Pete Buttigieg has a clear vision of where his party lost its way. Now Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, wants to use those lessons to shape the Democratic Party of the future and America’s next story.
“Sooner or later, one day Donald Trump will not be active in American politics. And the sooner we spend our energy thinking about what to do next, I actually think the sooner that day will come,” he tells David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Times Opinion. In this conversation, Buttigieg explains why DOGE’s destruction of government institutions may be an opportunity for Democrats and what working to revive his hometown taught him about the threats we face from artificial intelligence.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: Mr. Secretary, thanks for joining me today.
Pete Buttigieg: Thanks for having me. Good to be with you.
Leonhardt: Before we get to your thoughts about the next American story, I want to talk a little bit about you. I know your husband, Chasten, is from Traverse City in northern Michigan. Can you talk a little bit about your decision to move back there rather than back to Indiana?
Buttigieg: The decision really was propelled by family. Chasten’s parents live here; my mother lives here now, too, not far from us in Traverse City. It’s definitely more rural than where I grew up, but also very Midwestern in ways that make me feel right at home.
Leonhardt: And how would you notice the differences in terms of the community, the politics, anything relative to the other places you’ve lived?
Buttigieg: Certainly the community and the politics reflect that it’s a more rural place. On one hand, it’s more or less a 50-50 county, which is true of the county I grew up in as well. On the other hand, where I grew up, people might have Trump yard signs. Here, they have Trump flags on flagpoles. So it just feels different — and even compared to a place like South Bend, Ind., which I think, population-wise, is roughly 10 times Traverse City, where we live now. You notice the smallness of it. Sometimes people are scratching their heads about why they know me, because they know they recognize me from somewhere.
I was with the kids out recently, and this woman was giving me a hard stare. I was kind of waiting for her to come up and say that she realized she’d seen me on TV or something. And she said: Are you … are you my kid’s soccer ref? I thought: Well, I’m glad that the person you think I might be is an authority figure, at least. But no. So it just has that kind of texture to it.
Leonhardt: It reminds me a little bit of one of my close relatives takes her kids to the Jersey Shore, and at the little spot where they set up at the Jersey Shore, the family next to them often has a big Trump flag that they bring to the beach. My friend’s politics are left of center. And when she brought a friend there with them, the friend said to her, sort of in a low voice afterward, “Oh my goodness, what are those people like?” And my relative said, “You know, they’re really nice, and they’re really nice to my kids.” It feels like we need a little bit more of that in America today. And it sounds like you’ve gotten a little of that, even as high-profile as you are, in Traverse City.
Buttigieg: Totally. Not long ago, we had a neighbor who I know has very different politics than we do — someone I don’t even know personally — but she made a point of stopping by Chasten’s uncle’s welding shop to share a story about a photographer who was snooping in the neighborhood, hoping to be the first to get a picture of our kids, and how she sent him packing. She was very protective of our privacy, even though she’s someone who, I think, is completely different from us politically. So I think there’s that disconnect between how people might behave online and how they actually act when you’re sitting next to them at a restaurant or bumping into them at Target. People even come up and say, “I don’t share your politics, but it’s nice running into you.”
Leonhardt: One of the things that I think has long distinguished the United States relative to other countries is our optimism. We went West, we went to the moon, we won world wars, we invented the airplane and the internet and the American dream. Yet we sure don’t feel very optimistic today. President Trump tells this terribly dark story about crime and violence and the country being ripped off, and the left can be pretty dark in its own ways. I’m curious: Why is it that you think that these dark narratives seem to have really taken over?
Buttigieg: Well, I think part of it’s based on very real things and part of it’s based on the way we get our information. The very real part, I would say, is mostly about our economy. It’s a simple fact that if you were born the year that my mother was born, you had roughly a 90 percent chance of being able to expect that you would materially live better than your parents did, that you’d economically be better off by the time you were an adult than the family you were born into.
Leonhardt: So that’s the 1940s.
Buttigieg: That’s right. The year I was born, 1982, it becomes a coin flip, 50-50, whether you’re going to be better off than the generation before you. And there are some indications that that’s trended even worse for a younger generation that struggles to realistically hope to have a home of their own.
