Democratic Primary 2020: What Pete Buttigieg Learned from Barack Obama

It was missing a word in the speech by Pete Buttigieg in South Bend, Indiana, announcing his presidential campaign. It's a word you've heard twice in Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke's announcement speeches, nine times in Cory Booker, 21 times in Kirsten Gillibrand, 23 times in Kamala Harris and 25 times in Elizabeth Warren. .

This word? "Fight."

Instead, Buttigieg has returned to a word from which these discourses have been discouraged, a word whose relative absence from the Democratic primary is quite strange considering its power in past democratic campaigns.

This word? "Hope," what Buttigieg repeated eight times, Gillibrand repeated three times, said O'Rourke once, and Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker completely avoided.

Bill Clinton, famous, was "the man of Hope". Barack Obama spoke of "hope and change". But hope has become outdated in the primary democrats. In part, it's because the Democrats are trying to create a legacy separate from Obama's and seeking their own language. That's partly because many Democrats have learned from Sanders' outstanding performance in 2016 and Donald Trump's victory, namely that an angry country is looking for fighters – and no matter how many of times where Hillary played "Fight Song" during rallies, a critical mass of voters did not think she was really thinking (more about the gender dynamics of this in a minute).

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The rise of Buttigieg was unexpected and, to be honest, a little strange. The young mayors of medium-sized cities do not generally rank third in the presidential election in Iowa and New Hampshire before they officially announce their campaigns. "Frankly, I do not even know all the reasons why it's going so well," Buttigieg told New York magazine.

But there is a reason and it is related to the psychology that attracts liberals to the word "hope".

Liberals full of hope, worried conservatives

Liberals and Conservatives have different ideologies, different philosophies, different policies, different parties. But behind all that, there is the fact that they have different psychologies.

In their book Open Versus ClosedChristopher Frederico, Christopher Johnston and Howard Lavine write that "Democrats and Republicans now stand out clearly as a set of fundamental psychological arrangements related to the transparency of experience – a general dimension of personality exploiting tolerance for threat and uncertainty in its environment. "

A similar argument, using slightly different data, can be found in the publications of Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. Prius or Pickup:

Among the many factors that make up your world view, one is more fundamental than any other to determine which side of the division you are heading from: your perception of the dangerousness of the world. Fear is perhaps our most important instinct, after all, so it makes sense that people's level of fear informs their vision of life.

In Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives and the biology of political differences, John Alford, John Hibbing and Kevin Smith write:

Many studies have linked these dimensions of personality with differences in the combination of tastes and preferences that seem to reliably separate liberals and conservatives. People who are distinguished by their openness, for example, tend to love music and the abstract arts. People with a high level of awareness are more likely to be organized, loyal and loyal. A review of this vast research literature reveals that these types of differences are constantly being repeated in nearly 70 years of research on personality research. The main line, of course, is that this same literature also reports a coherent relationship between these dimensions of the personality and the political temperament. Those who are open to new experiences not only suspend Jackson Pollock's impressions in disorganized rooms while listening to Bach's techno-pop reinterpretations by experimental jazz bands. They are also more likely to identify as liberals.

These differences appear in surveys, experiences and life choices. People who are open-minded are more likely to like trying new foods, traveling to new places, living in different cities, keeping a messy office. They are less sensitive to threatening photos and disgusting images, even when measuring physical indicators such as skin connectivity, eye tracking and saliva.

Hope is at the heart of this vision of the world, in its most basic literal form. Do you have hope for new things, new people, new places? Does the change excite you? Is the difference? If that is the case, you are more likely to be liberal. If you examine the new, the different, and feel a peak of fear, you are more likely to be conservative.

Not all Liberals like this type of openness, any more than all conservatives. But these associations are present and strong in many studies covering dozens of countries. In a meta-analysis of the literature, John Jost, Chadly Stern, Nicholas Rule, and Joanna Sterling examined 134 surveys in 16 countries and found "a significant association between subjective perceptions of threat and conservatism."

