{"id":562484,"date":"2026-04-03T16:36:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T16:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/562484\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T16:36:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T16:36:12","slug":"pete-buttigieg-calls-for-a-politics-of-belonging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/562484\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Buttigieg Calls For a Politics of \u2018Belonging\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) this week, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg \u201904 teasingly acknowledged the prospect of another run for the presidency, after some lighthearted prodding from Princeton African American studies professor Eddie Glaude Jr.<\/p>\n

The two were speaking on a panel together at the Institute of Politics (IOP) Forum, along with Harvard President Emerita Drew Faust<\/a> and Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore<\/a>. Contemplating how to achieve a more unified country, Faust said, \u201cWell, we need to have a better president.\u201d Glaude pointed at Buttigieg, who laughed and responded, \u201cI\u2019m working on it!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Drew
\nFrom left: Jill Lepore, Drew Faust, Eddie Glaude Jr., and Pete Buttigieg | PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTHA STEWART; COURTESY OF HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL<\/p>\n

The Monday evening event was the first in a series of discussions at HKS this semester marking the 250th anniversary of the nation\u2019s founding. (Upcoming speakers include former U.S. Senator and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, M.B.A. \u201974, J.D. \u201975, and environmentalist and author Bill McKibben \u201982.) Loosely focused on the theme of unity and disunity, the panelists spoke about polarization\u2014past and present\u2014the notion of belonging, and the future of the American political system.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re actually in one of those rare moments, which, for all of the pain and the pathology of being an American right now, could also be an incredibly fertile moment for different patterns, different coalitions, and perhaps a very different electoral map in the near future,\u201d said Buttigieg, a current IOP visiting fellow, who first rose to political stardom as the young mayor of South Bend, Ind., an office he held from 2012-2020. After running for president in 2020, he joined President Joe Biden\u2019s cabinet.<\/p>\n

An undercurrent throughout the conversation at the IOP was uncertainty about the future. The first question during the Q&A session came from a former career U.S. Foreign Service officer who was laid off in 2025, one of 300,000 federal employees <\/a>forced out or into early retirements by the Trump administration last year. Now a student at HKS, she asked Buttigieg about how to protect and rebuild public service careers.<\/p>\n

Buttigieg responded by saying that the current political moment carries both opportunity and danger. \u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of this festival of destruction to our institutions,\u201d he said, \u201cbut that could lead to an incredibly creative period.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recent polling has suggested that an electoral backlash may be building against President Donald Trump and the Republican Party in this year\u2019s midterm elections, but Buttigieg cautioned that if Democrats do prevail in future elections, they must reimagine government and institutions, not simply try to turn back the clock. \u201cIf there’s one thing I\u2019m preaching right now,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s that our job as a country and the job of my political party is not to somehow take power, find all the bits and pieces of everything they smashed \u2026 tape it all back together, and serve it up to the world as it looked in 2022. That\u2019s not going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a panel with three historians\u2014Lepore studies the U.S. Constitution, Faust the Civil War, and Glaude the history of race and racism\u2014Buttigieg, as a politician, was the sunniest voice. \u201cMy experience has been,\u201d he said, that the nation\u2019s divided past \u201cdoesn\u2019t have to be destiny, especially at a moment \u2026 like this, which is so unstable that a different American political coalition might be built.\u201d He spoke about the need to broaden Americans\u2019 sense of belonging to each other. The U.S. military encourages that kind of belonging, said Buttigieg, who served in Afghanistan as a naval reserve officer. And so do universities, he argued. \u201cThat\u2019s part of why the university is such an important invention,\u201d he said. \u201cIt creates an opportunity to scramble some of those other circles of belonging, with intergenerational encounters, geographic encounters, ideological diversity, and many other forms of diversity.\u201d Faust agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But when he expressed optimism over the fact that the United States had overcome profound divisions and bitter fragmentations in past eras, Lepore, who is serving as moderator for the entire HKS discussion series, reminded him about the large-scale political violence that took place during the run-up to the Civil War in the 1850s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. \u201cI seldom take comfort in the fact that things have been bad before,\u201d she said. \u201cIs it necessary to go through the throes of that violence for change to happen?\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Lepore had started off the discussion by showing a series of maps that illustrated just how deep and durable the country\u2019s divisions have been. A blue-and-red electoral map from 1888, highlighting the geographic distribution of votes in that year\u2019s presidential election, lined up almost exactly with the demarcations in an 1850 map of the country\u2019s free and slave states. It also lined up with a map of the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

Faust noted another close alignment: recent maps produced by Ackman professor of economics Raj Chetty, who researches the geography<\/a> of poverty and upward mobility in the United States. \u201cTo see these inequities of a slave society replicated in the work of a contemporary economist at Harvard is very chilling,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Glaude, though, cautioned against reading too much into the maps, which \u201coftentimes [lead] us to overburden the South with the sins of the nation,\u201d he said. \u201cThe maps, on a certain level, actually feed the myth that the moral problem resides there, as opposed to in the heart of the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recited a catalog of conditions that existed in the United States during previous big celebrations of the nation\u2019s founding: 1876, the dawn of Jim Crow; 1926, \u201cthe decade of the Klan\u201d; 1976, riots in Boston over school desegregation through busing. And in the current moment, he said, \u201cWhat we\u2019ve witnessed over the last 50-plus years is an evisceration of any robust notion of the public good. We\u2019ve become self-interested persons in pursuit of our own aims and ends in competition and rivalry with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

What would it mean for us to imagine ourselves differently?\u201d he continued. \u201cThat\u2019s not going to come from politicians\u2026. It\u2019s going to come from us, understanding our role.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faust made a similar argument, through the lens of the Civil War Union dead. \u201cHaving read so many letters of people who were going to go to war and sacrifice their lives,\u201d she said, \u201cI just was so moved to think that they did it for a notion of a nation and a union. \u2026 People were willing to die for that, and I just think we owe them something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) this week, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg \u201904…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-562484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}