MBR_ISSUE 49_MARCH_lowres

POLITICS: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Malta Business Review
my place in the world strictly through
identity, it would be pretty confusing for
me, not to mention for others. And pretty
hard for others to identify with too.
BM: There’s another kind of “identity”
that Democrats and pundits are always
eager to hang on candidates: where
they fit on the left-to-center scale,
whether they are in the Hillary or
Bernie camps. So let me give you a
warm-up for those endless questions:
What kind of Democrat are you?
PB: I’m a progressive Democrat. I have
never shied away from that.
BM: But people aren’t going to let you
get away with just saying that. They all
want to know more about where you
fit on the ideological spectrum.
PB: The left-versus-center framework is
becoming less and less helpful. There was
a really interesting article in Politico about
this. Positions that have been characterized
as “left” are positions that the vast majority
of people in both parties hold. That’s
true even for supposedly divisive issues.
Requiring background checks for guns, for
instance, is something 90 percent of the
country supports. How is that not centrist?
What that whole debate about whether
Democrats should go more to the center or
further left gets wrong is that the center of
gravity of the American people is way to the
left of the center of gravity of Congress, and,
in many ways, to the left of the national
Democratic Party.
BM: How did we get this idea of what
“centrism” means — or the idea that
Democrats can only win by tacking in
that direction?
PB: In the 1990s, it represented a
correction of sorts, a recognition that the
country had entered a conservative era
after the liberal period from the 1930s to
the ‘60s. A lot of people viewed a move to
the right as a way to capture independents,
and, in some ways, it was at that time. We
still have to reach independents to win. But
doing it is no longer as simple as looking at
the Republicans and getting halfway there,
if it ever really was.
Mayor Pete at South Bend International Airport in
2014 after returning from a seven-month tour of
duty with the U.S. Navy in Afghanistan
Conservatives in my generation have
had a much better relationship to their
first principles. Every young Republican
in Washington has their volumes of Ayn
Rand and Milton Friedman. And you could
draw a direct line to their politics, at least
before the scrambling that happened with
Trumpism. The left has become the side
with less philosophical cohesion and less of
a connection to guiding principles. We have
spent the last 30 years arguing not about
whether our policies and ideas are right,
but whether they are close enough to the
Republican side.
"Barack Obama is
also a fan. In an
exit interview with
The New Yorker,
Obama named
Buttigieg as one of
four Democrats who
would lead the party
forward
Now is the potential change. We are into
what I think of as the illegible era. It’s a
good time for the left to get back to basics.
We have to understand the philosophical
basis for progressivism, then figure out
the politics, rather than the other way
around. The [Bernie] Sanders phenomenon
illustrates the power of conviction. Our
Democratic political class, for the most part,
has lost the muscle memory to design a
politics around principle.
BM: How do you define those
principles, those basics?
PB: You will hear me talk all the time about
freedom. Because I think there is a failure
on our side if we allow conservatives
to monopolize the idea of freedom —
especially now that they have produced an
authoritarian president. But what actually
gives people freedom in their lives? The most
profound freedoms of my everyday existence
have been safeguarded by progressive
policies, mostly. The freedom to marry who
I choose, for one, but also the freedom that
comes with paved roads and stop lights.
Freedom from some obscure regulation is so
much more abstract. But that’s the freedom
that conservatism has now come down to.
Or think about the idea of family, in the
context of everyday life. It’s one thing to
talk about family values as a theme, or a
wedge — but what’s it actually like to have
a family? Your family does better if you get a
fair wage, if there is good public education,
if there is good health care when you need
it. These things intuitively make sense,
but we are out of practice talking about
them. I also think we need to talk about
a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to
American greatness in its truest sense.
You think about this as a local official, of
course, but a truly great country is made of
great communities. What makes a country
great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives
you enable people to lead. I think about
wastewater management as freedom. If a
resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a
second thought, she’s freer.
BM: Is this one reason people are
talking about mayors — yourself,
Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Mitch
Landrieu in New Orleans — as potential
presidents, when that wouldn’t have
occurred to Democrats even a few
years ago?
PB: Part of it has to do with frustration
toward Washington. The discussion in
Washington has become so self-referential
and removed from reality. People are
aching to see their political leaders actually
doing stuff. When you are a mayor, that’s
your whole job. Working in local politics
is also a great alternative to the factfree
zone we have been living in. When
somebody calls to say, “Mayor, there is a
hole in the road,” I can’t say, “No, there
isn’t.” They are gonna call bullshit on that.
They can point to the pothole.
So there’s a connection to reality at this
moment when our politics has gotten so
untethered. When you are a local official,
when you’re a mayor, every interaction you
have with a resident is basically coming
face-to-face with your boss. Even if you are
a member of Congress, certainly a governor
or senator, you have staffers around you all
the time rather than the people you work
for. When I have to go to the grocery, just
for some beer and toilet paper, I’m going to
run into those folks and they are going to
tell me what’s on their minds.
BM: If you were running for any higher
office — whether it’s governor or
senator or president — what would you
boast about in terms of what’s been
accomplished in South Bend under your
mayoralty?
PB: One-thousand houses in 1,000 days.
I pledged, early on, that we would either
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