So I think there is a real trajectory — even as our nation, in total and on average, has grown wealthier and wealthier — where the concentration of that wealth and the difficulty of getting ahead have made people question whether they’re going to get ahead in their own lives. They relate that to a bigger national picture of us being on the wrong track.
At the same time, I also think part of this is related to information and the way we get information. The proportion of Americans who believed that we were in a recession shows that there’s a mix of both something very real in our economy and very fragmented information that people are getting when they look at the news. That’s why you often see a disconnect between what people feel is happening in their personal finances and what they think is happening to everybody else — or these strange partisan swings in how people tell pollsters they feel about their own financial situation, just based on what happened in the last election.
Leonhardt: And so even if part of it is real and part of it is more perception, it’s all the reality that we’re living with and it all makes me wonder: Boy, how can we get the country to move out of this incredible darkness? How can we possibly break out of that, given the real frustrations and given that we can’t simply invent a new media landscape?
Buttigieg: I think part of what has to happen is a sense of a shared national project. It’s simpler to do that in the context of something like a war — which we hope will not be the future of this country. If we think back to periods when there was a shared national narrative, the World War II generation is the example that shines most clearly from the last century.
I actually think there are projects like that waiting for us as a country. I’ve long believed that climate could be one — it’s an example of something bigger than any one of us. I also think, paradoxically, that all the damage the Trump administration has done to our institutions actually creates a very important potential future moment where even if we bitterly disagree on how those institutions were destroyed, we can come together on what we should build in their place.
Now, for that to happen, it means the Republican Party needs to evolve into being more about building than destroying. And it means the Democratic Party needs to get more interested in what we can do next than in preserving the status quo that’s being smashed to pieces.
Leonhardt: As much as I would like climate to be a potentially nationally unifying story, I think it’s become so coded as partisan — at least for the foreseeable future — that it’s much more likely the second of the two possibilities you mentioned could become an optimistic and unifying story. Something with a message about putting us on a better path, making it possible for people to live better lives in their communities and making it easier for young people to buy homes.
And maybe even a little bit of the competition with China. That, to me, feels like the broad set of subjects that could actually produce a unifying narrative — rather than something like climate, which just primes people in a partisan way so immediately.
Buttigieg: I think that’s right. I would add one more, which is the search for belonging. Perversely, it’s actually one of the main themes of Trumpism — except they are concerned with belonging from the perspective of who you can exclude. I think there’s a different way to think about belonging.
In a future where we have even less certainty about our professional lives, as A.I. looks poised to displace lots of workers — including white-collar workers whose entire social identity revolves around their jobs — there’s actually a very interesting potential opportunity to find more of a center of gravity and sources of belonging that don’t have an automatic ideological coding to them.
In fact, some of them code more conservative than not. I’m thinking about things like community, a certain concept of nation, and faith — but also a concept of nation and national service that could align well with progressive values too. The power of the local, the meaning of knowing your neighbors and investing in that part of your life that is literally physically around you.
We know the very ugly alternatives for people who can’t seem to find belonging, and those include extremism and nationalism. I think we can and should do better, and some of the labor market upheaval that’s coming our way will probably force us to do that.
Leonhardt: And I assume that’s a reference to A.I.?
Buttigieg: Absolutely. Look, we are already in the early stages of seeing A.I. completely transform a number of things that have gone a certain way for hundreds of years in our lives, like what it’s like to teach students how to write an essay, and also things that a generation ago we thought were surefire ways to get ahead in the economy, like becoming a coder. These things were already being transformed, and there’s more where that came from.
If we get it wrong, those transformations will play out in a way that resembles what I grew up surrounded by in the industrial Midwest: people being thrown out of their jobs because in the 2000s it was a mixture of automation and globalization; either being completely left behind or receiving some attempted solutions economically, like retraining into new careers, but not a lot of solutions in terms of what had happened to their identity.
Having lived through that and seen how it can go wrong, I think we have an opportunity to do better this time. Even if we don’t know exactly what to expect from A.I., we can expect disruption.
