Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

South Bend! No inland city on the American continent has attained greater renown or displayed more fully those sterling virtues of modern manhood and human progress, than this beautiful city located on the banks of the magnificent and picturesque St. Joseph River.

But when bread could be truly fresh it could be a treat any day, so much that some days Bob’s father literally couldn’t wait to get the bread home from the Hungarian bakery. He would bring a quarter stick of butter from home with him when he went to pick up the boys from school downtown. If they saw the butter in the front seat, they knew they were going to the bakery, just in time for the hot bread to come out of the oven at three o’clock. “We’d go over there and get a loaf of it, and it wasn’t sliced, we’d get to the car and tear it, and he had his pocketknife and he’d chop up butter and put it on if you wanted it.”

it must go back in some way to his boyhood devotion to the great English soccer club Manchester United. After all, that loyalty meant he was

the tension involved in the fact that my father was a man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s.

An obscure Vermont congressman, Bernie Sanders, had been reelected for years as a socialist—in a (then) generally Republican state. At a time when vagueness and opportunism in politics seemed to be the order of the day, here was an elected official who succeeded by being totally transparent and relentless about his values. “Socialist” was the dirtiest word in politics, yet he won because people saw that he came by his values honestly. Regardless of whether you agreed politically, it certainly seemed like a profile in courage to me.

volunteered for Al Gore’s campaign that fall,

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in Mr. Wylie’s sixth-grade English class at Stanley Clark School.

Until then, I had considered the Puritan years to be the most boring period in all of American history,

His seminal book The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the sense of promise in what we could become.

generation after Winthrop, in 1670, Samuel Danforth gave a classic jeremiad excoriating his followers and society for forgetting their purpose in coming to the New World: Now let us sadly consider whether our ancient and primitive affections to the Lord Jesus, his glorious Gospel, his pure and Spiritual Worship and the Order of his House, remain, abide and continue firm, constant, entire and inviolate. Our Saviour’s reiteration of this Question, What went ye out into the Wilderness to see? is no idle repetition, but a sad conviction of our dullness and backwardness to this great duty, and a clear demonstration of the weight and necessity thereof.

Within days President Bush was visiting a mosque, eloquently distinguishing between Islamist terrorism and Islamic people. “Islam is peace,” he said, in a speech largely forgotten today. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” Just weeks earlier, the nation had been obsessed with shark attacks and a philandering congressman; now we seemed to have matured overnight.

The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority.

We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.

murder and destruction, though it killed far fewer people than ordinary gun violence, car accidents, or even cigarettes, had the power to loosen our commitment to freedom at home and shatter our restraints on involvement abroad.

At the same time, little was said about personal sacrifice at home for the purpose of winning a national conflict.

Formal education continued that fall: a Rhodes Scholarship took me to Oxford for two years in large halls and small professors’ rooms in the ancient colleges learning philosophy, politics, and economics. Back to the U.S. in 2007, I landed a job in Chicago at McKinsey & Company, and my classroom was everywhere—a conference room, a serene corporate office, the break room of a retail store, a safe house in Iraq, or an airplane seat—any place that could accommodate me and my laptop. The capstone on my decade of education was in 2010, when I left McKinsey for a tough but priceless year-long political crash course in which I challenged the state treasurer of Indiana, and was overwhelmingly defeated in my first experience on the ballot.

EDUCATION CAN COME BY DRUDGERY or by adventure,

For example, in a philosophical debate over the nature of free will, we were required to confront just how difficult it is to define what “free will” even means. We considered one definition: that a freely chosen act is one taken by someone who could have done otherwise. It felt intuitively like a good way of describing free will: if I did something, and could have done something else, then clearly I made this choice freely. But then, another philosopher pointed out, what if you chose to stay in a room all day because you wanted to, but without your knowing it the door was locked from the outside? It turns out you could not have done otherwise, but we also would believe this choice was a free one, so clearly a more precise definition had to be found . . . and the refinements and arguments would go from here.