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Over the past 50 years, American political parties have increasingly come together in ideologically and demographically distinct coalitions, and some of this sorting has been psychological. As the Democratic Party has diversified, it has become particularly attractive to people who perceive difference as a force and who are excited by the idea of ​​a changing country. The Republican party has gone through the same process in the opposite direction.

Obama and Trump, in their respective campaigns, have taken this subtext of US policy to make stickers. A black man with a strange name won the presidency, combining the words "change" and "hope". He was replaced by a white man who won the presidency by promising to go back, who again organized a campaign around the word ". "

All this has overloaded the psychological sorting of America. Frederico, Johnston and Lavine discover that the more politically engaged a person is, the more closely his psychology and voting behavior correlate. Hetherington and Weiler, who measure a set of related traits that they call "fixed" and "fluids," find that now, "among fixed, 84% of people who chose one of these two labels chose conservative" , while "among the most fluid". 80% of those who chose one of them chose liberal. "

Obama misses the Democrats

Most Democrats running for president have tried, in their own way, to go beyond Trump Trump. They promise to be the populist fighter that he claims to be only.

But many liberals, temperament and psychology, do not want to fight. They do not want politics to be an endless war; they believe that mutual understanding is possible, that the country will respond to a person willing to believe and invoke the best. It's not just their vision of politics; it's their vision of life. This is Obama's point of view in the speech that made him a star:

Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, spin-masters and negative advertising salespeople who embrace the politics of everything. Well, I tell them tonight, there is no liberal America or conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is no black America and white America, Latin America and Asian America; United States of America.

And again in his 2008 campaign announcement speech:

You came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe that peace can exist. Faced with despair, you believe that there may be hope. Faced with a policy that excludes you, tells you to settle, divides us for too long, you believe we can be one people, seeking what is possible, building that more perfect union.

And while Mitch McConnell has dissuaded many Liberals from thinking that this style of politics will enact laws, he still describes the candidates and the messages that interest them. Obama appealed to them because he represented them, because he was one of them, and if they could, they would put him in power again. time. There are a lot of these Democrats, but there is not much competition at the moment.

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You can see Joe Biden's desire in the persistent header in the polls. Biden's popularity frustrates the left-handers who believe him insufficiently progressive and the Liberals who see him as an incomprehensible White. But Biden knows that many of his supporters do not really support him. They support Obama by supporting him. An Associated Press article on Biden's planning suggests that channeling this desire forms the foundation of his campaign:

Joe Biden is finalizing a campaign at the White House that would present him as an extension of Barack Obama's presidency and political movement. He bets that the majority of Democratic voters are eager to regain the style and substance of that era – and consider it the best option to lead the way.

Biden's weakness lies in his temperament, demographics and style. He is not very similar to Obama. He was brought on Obama's ticket to add balance, to reassure. If you watched Obama and saw too a lot of change too fast, you could look at Biden and see a familiar face.

As Rebecca Traister wrote, "Biden's His role has been to comfort the lost, prized and highly imagined Democratic Elector, the one who resembles him: this guy in the restaurant, this guy in Ohio, this white guy and so put off by the modified terms of sex and race. power in this country that he had fled decades ago for the party that was trying to curb the social progress that had deprived him of his power. "

It is there that Buttigieg found an opening.

Pete Buttigieg's piece for the vote "Hope and Change"

Buttigieg can not be considered the heir of the Obama administration. But among the candidates, it is he who uses his personal story and political message to echo Obama's call.

Buttigieg began his speech by doing exactly what Obama had done in his first speeches: he explained that the choice America was facing embraced a moment of change with hope – or the rejected out of fear.

"Change happens, ready or not," said Buttigieg. "The question of our time is whether families and workers will be defeated by the changes below us or if we will control them."