Leonhardt: To someone who asks: Belonging — what could that possibly look like in a political or policy sense? I actually think there’s an initial answer: phones in schools. I am encouraged by the idea that most of the country is now putting in place, or at least considering, some kind of ban on phones in schools. It’s really bipartisan, and when you talk to teachers at schools that have done this — and the kids — people really like it.
I do think it fosters a sense of belonging. You hear about schools putting board games in the cafeteria, and that really does create a sense of belonging. Even if it’s really hard at first to put down your phones, it’s just so much more satisfying, even in the relatively short term.
Buttigieg: I think that’s absolutely right, and I think it’s very telling that at a moment when bipartisan consensus is scarce, there’s a real overlap between right and left. I think a lot of people are upset about what tech has done to our politics. But the thing that’s really changing it is seeing what social media has done to our kids. I think about this a lot having 4-year-old twins who are not quite old enough for us to confront these decisions about when and where you get access to social media. But we know that they’re coming.
I do think that the bans on phones in schools are an example of people — in ways that aren’t dictated by party or ideology — coming to a gathering consensus about what we want our everyday life and experience to be like, at least for our kids. And I think we can build off of that.
Leonhardt: I realize you haven’t sketched this all out, but what are some of the ideas that intrigue you about other things we should do broadly to promote belonging that don’t look like, say, a big health care law, but are a little bit more cultural, even if they also can involve policy changes?
Buttigieg: I think there are signs of policies that could redirect our attention to experiences that are more offline — real, physical investment. I mean investment in things like service, particularly national service. There have been models for this: California has done a lot of good work promoting service, and AmeriCorps, which unfortunately has taken a lot of hits under this administration, was on the right track.
Military service did this too. The military is not for everybody, but it was an abundantly offline experience with people I had to get to know and sometimes trust with my life in a very short amount of time. I think investing in what’s sometimes called social infrastructure — I literally mean things like parks and recreation. If you have more safe, physical spaces for your kids to play in and for people to gather in, that really matters. It can help be an antidote to the retreat into the screen, which is harmful for kids and, I think, pretty poisonous for adults too.
Leonhardt: So if a key thing here is to have a story about belonging, about a shared national project rather than a partisan one, how do you think that can appeal to people, given the level of cynicism today and the darkness? How do we make sure it doesn’t just fall on deaf ears, given how frustrated people are and the way the media works today?
Buttigieg: I think it actually begins by facing the darkness, saying: OK, a lot of the things we’ve inherited or built don’t work. It’s a bit of a tough-love message, I think, for my party that a lot of the institutions we care about — built for very good reasons and that did a lot of good since the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s — need to be completely rebuilt. That doesn’t mean it was OK to burn them down, whether we’re talking about the Department of Education, our public health infrastructure, our system for international development aid or any of the other things being dismantled. I’m not saying it was OK to tear them down. I’m saying that since it’s happening, we might as well face the fact that they weren’t perfect before, and now we can rebuild them.
We can have a different, maybe less partisan, set of arguments about what we would build if we were starting from scratch — because in a lot of cases, I’m afraid we will be. I think it’s not by downplaying the darkness but by sailing right into it that we can actually get to a place that compels us to work together on these projects.
Leonhardt: Let’s continue with some tough love for the Democratic Party. I’m really struck that at this time of frustration and an anti-establishment national mood, the Democratic Party has become so identified with the status quo and the establishment — which is not historically where progressives have been. The reason the word is “progressive” is because it’s about making progress.
How do you diagnose how the Democratic Party came to be seen as defenders of the status quo? I think, if we’re being honest, in some real ways they are actual defenders of the status quo.
Buttigieg: Well, I think part of it is because we saw attacks on institutions and systems that we cared about and that really do deserve to be defended. I’m thinking about things like Social Security, but there’s a whole set of things that are core commitments of our party. I think that puts us in a mode of being less open to ideas about how to change some of these institutions. Then we saw them being attacked in the way they were, and we couldn’t help but defend them.
