Pete Buttigieg Thinks You're Dumb
Some people are smart for themselves. They like to learn new things, even if that new knowledge has no practical use. Other people are smart for everyone else, deriving little satisfaction from the act of learning itself—their emotional payoff comes later, when they get the chance to demonstrate that they know something you don’t. To them, knowledge is like real estate: gobble up as much as you can and park it somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind. Then, when the time is right, cash it in for social capital.
By all accounts, Pete Buttigieg is an intelligent guy. He’s the son of two college professors, a former high-school class valedictorian, a Harvard University alum, and a Rhodes Scholar. He plays the piano, he speaks seven languages, he was a consultant for McKinsey, and he was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana when he was just 32. It’s an impressive résumé, to be sure, but it doesn’t mean Buttigieg possesses a true passion for learning; rather, it seems to suggest a life spent carefully learning only that which will help propel him to the next achievement. In simple terms, Pete Buttigieg is smart for everyone else.
I understand why intelligence—no matter the impetus behind its acquisition—is an attractive quality in a presidential candidate. I especially understand it as a counterbalance to our current president, a man whose “evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life.”
To someone like Buttigieg, knowledge is worthless on its own. Its value lies in how easily it can be quantified or validated by others. This attitude is reflected in the achievements Buttigieg chooses to highlight: class valedictorian, Harvard alum, polyglot, Rhodes Scholar, each one a data point leading us to the inescapable conclusion that Pete Is Smart. His résumé is a checklist, like he’s collecting merit badges in the Brain Scouts of America.
(Andrew Sullivan once wrote that Rhodes Scholar recipients are “the apotheosis of the hustling apple-polisher, the résumé-obsessed goody goody […] [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.” This seems like a perfect encapsulation of Pete Buttigieg; because it’s Andrew Sullivan, it’s also a perfect place to link to that Clickhole article.)
To hear Buttigieg tell it, his presidential campaign is one born of necessity: “I’m running for president because I believe America is running out of time,” he told the Des Moines Register. Pete’s not doing this for himself, you see. He’s doing it for us! The Grudging Savior routine would be odd for any candidate—a presidential campaign is essentially the world’s longest job interview, and most hiring managers don’t love hearing “I suppose I’ll do you a favor and work here, since you guys are doomed without me.” In Buttigieg’s case, it’s completely at odds with everything else we know about him.
Buttigieg’s bona fides could almost belong to a character on The West Wing, but even Aaron Sorkin would dial it back a bit to make it slightly more believable. His is not the résumé of someone who decides Hey, what the hell: I’ve got 4 years of vacation time saved up, might as well use them to fix America. It is a résumé that could only belong to someone who started plotting their presidential campaign somewhere between taking their first steps and potty-training. Which, if the below tweets are to be believed, is precisely the kind of person Buttigieg really is.
(I happen to believe these tweets, since this person has mentioned him on numerous occasions dating all the way back to 2013—well before anybody outside of Indiana had heard of Buttigieg.)
Even factoring in the standard amount of hyperbole/exaggeration that sometimes accompanies tweets like these, it seems reasonable to conclude that Buttigieg has wanted to be president since he was a young child. And yet, when asked why he’s running for president, he only ever responds in empty platitudes about “a new generation of leadership” or “fixing democracy,” or my personal favorite, the importance of choosing the correct “president after Trump.” (You can almost picture him at a coffee shop, his copy of Nietzsche positioned at juuuuust the right angle for everyone else to see what he’s reading.)
So why won’t Buttigieg just acknowledge that it’s his dream to be president, that everything he’s done in his life is preparation for this moment? Why the insistence that his is an entirely altruistic endeavor? Because Buttigieg believes that if there’s anything Joe Six-Pack likes less than a nerd, it’s a nerd who tries at it. He’s like the kid in class who clearly tries harder than everyone else, but when the teacher hands back tests you can hear him monologuing about how he “probably bombed this one, since I barely studied.” And then he gets his test back (96%) and makes a big show of wiping his brow and feigning shock at his unbelievable luck.
It’s certainly possible for intellect and ambition to coexist. Take Elizabeth “I Have A Plan For That” Warren, who is both a bookworm and, in many instances throughout her professional career, coldly ambitious. Where so many who possess both—like Buttigieg, or Hillary Clinton before him—go wrong is by assuming 1) they have to pick one, and 2) that the existence of one is de facto proof of the existence of the other. As such, those possessing both traits tend to mistake achievement for intellect—and, inversely, ascribe a lack of achievement to an absence of intellect.
The problem isn’t that Pete Buttigieg is smart, it’s that he thinks you’re dumb enough to believe that he is ambivalent about this whole “being President” deal, but he’ll do it to help you out. It’s that he thinks you’re too slow-witted to notice that he launched his campaign without a single policy idea. That he spent the first three months of his campaign vaguely and genially agreeing with everyone else’s ideas until he gathered enough polling data to know where he needs to stand on the issues in order to win your vote. It’s why he’s pivoted from “Medicare For All” to “Medicare For All Who Want It” to “Who Can Say What ‘Healthcare’ Is, Really?”:
Any solution will do, as long as he gets the credit for making it happen.
