Pete Buttigieg Hammers Democrats’ Approach to Promoting Diversity: ‘It Is How Trump Republicans Are Made’
Former presidential candidate and secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, joined a panel discussion at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics on Tuesday and pulled no punches in hammering his own party for creating Trump voters.
At one point during the discussion, titled “The Future of the Democratic Party,” moderator David Axelrod hammered the “spectacle of the Democratic National Committee chair election” at the beginning of the month. Axelrod lamented “it seemed to devolve into sort of like we need a left-handed Mongolian caucus and a right-handed this caucus and not– what we did was fine we just have to communicate it better.”
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) responded to Axelrod saying, “What a load of shit” – also hammering the DNC for overly dividing based on identity.
Axelrod soon directed the question to Buttigieg, asking how can Democrats stop allowing their critics to “caricature” them in this way.
“Yeah, I mean, I saw a little bit of that event you described, and it was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us,” Buttigieg replied, adding:
And we cannot go on like that. We cannot. I also think that we believe in the values that we care about for a reason. And this is not about abandoning those values. It’s about making sure we’re in touch with the first principles that animate them.
What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia, which I have also experienced.
And it is how it is how Trump Republicans are made. If that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions but doesn’t actually get at what we’re what what actually matters here, what’s actually at stake, I think and this might sound counterintuitive if we were more serious about the actual values and not caught up in vocabularies and trying to cater to everybody only in terms of their particular slice of combinations of identities versus the shared project.
Buttigieg ended by offering a way to flip the script on Republicans, “Actually, if we thought about it a little bit differently. Things like diversity would be actually an example of how we reach out beyond our traditional coalition. And what I mean by that is the opposite of diversity is uniformity.”
“And if there’s one thing I really respect about principled conservatives, even if I don’t always agree with them, it’s that they have a horror of anything that has a whiff of being pressed into conformity by government or by society. So I would like to appeal to people who, whether it’s because of a conservative or libertarian instinct or a more progressive instinct or I would say just an American belief that part of the point of living in a country like this is you don’t have to conform to what other people demand of you,” he concluded.
Axelrod replied, ”Yeah, that’s good for Fox News.”
Watch the full clip above.
