Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg on the campaign trail. (Photo by Gage Skidmore.)

NOT DONE YET

THE FORMER PRESIDENT-

ial candidate argues that re-building trust as an American ideal is the key to tackling our country’s biggest challenges. From the October 7, 2020, online Inforum program “Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.” PETE BUTTIGIEG, 32nd Mayor of South Bend, Indiana; 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate; Author, Trust: America’s Best Chance BAKARI SELLERS, Former Member, South Carolina House of Representatives (2006–2014); 2014 Democratic Nominee for Lt. Governor—Moderator

BAKARI SELLERS: I wanted to start on something that’s near and dear to my heart; I believe it to be near and dear to yours as well. You had a chance to meet and talk to congressman John Lewis before he passed away. What did you take from his life experience as it relates to the issue that you delve into, the thesis of your book, trust for communities, and how that sometimes is too often left out of the equation that we deal with on a daily basis? PETE BUTTIGIEG: I’ve been thinking a lot about the legacy and the lessons of Representative Lewis; getting to know him better during the course of the campaign was one of the most moving experiences. I write about the fact that as chance would have it, my last day as a candidate, pretty much the last thing I did in public before we headed home to South Bend to end the campaign, was participating in that march at Selma, commemorating the incredible courage of him and those who were with them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

He joined those who were marking the occasion. We didn’t know he’d be there, because we knew

he was ill. But he came out and he told everybody there—and his voice even then was resonating—telling us to use the power of the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of the nation. It was such a stirring moment.

I wrestled with exactly how best to write about the role of trust in that period in the 1950s and ’60s, when he and others were marching to make America a democracy and doing it in a way that I think revealed a tremendous amount of trust. There was not trust, of course, in the good faith of the institutions they were trying to change.

They knew exactly what was waiting for them as state troopers were ready with violent intent on the other side of that bridge. But there was a level of trust in each other, trust in their solidarity, and I think trust in the capacity of the system to be reformed when confronted with a demand.

That’s something we ought to remember now, as I speak to a lot of young people who are rightly frustrated with the system, saying, “Why should I bother to vote? Why should I be part of a system that is broken in so many ways?” And [I] invite them to consider the power they have to make it less broken, if and only if they use the power that comes with the battle. SELLERS: I learned a lesson from the South Carolina state capitol; I would always tell people that the greatest currency you have in politics is not how much money you raise, but the relationships that you build. But those relationships rely on trust.

Let’s take a step back and talk about what it means, and even more important, why does it matter? Because to be honest with you, you can win the White House and nobody trusts a thing coming out of your mouth, as we’ve seen in recent history. So talk to me about what does it mean and why does it matter? BUTTIGIEG: So the reality is nothing works if we don’t have a basic level of trust. The simplest transactions in our lives—you go to a restaurant, you’re trusting that they’re not going to poison you and they’re trusting that you’re going to wait until you’ve paid up before you leave. It’s often in unseen ways that trust plays such an important role.

I write about some of the experiences in Afghanistan that made me really think about being able to trust those around me, but in less dramatic ways. We do this every minute. Every time you go through a green light, you’re trusting your life to the idea that the person waiting at red is going to obey the traffic light on their side.

And of course this is true in the political arena and definitely true in the international arena. Consider the fact that we’re confronted right now with a virus that really won’t be beaten unless we can trust one another to do the things that are needed to protect ourselves and each other—to wear a mask, for example. In fact, public health often depends on whether people trust the medical advice that they’re getting. I was especially disturbed to see statistics suggesting that as many as half of Americans are not sure they would get a vaccine even if one was approved. If that proves out, then we’ll never beat this pandemic.

So there are real, direct, life-or-death consequences to whether we have that level of trust, political trust in our leaders, social trust in each other, to get through life and to confront big problems around us. I think these are some of the questions that should be on our mind as we go into this voting season that’s now underway. What can we do to make sure that we hold leaders accountable, that we demonstrate that we expect a level of trustworthiness from them? And how do we build up those relationships that are not direct in-person, in-the-room relationships, but are still intimately important, like the relationship that each of us has to the people who make decisions over our lives everywhere from the Supreme Court to city hall? SELLERS: What did you learn about trust while you were on the campaign trail?

