On November 3, 2023, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. A short clip from the interview has gone viral recently, hence my finally noticing something that happened eight months ago.
If your first inclination is to move along—you don’t want to read about Pete because he’s a Democrat, or you want someone else to be Harris’s running mate, or you have a personal vendetta against the Department of Transportation—bear with me for a minute. By the same token, if your heart leapt with joy at the prospect of reading a breathless hagiography of one of the Democratic Party’s best communicators, temper your hopes.
But, before we get to Pete, permit me a brief tangent that is actually most of the article.
In Which I Launch into a Spicy, Partially Hinged Diatribe Against Political Media
Disclaimer: I briefly toot my own horn at the end of this section. I apologize in advance, and do please consider yourself warned.
I believe that much of the political division in modern America is attributable to or significantly worsened by the political media. Beware: I am about to stereotype pretty aggressively and use a whole lot of generalities. There are exceptions to some of them, but I do believe they are exceptions, not the rule, so please just forget them and adopt my arguments uncritically. Also, yes, I recognize the irony of caricaturing to criticize people for caricaturing. If you do disagree with my arguments, let me know, and let’s see if we can improve them.
In an ideal world, the electorate would have easy access to a reasonably consistent, reasonably fulsome set of facts presented to them by reporters and commentators unbeholden to government or unseen financial actors, and good faith arguments from multiple perspectives regarding the implications of those facts. Pundits would consider the best points made by the other side, or other sides, and explain their thinking in enough detail that readers, listeners, and viewers would leave with an informed view on an issue and a model for how to discuss it further.
We do not live in an ideal world. What we have now is closer to the complete and total balkanization of the media and the electorate. Let’s start with the premise that, as a general rule, the Liberal MediaTM presents liberal points of view without seriously representing or engaging with conservative counters, and, on the other side of the ledger, the Conservative MediaTM presents conservative points of view without seriously representing or engaging with liberal counters.
I think the first consequence is that liberals and conservatives each retreat to their own friendly confines—I don’t know many liberals that spend much time watching Fox, nor many conservatives that turn in the first instance to MSNBC. And why would they? Would you consistently read or watch something that dismisses your point of view without representing it as you would, or as the best proponent of your point of view would—without “steelmanning” it—or that doesn’t even bother with the merits, but instead dismisses it with an ad hominem or some other form of straw man? What would you get out of that?
Second, over time, I think ignoring counterarguments or engaging with their weakest form weakens the non-counterarguments—the…er…arguments. Meaning, if you’re a liberal, and you don’t ever sharpen your arguments by engaging with excellent conservative counterarguments, or you the conservative don’t bother learning what the best liberal arguments are, your own arguments are going to atrophy. You’ll begin to use shorthand, to speak with language that means one thing to your side and another entirely to the other.
Now, imagine that you’re a liberal never seriously confronted with good conservative arguments, or a conservative never seriously confronted with good liberal arguments: what are you going to start thinking about your ideological opponents? If all you have access to are weak arguments in favor of their positions—and, what is more, you might have been led to believe you’ve been presented with their strongest arguments—you’re likely to think the worst. Your conclusion that your ideological opponents are dumb or evil wouldn’t just be unsurprising—it might even be reasonable.
Switch to the media’s point of view. Let’s define the political media’s function—ignore the financial aspect of things for a moment—as to inform and persuade. By preaching primarily to one side, over time, I think channels, publications, and individuals forfeit their ability to persuade—anyone that isn’t already converted has left! Plus, the choir members that remain are weaker for it, and when they encounter the persuadables, they do so armed with weak arguments, little exposure to strong counterarguments, and intense pre-existing prejudices.
But, who cares? What’s the problem if conservatives want to hang out with conservatives, if liberals want to hang out with liberals? Pump my veins full of Morning Joe and Rachel Maddow, you might say, or plop me in a recliner and give me the Fox News prime time lineup of Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld. And why shouldn’t the reporters and pundits focus on their audience? They’re able to make scads and oodles of money. Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, is the most successful writer on Substack. She has over two million subscribers (not to brag, but I now have over two hundred). She writes a more or less daily newsletter providing a broad, historical perspective on current events. Professor Richardson knows so, so much more than I do about America and its history, but she doesn’t take conservative arguments seriously at all—not, at least, in what she publishes.
Let’s look further downstream, beyond Americans dividing up into fun little ideological silos. Is there an actual impact on our government?
