The more I hear him the more I like Pete Buttigieg, I think he's a lot more like what people hoped Barack Obama would be than Beto O'Rourke, is. Than Cory Booker is. In fact, I think he's more like the Barack Obama that people thought they were voting for than the one they got turned out to be. Charles Pierce's piece about him the other day contained two long quotes from him that remind me of how good he's been in impromptu interviews I've heard on radio and online.
To the folks on the other side, freedom means 'freedom from.' Usually, freedom from government, as if government were the only thing that could make you unfree. That's just not true. Your neighbor can make you unfree. Your cable company can make you unfree. If they get into the business of telling you who you can marry, your county clerk can make you unfree. Let's talk about what freedom really means. Freedom means being able to start a small business because you know that when you leave your old job, that doesn't mean you have to lose your healthcare. Freedom means that your reproductive health is up to you. Freedom means that when you have paid your debt to society, you get to re-enter society and become a productive, tax-paying, voting citizen. Freedom means you can organize for fair day's work, a fair day's pay, and a fair day's conditions.
I can understand Pierce being a bit skeptical of the things that make Buttigieg fairly compared to an O'Rourke or Booker - though I think, honestly, Buttigieg is more in line with traditional American style liberalism than them or Obama or Bill Clinton. The last two Democratic presidents pissed away the hopes of Democrats and progressive independents who voted for them by proving they were, in fact, corporate Democrats who made a lot more common-cause with Republicans who would always oppose them, which destroyed the coalition that elected them. I am not saying that Buttigieg is my candidate for 2020, Elizabeth Warren is the one I think is the best candidate. I think Buttigieg needs some time to learn Washington DC from either holding a House seat (maybe wrong but I don't think he's likely to get one in Indiana) or an appointed position. If he could be there long enough to get to know it while remaining uncorrupted in the seductive way of DC insiders, he might make a perfect candidate.
I am an uncompromising, traditional American-style liberal who has always lived about 20 to 40 miles inland from the Atlantic coast, someone who believes that all people are equal, the possessor of equal rights, that freedom is only legitimately exercised in so far as it doesn't impinge on those rights and the equal rights of others, that healthcare, adequate food, housing, education, police and fire protection, emergency health services etc. are a right, the provision of which is a test of the legitimacy of any government. That government of The People, by The People and FOR The People is the only legitimate form of government. Long ago I realized that the highest value in human experience is not necessarily intelligence, as useful as that is, but goodness. Hearing, for the millionth time, how smart Henry Kissinger was, I realized I'd known of hundreds, maybe thousands of smart people the world would have been a better place without but I'd never known one good person I'd say that of.
I am not an English-European style liberal, I am neither an economic or life-style libertarian. I am an economic leveler - especially seeing how the existence of billionaires and multi-millionaires is a fatal danger to equality, democracy and decency and that their existence guarantees poverty of millions and billions - I don't think the equal rights and legitimate freedoms of us all are safe as long as there is the obscene level of inequality which is common here and elsewhere. Libertarianism in the guise of "liberalism" or "classical-liberalism" is a road to one or another level of gangster governance that I set out in my new graph of political identity last Saturday.
Pete Buttigieg, would agree, perhaps, with my political analysis but I think he has a similar understanding of these things, I could probably learn a lot from him, though he's quite a bit younger than I am. I don't get that impression from anything Beto has so-far said.
Some things I think a lot of us need to consider, especially those of us who live on the coasts, is said in the other quote Pierce gave.
It’s time for some of the more visible national voices of our Democratic Party to come from the red states. It's time for a little more of a regional mix in the faces that our party puts forward in the highest level. We love our friends in the big cities, but it is time for us to confront the idea that any state, any county, or any community has to be conservative because it's been voting Republican for the last few years. Where is is written that this has to be a Republican state? Where is it written that Indiana has to be a Republican state? So would it not make more sense for more people to come from red states [to] the Democratic party and change the way some people think of our part of the country?
Pete Buttigieg, clearly, has understood one of the things that will need to be changed if a stable Democratic coalition is to be formed. A bi-coastal Democratic Party can only occasionally win elections for President, unless we can attract winning majorities in many other places, we will always be fighting up-hill. In doing that, the traditional American style liberalism I advocate has more in common with the better angels of the kind of people Buttigieg proposes appealing to than the Hollywood-NYC-DC-Cambridge MA style of liberalism, the kind of "liberalism" that Bill and, frankly, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama practiced and which has proven is unsustainable. I think one of the reasons that Clinton and Obama were such pathetically weak presidents is because they didn't understand the nature of their support among VOTERS as opposed to funders of their campaigns. Obama, especially, let people down by choosing to be a weak Democrat, hankering after the votes of Senate Republicans, weakening some of his greatest chances for appealing to voters in the industrial mid-west to try, ineffectively, to get Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to vote for funding bills. Clinton, of course, indulged his appetites, giving Republicans weapons against him, as well.
I think one of the biggest problems for Democrats to deal with is, frankly, the snobbery of many of us who live in East coast states who indulge themselves and whose self-indulgence is most useful to Republican-fascists, not to liberals winning. As long as that is the face of the Democratic party, you can forget the kind or politics that Pete Buttigieg is talking about, you can forget having the kind of stable Democratic governance that produced the high-point of American liberalism in the years in and around 1964-66, the thing which Republican-fascists are trying to destroy. Either serious American liberals can get the snobs to drop their regional snobbery, or they can get shut of them. And, as it turns out, not all of those snobs come from the coasts, this mornings news mentions one of those I would hope to never hear from again, Rahm Emanuel from Chicago, one of the architects of Obama's fatal self-weakening.
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