Downfall of a Clueless Polymath?
Pete Buttigieg’s Analytic Blind Spot: Race
The damaged presidential campaign of Mayor Pete Buttigieg has revealed his Achilles heel: race.
I like Pete Buttigieg. I like that he stepped up to serve his country in the United States Naval Reserve and became a “dirt sailor” in Afghanistan; he did so while as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, his hometown. I like that he’s been responsible for re-invigorating South Bend’s downtown and its economy. I like the fact that he’s found a dude to love and has committed himself to marriage by wedding Chasten.
I also support his stepping up to become one of the next generation’s American leaders. However, I’m disappointed that his analytic capabilities and coherent syntax has blinded him to police reform as a major issue. I know he has one sentence about it on his website, but that reads as a standard Democratic check-off box.*
I thought that his recent national security/foreign policy speech at the University of Indiana made him a thoughtful and credible person on issues regarding war and peace. However, his inability to lead the city of South Bend, especially its black constituents, may well expose that he’s actually failed a critical aspect of municipal leadership: citizen-police relations — especially in regard to race and the police use of deadly force.
When asked about a recent shooting in his city by a white police officer killing a black victim, as well as other citizen-police issues, by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow at the second Democratic Party debate, the mayor replied: “Because I couldn’t get it done.”
Buttigieg has often touted his years as mayor as being as valid a political experience as “marinating” in Washington as a US Representative or Senator. And he’s right. Being a mayor is where the political rubber meets the road of dealing with constituents in a democratic-republic.
He counts his two terms as mayor and helping South Bend from recover from a “death watch” as credible accomplishments. They are. However, the recent killing of Eric Logan by Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, a white police officer, who hadn’t even bothered to activate his body camera while claiming that Logan had a knife, gives Buttigieg a dubious distinction as someone who’s become a star.
As underscored by journalist Mehdi Hasan’s estimation of the polymath on Twitter:
“He is both ridiculously overqualified and intellectually brilliant by modern presidential candidate standards *and* singularly unable to run a non-racist police department in a small town in Indiana.”
Fifty years later after civil rights movement and era, relationships between blacks and local police departments are still a powder keg of resentment and hostilities ready to explode.
During the 1960s, frequent occurrences of riots were often sparked by the corrosive nature of mostly (and still pre-dominantly) white police forces in black communities. Obviously McKinsey and Company, Buttigieg’s former employer, didn’t issue copies of the Kerner Report to its whiz kids when charged with diversity training.
That the young and dynamic mayor didn’t even see the bubbling cauldron of race from the very start of his administration may well show his cultural and political blind spot as a son of South Bend. It would seem that he isn’t remotely aware that the issues of race and prejudice have coursed through his neck of the woods, which is northern Indiana. It appears he’s even unaware of a major Klu Klux Klan incident (see here, too) that involved his father’s work place, Notre Dame and South Bend.
The shooting of Eric Logan in South Bend is going to be a leadership test for Mayor Buttigieg, of which he is presently failing. (See this by Mother Jones.)
Given that the recent shooting and the hostility that it has elicited from South Bend’s black community, it is hard to see how Buttigieg can press onward during the Democratic primaries. Most black voters will be skeptical of him while perhaps more accepting of Joe Biden.
Look at this photo of him interacting with Logan’s mother. Whatever he’s trying to express, she isn’t buying it.
But there is a delicious irony regarding Pete Buttigieg: his father, Joseph Buttigieg, was one of the foremost scholars regarding a somewhat obscure but influential Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci, among other things, is best known for his insights regarding intellectuals and education, of which “He saw modern intellectuals not as talkers, but as practically-minded directors and organisers who produced hegemony through ideological apparatuses such as education and the media.”
And hegemony, in Gramscian terms, is the “exertion of intellectual and moral leadership [that] make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces” via a “ dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations, and ideas.”
And what is Buttigieg but an intellectual schooled by the foremost elite institutions of the dominant class: Harvard, Oxford, McKinney, and, to a lesser degree, the United States military.
McKinsey, Butttigieg’s former employer, is “an American worldwide management consulting firm. It conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate management decisions across public and private sectors. Widely considered the most prestigious management consultancy…” Put another way, McKinsey’s consultants are “corporate intellectuals” who work for the private and private sectors.
Buttigieg is also a technocrat who knows how to use the techniques of qualitative and quantitative analyses to assist in public administration.
As a “corporate intellectual” for McKinsey, Buttigieg bean counted the mechanism of corporations and projects, which he talks about his memoir, The Shortest Way Home. His analytic capabilities allowed him to spot the weaknesses and deficiencies of South Bend and make improvements there. But it would appear he has no real human insight regarding the vexing frustration that bedevils blacks who bear the brunt of bad policing.
Even more interesting is that Buttigieg is a reserved naval intelligence officer, which would mean that whatever qualitative and quantitative analytical skills he acquired from the private sector were transferred over to his “dirt sailor” days in Afghanistan: reading reports and scrutinizing surveillance photos and other data.
I suspect, however, that human intelligence — gathering information from and handling agents in the field and dealing with messy humans — was not his strong suit. And that shows in his handling of the South Bend shooting.
He’s the kind of “traditional intellectual” that Gramsci critiqued, the kind who sees themselves as a separate and apart from society. Buttigieg’s status as a marginalized person, a white gay man, hasn’t allowed him to become empathetic with another marginalized group, a group which has elected him to serve them.
As reported by the press, Buttigieg appears to be merely going through the motions of municipal contrition. Soon, he’ll be back on the hustings, promoting his theme of “freedom, security, and democracy,” concepts and practices that a number of blacks don’t experience in America, and in South Bend.
###
*Disclosure: The is not a plug for Buttigieg. I did, however, make a modest donation to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.