I also think this tracks the educational gap that has opened up in party affiliation — a gap that just wasn’t there as recently as when I was getting started in politics in Indiana. If more of the people who make up the Democratic Party are disproportionately those who are socially and economically doing better in the status quo than everybody else, you can expect a kind of reluctance — even ironically, a small-c conservatism — about necessary changes taking root in the party. I think that’s why you see such a fierce clash within the party between people who sound more populist or are more populist and those who would like to make more incremental change.
Leonhardt: You recently said that there’s a perception that Democrats — and I’m using your words here — Democrats have become so focused on identity that we were only for you if you fit into a particular identity bucket. Can you go into some more detail about what your critique of the Democratic Party is on these identity issues?
Buttigieg: To pick up a thread from earlier in our conversation, you mentioned a kind of darkness that seems to take hold in the left too. I think there are two very different things that have been conflated. One is the idea that we confront some extremely serious patterns of exclusion and unfairness in the way this country has treated people, and that we have a responsibility to do something about that — which is an important part of our politics. Another is to make it seem like that’s our entire view of this country. What I think Trump and Trumpism have accused Democrats of is preaching a message that the country is fundamentally evil because of these failures.
I believe in a very different story. I believe in a story where some of the most extraordinary, inspiring and uplifting moments of this country came through our process of wrestling with our demons — much of which has to do with the mistreatment of any number of groups of Americans — and doing better and getting better at that. That history has been a bit zigzaggy, but there’s a clear direction of travel, and it’s something I think we should be proud of, even if it’s always incomplete and imperfect.
So between those two ways of stating the case — one in which we are defined by unfairness that has played out versus one in which we are defined by our readiness to confront unfairness and make it better — I think in the play between those two things is the whole struggle over what the party is actually going to be. If it seems that all we can see is one group at a time, then we’re not really telling a story that speaks to everybody or one that people can see themselves belonging in, whatever group or identity they might claim.
Leonhardt: I think, to me, the biggest reason for Democratic introspection on this is the fact — and I want to be clear, I didn’t expect or predict this — that in the era of Donald Trump, large numbers of Latino, Asian and Black voters have moved away from the Democratic Party toward the Republican Party.
To me, that suggests that the identity-first message that Democrats have often offered — immigration being a good example — hasn’t worked as intended. Democrats thought that a more open immigration policy would help them win more Latino and Asian voters. Instead, it’s cost them a lot of Latino and Asian voters, and I think that really calls for some introspection. When you look at Americans who are actually vulnerable, working-class Americans of all races — whom the Democratic Party has a proud history of defending — they’ve looked at the Democratic Party of the post-Obama years and basically said: That party is less appealing to me.
It seems to me that, as part of the belonging story and shared national project story that you and I have been talking about, it’s really important for the American left to find a way to speak a language that emphasizes our similarities with each other, rather than always going to gender, race, sexuality and religion, as important as those factors are in American life. Do you think that’s fair?
Buttigieg: Or situating it in something that cuts across. That’s why I really think talking about fairness is the right way to come at this. Concern about fairness can apply to many different groups that might have encountered unfairness for different reasons, but it knits us together in a bigger picture.
That’s definitely how we tried to think about it when I was working at the Department of Transportation, for example. Many of the projects we worked on were to make sure that communities that had been underinvested in — maybe because they were low-income or minority communities — got taken care of. But huge numbers of grants to help communities improve their transportation went to rural communities that were excluded, not because of racial reasons — they were mostly white communities — but for other reasons. We still knew it was unfair that they had been left out, and we tried to do something about that. There’s a way of talking about fairness that can knit different groups with different experiences together. And there are other ways of talking about it that make it seem, to a lot of people, like we’re not for them.
In addition to agreeing that there should be introspection about many of the constituencies our party counted on, I would highlight an exceptionally important constituency: poor people. I haven’t seen a definitive, quantified answer on whether Democrats lost the vote of poor people in 2024. But what is clear is that a party that prides itself on being concerned with making sure low-income people get ahead did not command the support of the people it thinks of itself as helping. That’s a huge problem. I think it calls for us not only to look at our message and how we say things, but also at where our focus is at a policy level.