You were mayor of South Bend, Indiana. You were running for chair of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. You

announced you’re running for president of the United States. You didn’t have a whole team of people. It was you and our good friend the communications savante, Lis Smith. And then you’re on “The View” and on “TMZ Live.” There was not a TV screen or an interview that she shied you away from.

But talk to me about the trust, not just with the team around you, because we didn’t see any of those leaks or things fall apart. We saw you were very well-prepared going into debates and proposals and platforms. Talk to me about trust and the things you learned on the campaign trail. BUTTIGIEG: It’s a huge part of

Pete Buttigieg’s first appearance at The Commonwealth Club was in 2019 during his presidential campaign. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)

campaigning, and I think maybe even more so when you’re campaigning young. I enjoyed your account of that experience in your book, My Vanishing Country, how you establish those relationships. Because when you’re asking somebody to vote for you, especially when you’re running for president, but really for any office, in many ways, you’re asking them to trust you with their lives. You’re asking them to trust you with the lives of their loved ones. There’s something very serious and very intimate about that. The best thing that you can do is to try to help them know you think about the people in your life that you would trust with something very confidential or with something very important or just something intimate, like looking after your house or your kids while you’re away. More than anything, you want to feel like you know them.

So what does it mean to know somebody to [the degree] where we can trust them? Well, a lot of it’s being able to see how they act, and decide whether it’s predictable or not.

The word predictable has a lot of negative connotations, right? Because predictable means boring, but also predictable means I can count on you. I think that’s something that we’re really lacking right now in the political space.

The president seems to think it’s a strategy to be unpredictable. I don’t know that that’s a strategy or not, maybe it’s just an excuse. But whatever it is, it’s extremely destructive of the possibility of trusting anybody. Because what you learn on the campaign is people want to know you’re going to be the same person tomorrow that you were yesterday, that you’re going to be the same person in office that you were on the trail when you were asking for their vote.

Often you’re asking people to make a down payment of trust before they know for sure how you’re going to act, which after all is what trust is all about. If we all acted in predictably, certain, perfectly upstanding ways all the time, trust would disappear as a concept; it wouldn’t even make sense. We wouldn’t need it.

Trust matters, because we’re not always sure what to expect of one another. So we have to form our expectations, make ourselves vulnerable to what somebody else is going to do, whether you’re telling them a secret or trusting them with political power. That’s the experience that really an election, I think, exchanges. I mean, the election is maybe the greatest exchange of trust we have in our civic life. We as citizens are trusted to make decisions of incredible importance over who’s going to lead us. In turn, we expect those leaders to be trustworthy when we give them that assignment. SELLERS: Do you remember the times when you could forget who the president was for two, three weeks at a time? Just four years ago, you didn’t have to really worry, you could just— BUTTIGIEG: Wouldn’t that be nice? SELLERS: —trust. Do you remember? You didn’t have to stay up and look at Twitter all night. So I completely agree with what you’re saying.

Talk briefly [about] one of the unique experiences you have [that is shared with other mayors such as] Steve Benjamin, Frank Scott, Randall Woodfin, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, London Breed. You all have this unique executive experience. In fact, you all probably wouldn’t make the best legislators, because you all can’t be one to 435; you want to be one of one. BUTTIGIEG: It’s a different animal. SELLERS: It’s a different animal. Talk about the difference in our relationships in understanding trust from your perch as being mayor versus that of being a part of a legislative body. BUTTIGIEG: I think one of the biggest things about being an executive is you don’t have a peer group. By definition, there’s only one mayor, at least in your city. Hopefully you get to know your counterparts. I’ve loved getting to know some of the mayors you just named. But at the end of the day, there’s only one mayor, and there’s only one governor, there’s only one president.