Scott Olson / Getty Images

As Obama has done before him, Buttigieg has transformed his own story – in which an insane and closed teenager is watching his country transform itself enough to not only accept it but also embrace it – arguing that America is a place worthy of hope:

If I could go back in time, it would not be out of desire to live there. No, if I enter the past, barely 20 years ago, to find a teenager in the basement …[and] tell him that he will be fine. More than good. To announce that it will rain one April day, even before turning 40, he will wonder if he is rising too fast to become a leading candidate for the US presidency. And to tell him that day, he announces his campaign to the presidency, he will do it under the watch of her husband.

"How can you live this story without believing that America deserves our optimism, deserves our courage, deserves our hope?" Asked Buttigieg.

In his speech, Buttigieg may have used the clutter of his own identity – a Midwestern mayor, a married homosexual, a veteran of Afghanistan – to assert that the divisions of our policies mask the splendor of our humanity common:

When I went overseas, during each of the 119 trips I made outside the circuit, driving or monitoring a vehicle, we learned to trust others. The men and women who got into my car, they did not care about being a Democrat or a Republican. They worried about whether I had chosen the route with the least amount of IED threats, not whether my father was documented or undocumented when he immigrated here. They were worried about whether my M-4 was locked and charged, not if I was going home to a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

It was a speech aimed at the Obama wing of the Democratic Party, even going as far as jokes about tributes about being a young boy with a funny family name. It was a speech intended for voters who were looking forward to the future, who were delighted with the change of word.

"It's time to get out of the politics of the past," said Buttigieg, "and towards something totally different."

Buttigieg's confidence in her reception with applause speaks volumes about her target audience.

It's not 2008 anymore

Of course, Buttigieg is not part of the 2008 Democratic primary. It comes after the Obama presidency, following the questions raised by the rise of Trump. And he's running after Clinton's 2016 defeat and the #MeToo moment, both of which have drawn attention to why the new and exciting new faces of presidential politics always seem to be men.

"Whether a young candidate is bright, bright and promising or inexperienced, repulsive and ruthlessly ambitious, it depends on whether it's a man or a woman." , writes Jill Filipovic.

I was struck by the prevalence of the word "fight" in the 2020 speeches, on the fact that the most prestigious female candidates used it a lot more than men. And it's not unique to this election. In 2008, Clinton used this word so often that it made fun of her. She is the "most combative fighting fighter," wrote Byron York. In 2016, people complained about his use of "Fight Song" as the theme of the campaign.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

Men are supposed to be fighters, which frees them to build messages around ideas such as hope. Women must overcome the suspicions of weakness, which means that they must be much more explicit about their willingness to fight. But like Anne Helen Petersen points outthe work that women do to prove that they are fighters often causes them to be rejected as aggressive or abrasive. Why can not they smile more?

As a result, some Liberals regret that Buttigieg represents a status quo that frustrates them. For them, the enthusiastic welcome he's received, especially as more qualified candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, does not show how much has changed, but how much has stayed the same.

"Yes, Pete Buttigieg is a gay man, and that's a problem!" wrote Filipovic. "But it's not an insult to say he's a white man. Is he a white man exactly in the same mold as all other previous white men presidents? No, but being gay does not make him a white man or not. "

Another challenge for Buttigieg is that Obama did not win by impressing open-minded Liberals. He won by building a coalition between them and black voters. To date, there is very little evidence of Buttigieg's breakthrough among non-white voters – and, in particular, non-white voters are not as categorized according to the dimension of openness between parties. The messages that work for the white liberals of New Hampshire are therefore often shared by the faithful in South Carolina.

Nevertheless, Buttigieg's rapid rise is a lesson for the rest of the Democratic field. Democratic elites have given up all hope and change because Washington is a place that breaks all hope and pushes for change. For them, Obama's message now seems picturesque, even naive. At the same time, the Democrats were obsessed with reverse engineering: how Trump had dominated his primaries and won the elections, forgetting that the voters who had driven him to victory wanted different things – in personality as in politics – from voters who propelled them to victory.

But it is still the Democratic Party that has elected Barack Obama twice and who loves him today. A lot of liberals still want a candidate who sees the world in the same way as Obama, because that is also the way they see the world.