I believe there is.
Another thought experiment. If you lean left, congratulations: you are now Sean Hannity. You have cool hair and probably a yacht. If you lean right, you are now Emmy Award-winner and Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow. You have more degrees and trophies than Hannity, but your audience is probably just as Democratic as his is Republican. You also have cool hair. Anyway, I think Sean Hannity earnestly wants Republicans to win more elections, and I think Rachel Maddow earnestly wants Democrats to win more elections.
How, exactly, are Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow helping to make that happen? I’m going to hazard a guess that about 99.4% of Hannity watchers and listeners either agree with Hannity completely, or don’t agree completely but agree enough to still be reliable Republican voters. I think the same statistics are true of Maddow for Democrats. What are they going to say? “Go out and convert your friends”? Quick confession for those that didn’t already know: I tend to vote for Democrats (important context for the next sentence). I’ve had plenty of conversations with Hannity listeners that started out with some sort of revelation about Democrats I had genuinely never heard of—because it was, if not untrue entirely, based on a tiny fragment of a truth. On the other hand, I’ve been lucky enough to have a number of close conservative friends that are flat-out more knowledgeable than me about many political issues. I’ve gone into discussions thinking I was going to seal an easy win and come out needing to do a considerable amount of background reading before re-engaging.
Point being, Hannity and Maddow aren’t converting anybody, and they’re not giving their missionaries much of a chance either. As a result of the voting public getting themselves nicely separated, you’ve got many lovely Democrats and Republicans running for office without a prayer of actually winning election, no matter how good their ideas are. I’m not going to say voters have never been more entrenched because someone will inevitably say something about the Great Voter Entrenchment of 1846 (I made that up), and I’m not going to claim we’ve never been more polarized so long as we fall short of the very high polarization standard set by the Civil War, but, whatever things may have been like historically, we are currently in a situation where (1) neither party can build up a significant margin in both houses of Congress at the same time; (2) neither party can hold any margin at all for very long; and (3) both parties have immense incentives not to compromise with the other side to get major legislation done (because, well, highly entrenched voters tend to not like compromisers very much).
As a consequence, Congress is currently batting .160 in getting America to approve of it. That is bad.
I get the sense listening to pundits on both the left and the right that they recognize the entrenchment; many of them, if not all, are trying to work within it. Take Crooked Media, for example, a liberal/progressive media company. Crooked Media was founded in 2017 by Jon Favreau (not the director/actor), Jon Lovett (not comedian Jon Lovitz), and Tommy Vietor, each of them a former top Obama staffer. The company offers a network of podcasts, a news and opinion website, live shows and tours, and an active social media presence. The New York Times has called the company “the left’s answer to conservative talk radio.” Its stated goal is to foster open conversation between liberals and support grassroots activism and political participation. To the extent you’ve heard of them, it’s likely because of their flagship podcast, Pod Save America.
I’m simplifying, but their goal is not to broaden the audience to include current conservatives, or even a good chunk of swing voters, but to energize liberals and progressives to elect more liberals and progressives. I think they and their conservative counterparts operate on the theory that if they can just get a bunch of their party elected, and can finally put their chosen policies into place, America will be convinced: the wider electorate will see the goodness, the rightness, of the liberal way, or the conservative way, and that’s how they’ll be converted.
I’m not sure that theory holds much water. Even in the impossible, one in a million scenario where one of the parties somehow gets its entire platform enshrined in law in the first year of a new presidency, we have elections every two years: the country is too big, our systems far too complex, for a set of policies to be viewed as clearly, unambiguously good so quickly that voters originally opposed to those policies change their minds before they have a chance to vote for people elected to reverse them.
I don’t foresee a natural end to this: the media makes money, and rigidly partisan media makes serious money. Fox News cleans up. MSNBC does great. Crooked Media is raking it in. CNN does less fine, in part because I think they’ve lost audience to both the left and the right.
But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do (this is the aforementioned horn-tooting part, or maybe just my commitment to an apparently unpopular approach): I’m not going to pretend to be anything I’m not, but I will present arguments and counterarguments as respectfully and seriously as I can. To the extent I share my personal opinion on an issue, I will endeavor to be clear enough that, whether you agree or disagree, you understand why—that you understand how I came to my view on a particular subject, what I might be missing, and maybe how you’d convince me that I’m wrong.
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With that out of the way, let’s get back to Pete.
