Things in the United States are even worse than they appear, and the hope is not in rebuilding the systems that have been destroyed by Donald Trump, Pete Buttigieg told the Texas Tribune Festival Nov. 14.
The former U.S. secretary of transportation and likely Democratic presidential candidate spoke Friday morning at First Baptist Church of Austin, one of several venues for the festival of ideas in downtown Austin, Texas. He was interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic.
Of the Trump administration, Buttigieg said, “I’m not here to say it’s better than it looks. I suspect it’s a little bit worse. Because the destruction is so profound. … It’s not just bad policy. It would be one thing if there are a lot of policies I disagree with that are bad, which of course is happening, but it’s much more fundamental than that.
“The president, for example, has not only asserted control over the federal government in everything that it does, promoting or deleting any independence that exists within the policy. He’s also asserting a level of control over civil society, academia, all business, late night comedy that we have not seen certainly in the United States in modern times, and that it’s going to be very hard to recover from having experienced all that. I’m not pessimistic. I believe that we have been through worse as a country.”
At that assertion, Goldberg interjected with disbelief.
Buttigieg responded: “Well, in the middle of the 19th century, half this country broke off and declared war against the first half for the purpose of being able to continue enslaving people.”
Such major disruptions and national disagreements are rare but still notable, he said.
“The task is not just to put back what we used to have.”
And just like in the aftermath of the Civil War, America does not need to return to its past broken habits, he explained. “My point is we have the means to get to a different and better place. But that’s going to require an understanding that our task … as Democrats, but really anybody who’s opposed to the carnival of destruction’s going on right now, the task is not just to put back what we used to have. I’m very worried that we have a habit of mind … that tells us since all this destruction is obviously terrible and wrong, our job is to somehow retake power and then get in there, find all the pieces of everything they broke and put it back together in what we had as the status quo.”
The reason, he said: “If our political and economic and social systems were acceptable, we would not be here.”
Pete Buttigieg with Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo buy Mario Cantu/Cal Sport Media via AP Images)
“A guy like Donald Trump, a movement like the kind of proto-authoritarian nationalism or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t find fertile ground in places where things are working, right? So we have to face the fact.”
Thus, America today faces “a huge problem and a huge opportunity,” Buttigieg said. “To me, the reason we should be propelled and not paralyzed in this moment is that we actually get to redesign what our country looks like. We have to do this or else it’s all over.”
Goldberg asked Buttigieg how Trump and his MAGA movement rose to such power today and what role social media played.
Social media definitely has made things more difficult, Buttigieg responded. “Think about what really happens when some dude on the internet has as much authority as a professional journalist, right?”
Goldberg interjected that there’s “a guy named Captured who has more followers on Twitter than the Atlantic has subscribers.”
That’s the right illustration, Buttigieg affirmed. “If Captured says something false, it’s just there. Whereas if you were to publish something about me, for example, that was inaccurate, I would call you or somebody would call somebody, and if we were right, we could prove it. You would issue a correction.”
But that doesn’t happen with social media influencers and podcasters who are accountable to no one and have no editors, he added.
The problem is compounded, he continued, by the social media algorithms that do not feed users the things they need to know but instead only the things they already believe.
“The algorithm’s job is to find things that will keep you staring at the screen. It knows what your thumb will do. Your thumb is connected to your lizard brain. It is recording the preferences of your lizard brain which, by the way, are very different than the preferences of your actual brain.”
In that sense, social media algorithms have made all Americans “targets for bad and wrong and false information,” he explained.
“He is an example of things that seem unprecedented but they are more precedented than you would think.”
Would Donald Trump, a reality TV star, exist today without the internet and social media, Goldberg asked.
“He is an example of things that seem unprecedented but they are more precedented than you would think. There is a long, rich American tradition of hucksters and conspiracy theorists and in particular rich men who take poor people’s money while telling poor people they’re being empowered. That is something that has happened from the get-go in this country that’s not novel.”
And today’s social media environment isn’t that different from the newspaper landscape of the 19th century where everyone read newspapers favoring their own political slants, he said. The idea that news reporting should be objective arose after that time.
Of the much-discussed point that young men in America seem to have turned to Trump more than other demographics, Buttigieg pointed out the series of policy failures young adults have known their whole lives.
“There are exceptions, the important ones from the Affordable Care Act to the infrastructure bill that I worked on. But for the most part, you have witnessed things like the financial crisis, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and it’s not just policy choices. … If you were born the year my mother was born at the end of World War II you had a 90% chance of coming out ahead of your parents economically. If you were born the year I was born, it’s a coin flip. Any younger than me, you’re under water.”
He was able to buy a house at the age of 30 in Indiana at a time when the median age of the first-time home buyer who was 30, he noted. Now that median age for first-time homebuyers is 40.
“Trump’s policies and Republican policies tend to make (these things) worse, but they also tend to create an environment where a lot of people who don’t even like him will say, ‘You know what? I’ll try anything, including burning the house now to have some shot of being better off.’ Those are the conditions my party needs still to understand that have led us to be here.”
However, constantly talking about the horrors of Trump and his administration is not the answer, Buttigieg said, returning to his opening theme. If anyone can’t see by now that Trump should be “disqualified,” they’re not going to get it and there’s no value in extending the argument, he advised.
“Trump’s era began 10 years ago last summer, the moment he came down that escalator. And as proud as I am of some policy accomplishments that happened when we were in power, the reality is for those 10 years it’s been his world, and we’ve been looking at that, and it sucks. And increasingly, increasingly it’s clear that his economy sucks.”
That’s why the answer can’t be, “Let’s take things back to the way they looked in 2022,” he urged. “What we need to do is make it very clear what’s coming next. … The more we’re talking about him, the less we’re talking about you.”
Those outside MAGA world, “have potentially a better story to tell,” he said. “We have answers on what it would take for you to be able to buy a home, what it would take for you to be able to afford health care. It is not just that he’s taken it away from you, it’s that we could do something different and better.”