When you’re in that executive role, the role of trust is huge, because it’s just a different feel from being in a committee room where people are testing different ideas, seeing what’s convincing, poking each other a little bit. You have to rely so much on the team around you. You have to rely on them to be telling you the truth. You have to rely on them to tell you things you might not want to hear in order to help you make a good decision. You’re relying on them to challenge you if you’re going in a direction that could be a mistake and you haven’t thought about all of the reasons why. And then you’re relying on them to go and carry out the decision, whatever it was, even if they’d recommend something else. It’s that kind of trust that I think can be formed in a swift amount of time when there’s a big challenge in front of you.

But everyone from military officers to business leaders, to executives and government learns the extent to which—no matter how strong you would like to view yourself as—you just can’t do it alone. You really are dependent on the competence and the integrity of the people around you. SELLERS: Let’s go back to your military background. Can you talk about that experience in Afghanistan and war zones? Trust has to be something that is everywhere. BUTTIGIEG: Trust is a huge part of what makes it possible for the military to function. One of the things I was reflecting on as I wrote the book is how quickly that trust has to be established.

I was an intelligence analyst. In theory, my job was at a computer, but in practice, they wound up needing me to do a lot of vehicle runs between Kabul and Bagram or around the city of Kabul just because I happened to be long-gun qualified, and that was something they needed per protocol to get people around. SELLERS: You can shoot? BUTTIGIEG: Yeah. And not always straight, but enough. SELLERS: I’m learning something new. BUTTIGIEG: I don’t mean to present [a false picture]. I wasn’t kicking down doors; I wasn’t a Navy SEAL. But part of my job was to go outside with the vehicle and get people safely and alive or get equipment safely from point A to point B. I remember thinking about how much I trusted people when somebody got into my vehicle for the 30th time, the trust that we’d established.

But then I started thinking, What about the trust that was there the first time somebody got into my vehicle? Not knowing anything about me, what kind of person I was, my personality—all they might know about me was that they’d been assigned to get into the vehicle I was driving and that they could see my rank and my name on my uniform. That was it. And they were going to trust me with their lives. Of course, it was mutual. What I realized is that we create institutions and structures and customs in order to place that sort of down payment on trust before it can be validated by the

experiences we have. That’s what training is about; that’s what rank is about. But it’s also what it’s about to be part of a group that has a strong sense of belonging.

All you should have to know about somebody in uniform is to look at the flag on their shoulder and you know that we’re part of the same team, even if they’ve got a different political viewpoint than you do, or they’re from a different part of the country or they have a different racial background; whatever it is, you know that you’re in it together. I’ve thought a lot about what it would take to create that same sense of group belonging for more Americans without more Americans having to have the experience of going to war.

I think there are a lot of ways to do that, and we’ve got to be on the lookout for those sources of group belonging that are not about excluding outsiders, but about creating that sense that we can turn to each other, that you know, whether you’re a part of a sports team or a club or a faith community or a political organization, or a military unit or whatever

Seemingly no politician visits San Francisco without hearing from former Mayor Willie Brown. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)

it is, it can create such important bonds of trust that you can then take out into other contexts and use to build the relationships that we really are lacking in this country.

The number of Americans who say you can trust other people to do the right thing has been falling at almost catastrophic speed. If we don’t shore it back up, we’re going to find that the U.S. will become like a lot of lowtrust societies that do worse economically. They do worse in terms of safety. They do worse in terms of justice. That’s a direction we’ve got to reverse for America to have a good balance of the 21st century. SELLERS: We did a lot of background— you as mayor and you in the military. I do have a question though about the moment we’re in now. Do you think we’re at kind of a tipping point when it comes to distrust or mistrust? BUTTIGIEG: I think we could be. I think it’s up to us, and a lot depends on the answer to that question. Look, this is the beginning of the 2020s, right? If the rest of this decade goes the way the first year of this decade went, we’re all in trouble, because I think a lot of us feel like 2020 has been a long few years. But I also believe that this decade ahead of us is a deciding decade that could lead to enormous progress if we started to establish a fairer tax code and actually invest in the things that make it possible for people to thrive, to cut poverty, to have real infrastructure, to invest in education, to address health. If this is the decade when we choose to finally wrestle and wrangle down the racial inequities that have been with us for 400 years; if this really could be, as some have called for, a third reconstruction, building on the first one after the Civil War, the second one in the civil rights era—if this was the decade that America actually got the job done. If this was the decade that we actually confronted climate change—and