Leonhardt: To knit two of these themes together: It seems to me it will also be much easier for Democrats to fight over economic policy issues — where Democrats tend to be on the side of public opinion — if they can get more voters not to disqualify them because they see the Democrats as too elite or too far left on a whole bunch of social and cultural issues.
To me, doing that will require more than what Kamala Harris did in her campaign, which was changing her position without talking about why. Do you think it’s important for Democrats, in some pretty clear and salient ways, to say “We were wrong about this,” whether it’s crime, immigration or something else?
Buttigieg: Yeah, I think there are moments where we need to do that, not only because it might be politically important but because it’s true. We were wrong to downplay the importance of what was happening on the border. It’s clear that we thought some of what we were hearing was overblown when actually it was impacting people in a real way. Democrats could have paid more attention.
I also believe that what’s happening on the border is the result of a lot of cynical Republican politics — blocking bill after bill over the last 20 years to ensure it stayed a problem because it helps them politically. Still, there is a substantive concern that my party just didn’t accept the importance of that issue, both the real and the political importance. We need to contend with that.
At the same time, we can’t let introspection turn into navel-gazing. We can’t lose sight of the fact that on the majority of the biggest issues, most people tend to agree with us, and we need to hold fast to that. There are issue after issue where there’s 60, 70 percent consensus on a position that Democrats hold and Republicans oppose. What I don’t want is for us to think we need to shy away from our values or important fights just because the last election didn’t go our way.
Leonhardt: We haven’t talked much about what President Trump is doing right now, but it’s kind of been the backdrop to our conversation, and it greatly alarms me. I’m not talking about individual policies so much as his entire approach to government.
I’m deeply alarmed about American democracy, even if I don’t necessarily think it is the most winning political issue right now. I’m curious how you think about that balance: How alarmed are you, and what is not the way to take on Trump that feels best for his opponents, but the way to take on Trump that is actually the most effective at preserving the parts of American democracy that really need preserving?
Buttigieg: Well, I think we have to speak to these democracy issues. I’m alarmed too. I know there’s a school of thought that says no one cares about democracy when there are economic problems, but I think we have to talk about both. Part of how we do it is by demonstrating that they’re connected.
We talk about how, if you have an executive branch that has shredded any institutions — even in the private sector — that could hold it accountable, you’re going to get really bad outcomes in your day-to-day life. A president who doesn’t have to go to Congress for anything can, for example, increase the prices on your daily basket of goods through tariffs with no accountability — and has in ways that some courts have determined to be illegal.
Whether the administration obeys the courts is not just a nicety of constitutional principle; it affects how much you pay, or whether you wake up in the morning and see federal troops marching down the streets of your city. Policies like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denying you eligibility for a Covid shot, or Kristi Noem sitting on aid that was supposed to go to flood victims in Texas — these things don’t happen in administrations that care about accountability. There’s a reason humanity has learned the hard way that dictatorships are terrible — not just by the lights of some academic idea about freedom, but in terms of what it feels like to live in them.
Leonhardt: I’m curious how you think about the trade-offs and tensions between trying to work between the system and trying to bring about more radical change. I’ve been reading — in some cases rereading — profiles of you to prepare for this conversation. The New Yorker in 2019 described your politics as one that tries to steer consensus rather than champion a movement. I’m curious if you think that’s fair, or even partly fair, and what it gets right about how you think about actually achieving change in the United States.
Buttigieg: Well, I think about it a little differently. I definitely understand, as someone who has had to function and deliver results in government as well as politics, that building consensus is a really important part of what you do in public life. But I also believe that we need to open the window on big, bold changes, even if people aren’t prepared for that yet.
Part of how you prepare people for that is by taking political risks to popularize or champion those ideas. Look, I don’t think even Bernie was willing to talk about expanding the Supreme Court. When I said we need to reform the Supreme Court, including potentially through expansion to make it less partisan, I think now that’s more of a mainstream view. I’m not saying I single-handedly did that, but I’m proud that I helped by making it a risky issue in my presidential campaign.
