The curious mind by Pete Buttigieg keeps much of its functionality in reserve. Even talking about railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that make up his current stash, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation comes across as a Mensa black cardholder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for any date in 1404, along with an uncondescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
As Secretary Buttigieg and I spoke 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 faculties. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are assigned to the Iliadpuritan historiography and that of Knausgaard Spring– although not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to dedicate another apse in his cathedral spirit to make his ideas on three powerful themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—comprehensible to me.
Because Buttigieg, at 41, is an old millennial; for earning a first in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, the signature degree for Labor Party elites of the Tony Blair era; because he worked on optimizing supermarket prices at McKinsey; because he joined the Navy in hopes of promoting democracy in Afghanistan; because he married his partner Chasten as gay in 2018; and since, as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he was bent on bringing hipster entrepreneurship and “high-tech investment” to his rusty-belt hometown, I had to ask him about neoliberalism, the happy idea that consumer markets and liberal democracy will always exist. expand, and will always expand together. I was also fascinated by the way Buttigieg, who has long described herself as obsessed with technology and data, has responded to the gendering of technology, and green technology in particular, by terrifying culture warriors, including Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Buttigieg, whose father was a renowned Marxist scholar, was himself a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders as a young man. He now acknowledges that the persistence of far-right ideology, with its masculine and anti-democratic preoccupations, is part of the reason neoliberalism has been undone. Not everyone, it seems, even want to a rising standard of living if it means accepting the greater suffrage of undesirables, which of course includes women, poor people, black people and the usual demons in the crosshairs of the world’s Ted Cruzes and Tucker Carlsons.
He also talked about his faith. Leftists today are said to be less religious than right-wing evangelicals, but between Buttigieg, whose Episcopalianism informs his decision-making, and his boss, President Joe Biden, whose robust Catholicism drives his earnest efforts to revive America’s soul to blow, the religious left may be rising again.
Virginia Heffernan: What Is Neoliberalism And What Happened To It?
Peter Buttigieg: When it comes to neoliberalism, we are robbed by reality. That’s a cheeky way to put it.
Poor old liberals. Always getting robbed by reality, or just robbers.
See, early in my adulthood, neoliberalism was almost described as a consensus that just made sense – at least for anyone in positions of influence. Now it’s very different. We have experienced the end of the end of history. We have certainly experienced the limitations of consensus. None of the assumptions from the period between roughly 1991 and 2008 have survived.