I now had to make sure that every sentence and idea was precise, clearly defined, and airtight, in order to survive the skepticism of a British critic. In the process, I learned more rigorous ways to explain the moral intuitions I already had about politics and society.

He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—

compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.

Indeed, for some prior generations the rate of loss in war may have been higher for the wealthy than for the working class, because service was so close to the heart of elite culture.

In 1956, a majority of the graduating classes of Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton joined the military.

The proportion of members of Congress who were veterans had fallen from 70 percent in 1969 to 25 in 2004, and fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress had a child who was serving.

TV was playing some action movie, which captivated most of the recruits around me.

As with any other job, there is no better way to learn political candidacy than by doing

The call time was the hardest. It meant reaching out to everyone you had ever known to ask if they would send you money. You have two minutes’ small talk, a quick windup about the state of the race, and the inevitable hard ask: “Sooo, I was hoping I could count on you for a two-hundred-fifty-dollar contribution.” Eventually I came to prefer calling strangers to calling acquaintances, since they took less time to realize why you were calling and were more comfortable giving a yes or a no. I spent hours on this daily, and often wonder if most Americans realize this is how many elected officials spend most of their time. It’s not unusual for a member of Congress to spend twenty hours a week doing this, and you have to wonder whether, like spending too much time typing or sunbathing, it does something unhealthy to you over the long run. In the car or at a desk in headquarters, I would go through page after page of calls that our finance director had prepared for me, based on lists of people who had a history of giving to Democrats.

The Internet erupted with angry responses, largely in the form of zero-star Yelp reviews.

to do so is to assume that voting is about ideology and policy analysis, rather than identity and environment.

“AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,” said my friend and colleague Scott Ford, quoting G. K. Chesterton as he raised a glass of scotch.

For me, that meant sudden urgency around a question that had lingered unanswered for all of adulthood: how to reconcile my professional life with the fact that I am gay.

In my view, the biggest thing to turn the tide on LGBT issues wasn’t theological or political evolution. It was the discovery that many people whom we already know turn out to be part of this category. The biggest obstacle wasn’t religion, or hatred. It was the simple fact that so many people believed, wrongly, that they didn’t even know anyone who was gay. At my high school in the late 1990s, I didn’t know of a single gay student.

Somewhere during that transition phase, in the months before I took office, the internal politics of the department had boiled over. The chief, believing that some other officers were gunning for his job, allegedly confronted them with tape recordings that could embarrass them if disclosed. He had access to these tapes because some phone lines in the department were connected to recording equipment used for interviews and investigations, and the officers had been recorded on that equipment without their knowledge. As court filings would later document, the chief threatened to take action against at least one officer he had come to consider disloyal. Perhaps the chief didn’t realize that I was already leaning toward reappointing him; or perhaps it just seemed like an insurance policy. Enter the Federal Wiretap Act—a set of very strict federal laws about recording other people without their knowledge. In fact, making such recordings or disclosing their content can be a felony, punishable by prison time as well as fines. There are state laws, too, against recording a conversation without the knowledge of either party, absent a warrant or other legal clearance. The recorded officers knew it, and complained to federal authorities, who took the issue seriously. So that’s how it came to be that, a few weeks into the job of mayor, I learned that my newly reappointed police chief was being investigated by the FBI. Eventually a message came through, thinly veiled but quite clear, fr...

Analytical by nature, I surprised even myself with the emotional tenor of my words to the crowd that night.

Crossing back toward downtown along the railing of the Colfax Avenue Bridge, I felt the slight brushing of his hand coming closer to mine, and I took hold of it. Nothing in my life, from shaking hands with a president to experiencing my first rocket attack, matched the thrill of holding Chasten’s hand for the first time. I was electrified. We got back to the car just as the post-game fireworks began, and as the explosions and lit colors unfolded over us, he went in for a kiss. We began to see each other every weekend, and it only took a few weeks for me to acknowledge the obvious: I was in love.

CHASTEN’S PARENTS ARE THE KIND of people who sometimes pay for the customer behind them at the drive-thru window at McDonald’s, just to put a little good out into the world,