There are big structural things we need to confront as a country, particularly around money and politics, that probably can only happen through constitutional amendment. These things might well take a generation to deliver. And precisely because it might take a generation for people to get used to the idea, people like me ought to be helping people get used to the idea by making the case. At the same time, we can do that while also ensuring that issues where there is consensus — where it’s just down to bargaining over how to implement it — are addressed. That is also a very real element of what it means to earn your paycheck as a politician or someone in government.
Leonhardt: That makes me think about the marriage equality movement and the gay rights movement more broadly. One of the things I’m really struck by with that movement — which I think is the most successful progressive movement of the last quarter-century — is the way it set out an incredibly bold, radical goal, a goal that most of the country at the time didn’t agree with.
Then it pursued that goal in what I think was a ruthlessly strategic way, trying to win over people who weren’t already convinced. It talked about letting L.G.B.T.Q. people join the military. It talked about marriage, which is a fundamentally conservative institution.
To me, there’s a real lesson there: You don’t have to trim your ambitions, but you also can’t pursue a strategy that just makes the people who disagree with you feel bad about themselves or ignorant. You have to take them seriously. I wish more parts of progressivism today included that second part — the ruthless strategy of the marriage equality and gay rights movement.
Buttigieg: No question. Look, so much of politics and making change has to do with how people feel about themselves — how you make people feel about themselves. A lot of what happened with the struggle for equality was about coaxing people onto the right side of history, rather than dragging them there. There was also a history of very important activism that broke a lot of proverbial glass, drawing attention to things like the AIDS crisis. I don’t want to discount that; that’s part of the picture for sure.
There’s a trajectory here that shows enormous change can happen when you’re willing to play out that strategy over the long term. What is inspiring about the gay equality movement — not just to somebody who benefits from it, but that it didn’t just take something from being unpopular to being popular. It took ideas that were preposterous for one generation and made them consensus for the next generation. That’s the level of ambition we ought to have.
Leonhardt: To wrap up here, I think so many people today just feel a little bit hopeless. They think that reality doesn’t matter. They think that politics can’t fix things. And on some level, being involved in public life — as you are — is an act of hope. I’m curious what you would say to people who say: Hey, you know, I agree with you on a lot of policy stuff, but I just don’t think this matters anymore. Trump has shown that it doesn’t matter and I’ve kind of given up.
How would you encourage people to find some sense of hope that actually, some of our very deep problems are solvable and we’re not destined to live in the Donald Trump era for the rest of our lives?
Buttigieg: I’ve heard it said that hope is the consequence of action more than its cause, and that’s something I try to think about a lot in this moment. Instead of waiting around for hope, we actually have an obligation — a responsibility — to build hope, and that hope is the result of what we do in this moment. That’s how I think about the present.
I also draw a lot of hope from the past and from the future. From the past, I draw hope from staring down the darkness of some of the moments that humanity and America have been through. It can feel totally disorienting and alienating that we no longer even have access to the same facts in terms of how our information system works. But that’s not totally unlike the 19th century, when everybody had their own ideological newspaper, and yet we figured our way through. Some of the things that feel unprecedented are more precedented than we think, and that can be a source of hope.
The same is true when I think about the future. By looking at the darkness I actually find my way to the most hope, because I can see that we are headed toward a time like many of the most consequential periods we study — the times that generate the heroes we name buildings after, write about in history books and look up to, those are not good times. Nobody ever became an inspiring historical figure by just doing their thing during a period of stability, calm, consensus and kindness.
It is precisely in moments like this that more is called for from us. The more gets burned down around us in this awful period that we’re living through right now, during the Trump administration, the more we have to get to work building things that will stand for the next century. The sooner we orient ourselves around what that would look like, the sooner we can bring it about. In other words, all of us must recognize that sooner or later, one day Donald Trump will not be active in American politics. The sooner we spend our energy thinking about what to do next, I actually think the sooner that day will come.
Leonhardt: Secretary Pete Buttigieg, thank you so much.
Buttigieg: Thank you.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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