It’s time for Pete Buttigieg to drive away from the Department of Transportation — if he shows up for work and can find a driver. Even by federal government standards, the head of a department disappearing during an emergency is a disgrace. For a technocratic Democrat in a technocratic government, it’s absurd.
The intelligentsia is blaming the supply-chain disaster on middle-class false awareness. ‘Most of the economic problems we’re dealing with (inflation, supply chains, and so on) are high-class issues,’ says Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain.
If the peasants can’t find veggies on the stores, Ron, let them devour the wealthy. Because only the wealthy are concerned about commodity prices growing at a higher rate than they have since 2008. When the price of fuel, veggies, and infant formula continues to climb, only the wealthy are aware. Only the wealthy — or at least the well-educated, which has come to signify the same thing these days — are literate enough to be concerned about inflation’s more certain consequences.
It’s part of the amateurishness of those who dominate us that they occasionally let their manners slide, revealing their contempt for the governed. In the past, this has never gone over well in other civilizations. It didn’t go over well with the crazed King George. There’s no reason to believe that Americans will continue to swallow this garbage indefinitely.
Klain’s move is almost as stupid as assigning Buttigieg to Transportation in the first place in terms of intelligence. Why would an administration that purports to prioritize infrastructure hand over a $87 billion budget to someone whose previous experience — as mayor of that major transportation center, South Bend, Indiana — didn’t even include command of South Bend Transpo and its 18 bus routes?
Although Buttigieg may not know the difference between a rotating system and a refrigerated container, he did finally back Biden for the Democratic candidacy in 2020. This reflects the distinctively American practice of giving ambassadorships to fundraisers and supporters rather than to experienced diplomats who have spent years mastering the local language and even living in post.
I mean “unique” in the sense of “unique among liberal democracies.” The brown envelope and reciprocal back-scratching are used by a lot of banana republics, kleptocracies, and dictatorships. When the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, imports this sort of behavior into domestic politics, it aspires to a new low in public ethics. We don’t need Michael Sandel to tell us that’meritocracy’ has failed miserably. In plain sight, a new governing elite is tightening its fortifications and climbing the ladders.
Twenty years ago, American politicians promised their citizens that Brazil will become more like us if they supported globalization. Today, we are becoming more like Brazil: a low-trust society with seemingly insurmountable class and race divides, in which the wealthy live in private areas guarded by a military police force, and politics has devolved into a theatrical performance.
That leads us to another possible rationale for Buttigieg’s appointment to the Transportation Department by Biden’s staff. Buttigieg isn’t only pallid and stale; he’s also homosexual. The media did not hail him as an expert when he was selected in February 2021. They hailed him as a hero of the civil rights movement.
According to ABC News, ‘Pete Buttigieg makes history as the first out homosexual cabinet member.’ Of course, the phrase ‘openly’ has more weight in this context than an 18-wheeler. But that’s the purpose, just as the goal of the unnecessary list of personal pronouns is. It’s politics as symbols, as a virtues-based play.
The same could be said for the pictures that would have marked Buttigieg’s tenure at Transportation if they weren’t for the impending sight of a chastened Buttigieg returning to South Bend and overhead shots of the Port of Los Angeles showing acres of containers going nowhere.
The first of these photos, obtained by CNN, shows Buttigieg unloading his bike from an SUV and then riding out to a cabinet meeting. The Department of Transportation has to deny it since it resembles a theatrical production.
Buttigieg and his husband Chasten pose with their baby twins in the second of these photos. This was a medical marvel, because neither Pete nor Chasten are what we now refer to as “womb-owners.”
We’ll probably never know how the woman who owns the womb feels about giving up her offspring. The Buttigiegs claim to have adopted the twins through traditional means. Maybe they did. We have their word, and it is up to each of us to determine whether or not we should believe them.
These are really ‘high-class concerns,’ such as performative riding, performative politics, and performative procreation. However, the aristocratic liberals who control us believe that this is more essential than, example, good office performance. What about the rest? Allow them to have cake and painkillers.