Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang

Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubiks Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars...

As SecretaryButtigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers..

Because Buttigieg, at 41, is an old millennial; because as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he got a first in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics),the trademark degree for Labour-party elites of the Tony Blair era; because he worked optimizing grocery-store pricing at McKinsey; because he joined the Navy in hopes of promoting democracy in Afghanistan; because he got gay-married to his partner Chasten in 2018; and because, as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he agitated to bring hipster entrepreneurism and high-tech investment to his rust-belt hometown, I had to ask him about neoliberalism, the happy idea that consumer markets and liberal democracy will always expand, and will always expand together..

Not everyone, it seems, evenwants a rising standard of living if it means they have to accept the greater enfranchisement of undesirables, including, of course, women, poor people, Black people, and the usual demons in the sights of the worlds Ted Cruzes and Tucker Carlsons...

So given how hard we work to push the number of, for example, accidental railway casualties from the single digits toward zero, and to make sure there are not just no airline crashes but no close calls with airlines, what it would mean to reverse that rise in roadway deaths, which claims about 40,000 lives a year, yeah, thats an enormous one...

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