it’ll have to be, because this will be one of two things: the decade we failed permanently to deal with climate change or the decade we somehow got on top of it. One of those two things will have to come true, and we’ll know very quickly. So all of this in ways we don’t always think about depends on trust, the ability to build enough trust in the possibility of our institutions to reform, to go in and actually do it.

The trust we have in science and expertise that will be needed in order to make the kind of decisions and sometimes difficult choices needed to get ahead of the climate crisis. The amount of trust in this better shared future that’s going to be needed for a lot of white Americans to lay aside some of the benefits that exist as a consequence of the racialized inequities that we live in. All of these things are either about to happen or they’re about to not happen in a very permanent, painful and devastating way. It’s part of why I thought it was so important for this book to come out this year. SELLERS: I want to talk about a specific incident, because unfortunately I think Black people are in a really unique situation, that blood has to be shared or images have to be shown so that, one, you can understand the distrust that some people have of an institution or a system, and two, ironically, being able to trust in what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and try to bring us together.

Talk to me about the George Floyd case, that 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and how it took that for a lot of white folks to understand the distrust that black people have of this community. Talk to me about that incident, that moment and how you evaluate that moment as we are coming up on these other series of moments that you talked about. BUTTIGIEG: The murder of George Floyd awakened so many Americans, partly because it closed the gap—because everybody saw this horrifying killing literally before our eyes. It closed this gap between what Black Americans had been saying about the Black experience and what white Americans have considered about how deep it runs.

In other words, I think what was different this time is it’s not so much defeating the likes of the KKK and the Proud Boys, that’s got to happen. But this was more about an awakening of what needs to change among white people who consciously would detest racism, but in so many ways continue to participate in this racialized society that works to the benefit of white Americans and to the detriment of Black Americans.

A lot of this, again, has to do with trust, partly in terms of trust as a resource just like financial capital. If you have more of it, you can do more in life. And Black Americans have been systematically distrusted. We can put a number on how much people are trusted with credit ratings. And there’s a of data about the racial disparities in credit ratings, even for otherwise equally credit worthy people.

It’s certainly the case in what Bryan Stevenson has called the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that Black men, young Black men in particular, experience that puts their lives in danger every time they encounter a police officer, but also creates maybe a different kind of pressure just getting through life. Things again that Black writers and voices have been talking about for a long time. But I think the pivotal nature of the moment of George Floyd was the invitation to so many well-intentioned white people to be not just vaguely sympathetic, but specifically active in trying to do something about it. SELLERS: One of the things [about which] I really wanted your understanding, because I’m still not there yet—distinguish between trust and faith. BUTTIGIEG: It’s a great question, one I’ve been thinking about a lot. In fact, you could spend all day on Google Translate putting in a word like trust or faith, translating it into some other language then translating it back into English and see what comes back. Not every language has the way we do of talking about trust or confidence or faith.

Consider the word trusty, which is not quite the same thing as trustworthy. But we have that word to refer to the kind of affection that we have for maybe a pocket knife or a friend or a trusty steed that we can count on. The way we talk about this I think reflects the way we think about this, too. And if you look in scripture, there’s a lot about trusting in God.

Every faith tradition has something about how we trust in a higher power or trust in an order of things. I think having that kind of trust, which is intertwined with faith in the spiritual sense, gives us a better ability to have a level of trust in one another. I’m not saying you’ve got to subscribe to a particular religious tradition in order to experience this, but I think it is clear that part of what humanity has been searching for ever since the earliest faith traditions emerged is a basis for some level of trust in a frightening and uncertain world.