Pete
Roll the clip.
I want to focus on an exchange at about the three minute mark. As a bit of context, Buttigieg is openly gay. He is married to his husband, Chasten Buttigieg. They have two young children they adopted in 2021.
Colbert: “Mike Johnson is Speaker of the House. His record on LGBTQ issues is…what’s the word…awful. So, how do you work with a guy who argued that same-sex relations are ‘the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic’?”
Buttigieg: “Look. I’ll work with anybody who can help us get good transportation available to the American people, but I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just have him over, because our little house isn’t that far from the Capitol, and if you could see what it’s like when I come home from work, and Chasten’s bringing the kids home from daycare or vice versa, and one of us is getting the mac and cheese ready, and the other one’s microwaving those little freezer meatballs that are a great cheat code if you’ve got toddlers and you’ve gotta feed them quickly, and they won’t take their shoes off, and one of them needs a diaper changed…Everything about that is chaos, but nothing about that is dark. The love of God is in that household.”
I don’t know exactly what Colbert wanted for a response. I was in high school during the initial golden years of The Colbert Report, which began airing on Comedy Central in 2005. I loved Colbert’s alter ego, a caricature of right-leaning pundits like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Geraldo Rivera, both before he left the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and after he was given his own time slot. Colbert did nearly 1,500 episodes of The Colbert Report before he left to succeed David Letterman on CBS in 2015.
As host of The Late Show, Colbert isn’t playing a character. He’s himself: intelligent, maybe nerdy, Catholic, and liberal. Over the years, he’s conducted some genuinely insightful, moving interviews of the kind of depth you’re not going to get on other late night talk shows.
But there is no question that Colbert uses his show as a platform for his political views—he is a partisan, and he isn’t pretending not to be. I’d be surprised if The Late Show had much of a consistent conservative audience left—if you’re looking to seriously engage with conservative ideas, you’ll need to turn elsewhere.
Whether or not you like Buttigieg or agree with his views, it is difficult to deny that he is highly intelligent, remarkably well-spoken, and a skillful debater. He appears on Fox News perhaps more than any other prominent Democrat. When asked why last week on The Daily, the flagship podcast of The New York Times, he responded that doing so gives him an opportunity to bring the Democratic message to people that would otherwise never hear it. I wish more people took that approach. I want to see JD Vance and Ted Cruz pop up on MSNBC; I want to see Hannity interview Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It wouldn’t just be entertaining, although it would probably be that—it would maybe give us a shot of breaking through the walls a little bit.
Back to Buttigieg’s answer. Ignore, for a moment, your feelings about same-sex marriage—no matter what they are. In that context, in front of that audience, a personal attack against Speaker Johnson would have been very well-received. Buttigieg could have leaned into every stereotype in the book about religious conservatives—enjoying with Colbert the additional credibility provided by the fact they are both observant Christians. Colbert had spent the previous week absolutely hammering on Johnson in ways that, to put it one way, would probably not be that well-received by Mike Johnson. Colbert likely wanted a juicy quote to present to Buttigieg, and Johnson had considerately put one in print at some point.
But Buttigieg chose a different path. What our public officials do matters—it matters a lot. But what they say also matters, and what he said was good. He addressed the job first, then turned to his family—to his personal experience—and indicated an openness—hopefully sincere—to having Johnson over.
As silly as it might seem to focus on a short clip from a talk show, I think that Buttigieg’s answer is important. Any step away from personal attacks and toward a kinder politics, toward a politics that seeks conversion, not entrenchment, is welcome.
In Closing
I am, fundamentally, an optimist. I see people on both sides of the political aisle as operating largely in good faith. The left and right have—and should have—many genuine points of disagreement, but I think much of the anger, much of the distrust, is driven not by disagreement but by a mutual lack of understanding. That is a problem that can be fixed.
Do I think it will be in the short term?
Well, maybe not.
But nonetheless—onward.
Random Fact
Only fifteen Olympians ever have won at least eight gold medals.
Ten of them have won exactly eight.
Four, nine.
And one, twenty-three.
Random Recommendation
Get really into as many Olympic sports as possible. There is almost zero chance I will watch competitive surfing, badminton, dressage, and so many other sports again before the next Summer Olympics in 2028, but for now, they’re all appointment viewing. My absolute favorite might be listening to Rowdy Gaines lose his mind doing color commentary for the swimming events.
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