Pete Buttigieg is probably the most brilliant, insightful politician of our generation and I have lived through the administrations of JFK, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; and marveled at the speeches of Martin Luther King and RFK. We need this guy as president one day. Hopefully his time will come. (@dblcircle also has a diary about this speech from Buttigieg. www.dailykos.com/… I’m not trying to step on his toes. This speech is worth two diaries! Here is my summary and take.)
What blows me away is he did this off the top of his head!!! It would take any other mere mortal days to argue THESE points as concisely, forcefully and with such clarity.
Here are some snippets from what he said from his impromptu remarks at the University of Chicago Institute of politics.
The general path of social and political life in America has been towards more liberty, more freedom and more rights. Did we just see the high water mark of liberty, truth and rights?
Even if we can't come into alignment about where to draw the line on things like when to terminate a pregnancy, we could at least agree on who should draw that line. For the last 50 years America has trusted women to draw that line.
And now it appears, the Court is willing to take that understanding away. It raises the question about what other rights are willing to be put on the table.
This is no longer theoretical. This is going to shape what our lives are going to be like.
For some, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a culture war.
When you have a political faction that really doesn't have any answers. They don't have any answers on gas prices. They don't have any answers on inflation. Many of them answered our call for a bipartisan answer on infrastructure with a "No". Haven't seen an answer on what to do about the price of prescription drugs. Don't have an answer on what to do about the cost of child care. Don't have a great answer on taxes. They actually want to raise taxes on the poor. That's a new one. That's not great territory for them to be debating on.
So what do they do? They find someone vulnerable and pick on them.
We're seeing a lot of overlapping of patterns that the worst tendencies of human politics always has ... which is to take rights and freedoms away. And to make it harder for vulnerable people in the service of some imagined political gain.
There are 2 kinds of answers to that kind of thing:
1) One answer is to argue and fight against it.
2) And the other is to see to it that is in fact NOT the way to gain power.
The biggest test of any of these tactics isn't were they well argued, were they convincing, the biggest test is did they work?
If things that hurt people help you get more power, people will continue to do it. And the rest is up to us."
Bravo!
His closing argument is straight from Martin Heidegger's understanding of how we come to know the world. In the face of Descartes's declaration, "I think therefore I am", Heidegger said "No" and argued that the primordial relationship we have to the world is not knowing or thinking about it but using it, working it.
We use and work the world first and later think about what we just did. Buttigieg nails this idea when he says, "The biggest test of any of these tactics isn't were they well argued for or were they convincing; the biggest test is did they work?"
Buttigieg is channeling Heidegger. And he speaks directly to why it's so hard to argue with our conservative friends anymore. Trump showed them one way to get power. And it worked for one political cycle before the American people woke up and said "Hell no. We won't take it anymore." But now the GOP establishment is addicted and bound to the Trumpian politics of hate, division and marginalization of the “other” and have concluded that bullying people and taking advantage of the disadvantaged, is the way to keep that power.
It's up to us in November to show them that attacking the vulnerable and taking away fundamental individual rights is not the path to power.
GOTV!