Another good bit -
During the day, three people had told Buttigieg that they were Republicans, active or former, who were considering his candidacy. In the S.U.V., he said to me, “You can tell a lot of Republicans ready to cross over didn’t suddenly become liberal. They just feel that exhaustion from fighting. Which is why we’ve got to make sure that our answer is not some kind of equal-and-opposite meanness.” Buttigieg posited that the economic alienation that was central to the 2016 Presidential election was now matched by a powerful political alienation—a sense, he said, that “has people feeling like elections aren’t fair, and having reason to feel that way when they see how districts are drawn, for example. I think it’s that question of how some policies can command so much support and get nowhere.”
. . .
It was dark enough outside the S.U.V. that we could not see past the road, creating a serene atmosphere inside. The four campaign aides travelling with us were quiet, perhaps in deference to the general demeanor of a politician whose way to relax on the road is, as he pointed out later that evening, to play board games with his husband. (He recommended Risk.) I asked about an aspect of his pitch that had always been opaque to me. If Trump was the President who ended the Reagan era, then what, exactly, was the era that would follow—the one he was campaigning to begin? . . . “I think there needs to be an emphasis on political reform, the likes of which we probably haven’t seen since—maybe since the first Progressive Era.”
He mentioned a familiar trope, that there is a “new American majority” for ideas that a few years ago would have been considered too liberal for the mainstream—for broad action on guns and climate change, for much steeper taxation of the rich, and for expanded health care. Warren and Sanders have built their campaigns around these issues, arguing that the main obstacle to progressive policies is the billionaire class—who, they say, must pay for those policies through new wealth taxes and higher estate taxes. . . . Unlike many Democrats, Buttigieg suggests that the traumas of the past decade are as much political as economic. What gives his campaign its peculiar mood, of optimism in the midst of an emergency, is his conviction that a progressive consensus is already present in the country, and that the way to spoil it is to be too partisan or unwelcoming—that the change has already come.
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