We’ve got to think about the trust that we have in each other through the lens of the trust we can have in our place in the world, perhaps our place in the universe. I think many believers organize our understanding of that place according to a faith tradition. But whatever moral tradition you hold to is a big part of what makes it possible to make that down payment and make yourself a little vulnerable, trusting someone else before they fully earned it. SELLERS: The words that will be synonymous with [Donald Trump’s] tenure as president had been fake news. He’s talked about it from the beginning. I don’t want to harp on the bad politics of it, but talk to me about how it erodes the trust coming from the highest office in the land in our institution of media and journalism, which is a necessary institution. How do you rebuild that post? BUTTIGIEG: Forty, 50 years ago Walter Cronkite would literally end his news broadcast by saying, “That’s the way it is.” It was his sign-off. There was an expectation that certainly broadcast media could give you a clear sense of what had happened.

And then there was still politics around it. There were ferocious controversies over what was reported in the news, but no one would think to say that thing that you saw you didn’t actually see.

There’s that saying, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.” Nobody thought of that. They just would argue over the same set of facts. People would have different values that would lead them to make different conclusions or your different interests that would lead you in a different direction. But those different interests, those different values, those were being negotiated on a single field of fact.

Now fast forward to 2020. The facts haven’t changed. There’s still a set of things that either happened or didn’t happen, and the truth is out there. But it is increasingly viewed as acceptable to attack an unfavorable news story by saying, “No, that didn’t happen,” and calling it fake news.

We must remember the origin of fake news actually was something very different, which was news that was not really designed to get people to believe in it for longer than it took to get you to click on it. But when you clicked on it, somebody made money. There were Macedonian teenagers who could make tons of money by putting up a story that you’d see in your ad stream that would say Britney Spears has been devoured by alligators, and just out of curiosity, you’d click on it.

And you wouldn’t go through life believing it, but they’d make a couple of cents every time somebody did that. There are some pretty rich Macedonian teenagers, because that’s how fake news got started, or at least how fake news came into our vocabulary.

Now, I actually have a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who’s been discussing how a different conception of fake news goes back to the colonial days. I’ve got to think that if I was walking down the street in the 17th century and you handed me a political pamphlet that had been printed on a printing press, I probably would have been a little bit impressed that you had a printing press and I would have thought, “Well, I better at least look at what this is.”

Then eventually we wised up, and we had that expression, “Don’t believe everything you read.” I think we don’t have that same wisdom yet when it comes to all the stuff that bombards us on the internet. So paradoxically, even though everybody can be their own reporter today, we actually need journalism more than we used to because there’s more information.

“We need more editors and reporters, not just to figure out what the little bits of information are out there, but to make sense of them.”

We need more editors and reporters, not just to figure out what the little bits of information are out there, but to make sense of them. That’s something that cannot be automated, and it cannot be outsourced. We need people of integrity—as, by the way, we have in many places in journalism—to play that role. It’s only going to matter more the more raw information hits us and comes our way. SELLERS: Tell me what your hope is for the next four years, even if Donald Trump is reelected. BUTTIGIEG: That’s a pretty painful if.

But my hope is that America is ready to fix what is broken at a deeper level than we have been in a long time. That does mean structural change. As a country, we’ve amended our constitution in some substantive way at an average pace of once per decade, and yet it’s been about 50 years now since we’ve made some changes. We know some [possibilities are] to get money out of politics, to have a national popular vote, things that would increase trust in our system and would probably increase participation, which would make the system just truly more trustworthy, which in turn would increase trust. All of these things have a chicken-and-egg quality, and they either get better and better and better, or they get worse and worse and worse.

My hope is that the 2020s will be a decade where we get out of the negative cycle into a positive cycle, but that’s going to require some very concrete and ambitious decisions about where we’re going to take things.

I think that probably does require a new president. But no matter who the president is, it’s not just about the president. You know from your time serving in the legislature how much power our system places in the hands of state officials. It’s one of the reasons why I believe in finding the power in state and local office too, because that’s where a lot of this actually plays out.