan who he thought worthy of naming in his book, and the people of Kabul appear as anonymous pieces of scenery. (In this respect they are like the Black people of South Bend or the homeless people of Harvard Square: nameless nonentities whose opinions Buttigieg has never sought.)
To see what Pete Buttigieg finds important, let’s look at the Index to
Shortest Way Home. Helpfully, it contains an entry for “Buttigieg, Pete,” broken down into all the aspects of Pete Buttigieg’s life and political work. Let’s see what this “encyclopedia of Pete” shows:
[...]
But it’s a memoir. How could it not be all about him? Tell you what:
Grab a copy of Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution and crack it open. Look at the Table of Contents. What do you see? Page 1-185 is Part I, about how Bernie’s early life shaped his politics and why he feels his presidential campaign was important. Then from page 185-449 is Part II, “An Agenda For A New America: How We Transform Our Country.” The subsections are things like “defeating oligarchy,” “real criminal justice reform,” “health care for all,” “corporate media and the threat to our democracy,” and “protecting our most vulnerable.” In great detail, he lays out the problems that disturb him and the things we need to do to fix them. You are, in fact, allowed to write about things other than the essay contest you won in high school, how much you learned about big data during your time as a management consultant, and the time you played Gershwin with the local orchestra.
As we’ve discussed in Current Affairs before, one of the main problems with liberal politics is that people think it should operate like The West Wing: You just pick the smartest and most credentialed people, and they’re the ones who should be solving the nation’s problems. (Jed Bartlet, coincidentally, is a former resident of South Bend, Indiana.)
Part of this emphasis on background and credentials is a kind of “demographic politics,” by which the demographic boxes a person checks are taken as indicative of their political potential. This is how Tim Kaine was selected as Hillary Clinton’s Vice Presidential candidate: He was from Virginia, went to Harvard, spoke Spanish, played the blues. Swing state appeal, competence, cosmopolitianism, “cool dad” factor: a perfect mix.
Pete Buttigieg is trying the same thing. Look at the number of boxes he checks. He’s from the Rust Belt so he’s authentic, but he went to Harvard so he’s not a rube, but he’s from a small city so he’s relatable, but he’s gay so he’s got coastal appeal, but he’s a veteran so his sexuality won’t alienate rural people. This is literally the level of political thinking that is involved in the hype around Buttigieg.
Buttigieg himself is quite explicit about pitching himself this way. Asked about why anyone should vote for him over other candidates, he did not cite a superior governing agenda. Instead he said:
You have a handful of candidates from the middle of the country, but very few of them are young. You have a handful of young candidates, but very few of them are executives. We have a handful of executives but none of them are veterans, and so it’s a question of: What alignment of attributes do you want to have?
Alignment of attributes? Are we building a Sims character? This is McKinsey-speak: optimizing candidate attribute matrix for maximal cross-national vote share. Unfortunately, many in the political press still find this meaningful. Have a read through the profiles and see how much time is spent thinking about Buttigieg’s Attribute Alignment versus asking him to name a single thing he plans to do to help working people.
“Mayor Pete is fresh, he’s untainted… He has an entirely different story than any other politician in our lifetime.” — a wealthy Upper West Side Democrat, quoted in the
New York TimesMayor Pete does
not have an entirely different story than any other politician in our lifetime. He has the same story they all have. David Axelrod has gushed: “His story is an incredible story.”
Is it? The son of two professors at an elite university goes on to several different elite universities, serves an uneventful seven-month tour of duty in the Navy, and then becomes the technocratic mayor of the city his parents’ university is in? Ilhan Omar has an entirely different story than any other politician. So does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This man
is the story of the American elite.
The myth-making here is going to be intense. The profiles are already streaming forth.
The New York Times covered his wedding by wondering if Buttigieg would be president. You will be sold Buttigieg’s small-town milliennial neoliberalism the way they’re trying to sell you Beto O’Rourke’s skateboard neoliberalism. Hey kids, you like Medicare For All? So does this guy! But he’s young and from the Midwest and likes
Hamilton! Bernie is old. You don’t need an old man. You need young hip progressivism.
Do not be deceived by this. Look into the actual records of these candidates. Get their shitty books and scrutinize them closely. A lot of money is going to be flowing toward tricks like this,
as frantic Democratic elites try to push someone like Buttigieg in order to prevent a Sanders nomination. They know Buttigieg is one of them; they see “McKinsey” and realize they’ll come to no harm. But they hope you don’t see what they see. It has been the same over and over:
Hey kids, Tom Perez isn’t any different from Keith Ellison! No need to do anything rash now! At every turn, bandwagon-hopping frauds are going to mouth the latest slogans. Abolish ICE? Yeah dude! I’ll abolish the
fuck out of ICE.
You can see it in the press coverage. Here’s what the
New Yorker writer concluded:
I began to see [Buttigieg] not as a counterweight to the radicalization of his Party but as an expression of it. If the cautious, studious, improbably ambitious Rhodes Scholar in the race, who emphasized the necessity of meeting middle America where it was, was himself supporting the abolition of the Electoral College, then that suggested that the generational transformation of the Party had been completed.It does suggest that things have changed. But it doesn’t suggest that Pete Buttigieg is actually a radical. It’s just that the consultants all have to be a bit more careful now.
Pete Buttigieg will be in the debates, and he will be good. There will probably be all kinds of profiles about the “breakout star” of the first debate.
“Is Sanders finished?” Slate will ask. “Pete Buttigieg Out-Sandersed Sanders,” the Atlantic will insist. Joe Hagan will travel with him, accompanied by Annie Leibovitz. They’ll talk about how he’s a fit, world-weary Afghanistan survivor who is still “most alive when discussing James Joyce.” There will be a long puff piece about how Buttigieg squares his sincere religious commitments with his gay identity. (Actually, while
New York calls him “openly Christian,” if God appears in
Shortest Way Home I could not find Him. The chapter epigraphs are from Lincoln, Keynes, James Joyce, Michael Collins, and Hilary Mantel.)
Always watch for the qualifiers. The
Times says Buttigieg is a man of “quiet rebellion.” A quiet rebellion is not a rebellion. “In his own understated way, he is suggesting a sharp break with the past.”
Suggesting. Understated. These words mean “he is not actually a break with the past.” “Ideologically, Mr. Buttigieg is a progressive — sometimes an adventurous one.”
Sometimes. “At the very least, Axelrod said, Buttigieg was likely to emerge from this ‘an interesting voice from his generation.’”
Interesting: the fallback word for when something has no meaningful other qualities worthy of note.
That's plenty for now.
Sorry about the large image size, I'll try to fix later.