As his campaign’s momentum has increased, so has the scrutiny. Most presidential candidates understand that reporters digging into their past isn’t just expected, but welcome: it’s a sign that they’re being taken seriously as a candidate. Reporters focused on Buttigieg’s previous work with McKinsey & Co., and rightfully so: a candidate running on a progressive platform should have to explain why a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar—someone who could work wherever they wanted—accepted a job with an organization whose own employees describe as “capital’s willing executioners.” Buttigieg tried to sidestep the questions, first by saying he couldn’t answer them because he’d signed an NDA, then by saying even if he hadn’t signed an NDA, he didn’t remember the projects he’d worked on.
When pressed on the details of his work at McKinsey, The Boy Who Would Be President found that his signature blend of folksy charm and consulting-class pablum wasn’t going to work. As a result, his responses got shorter and sharper, and at times his irritation was palpable.
The criticism continued to mount, reaching a fever pitch when ProPublica published an investigation outlining how McKinsey helped the Trump administration detain and deport immigrants. This investigation was followed by another a few days later demonstrating how, hired to help New York City get a handle on jail violence, McKinsey falsified numbers and created a strategy that led to a 50% increase in inmate violence at Rikers Island.
Buttigieg finally released the details of his work at McKinsey, and all he had to do was ask; turns out NDAs are only as ironclad as both parties want them to be. There was nothing scandalous about the particulars of his work, save for a brief spell when people thought he was connected to a Canadian bread price-fixing scandal. When asked why he didn’t just press McKinsey to let him break the NDA before all this became a cloud over his campaign, Buttigieg said:
“I think keeping your word matters. I’m not the kind of guy who is going to make a commitment and then the moment it’s inconvenient, politically or otherwise, just break it. Right now, we’ve got a president who breaks a promise or tells a lie every day and does [not] seem to care about codes, norms, or even laws. We need something different.”
Like most of the things Buttigieg says, it’s nice-sounding but ultimately hollow: the moment his work at McKinsey became politically inconvenient, he sought and received permission to break the NDA. Buttigieg and Trump both got around NDAs; the only difference between them is that Buttigieg, ever the Johnny Rulebook, politely asked permission first.
Buttigieg’s reticence to discuss his work at McKinsey has nothing to do with whether or not he was allowed to under the terms of his non-disclosure agreement. He declined to discuss it because, like anyone who thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, Buttigieg believes he alone gets to decide what information we’re worthy of possessing. We are to learn only that which he chooses to teach us.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Buttigieg has made it clear he wants to take “big money out of politics.” And yet:
It’s a rare moment of honesty from Buttigieg. More than that, it’s an indication of how angry he must have been that all he could muster was a monosyllabic reply—of all the candidates in the Democratic field, Buttigieg is unmatched in his ability to expound at great length about absolutely nothing at all. (In the clip I linked to earlier about why Buttigieg wants to be president, he speaks for just under two minutes without saying anything of consequence.)
It was a completely reasonable question, so why does Buttigieg seem so irritated that someone asked it? Because Pete Buttigieg’s public image is an artfully-crafted façade, focus-grouped and researched to death to ensure he achieves optimal likeability across the broadest possible spectrum of potential voters. Buttigieg’s public persona is a Bill James fever dream, more statistical analysis than man. But it’s not who he is.
Who he is can be found in those momentary lapses in composure when he allows the mask to slip. Pete Buttigieg isn’t irritated by the question itself, he’s irritated that someone who is not his equal would have the temerity to ask it. He’s irritated that he has to engage with these people who lack the good sense to recognize and embrace a generational figure when one is standing before them. It is offensive to him that you, a dullard, won’t simply accept what he’s saying to you. You are in no position to challenge him; have you not seen his accomplishments? He is doing you a kindness by telling you the way—the right way—the world should be, yet you, the unwashed masses, presume to know better than him.
That is who Pete Buttigieg is.
Pete Buttigieg desperately wants to be smart for you, but not in any meaningful or useful sense. He doesn’t want to teach you anything; he just wants you to know that he knows more than you do. He doesn’t want to fix things, he just wants to be enshrined as one of the few men in American history upon whom the public bestows the sacred responsibility of trying to fix them. No matter what Pete Buttigieg says, he doesn’t really believe the presidency is a duty or a calling. He believes it’s his birthright.
If there was a path to the White House that didn’t involve talking to voters, Buttigieg would take it. We’re just a particularly vexing problem set for which he needs to find a solution in order to get what he wants. We’re all extras, a faceless, amorphous mass to applaud him when the script calls for it and stay out of the way otherwise.
This is all for him.