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

by Pete Buttigieg

Being in your thirties today means you have lived more or less half-and-half with Democratic and Republican presidencies, known twenty years of peace, and fifteen of war.

But the basic premise still holds: that candidates for office can easily develop “an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power,”

I wrote that Sanders’s “real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system.”

The Quiet American

It was immediately clear that the project of my generation had just been reassigned in some way. The infinite peace of post–Cold War promise was in fact a mirage, and we would be dealing with matters we thought our grandparents’ generation had settled, having to do with war, terror, and freedom.

Perhaps inevitably, that sense didn’t last for long. We might have lost our innocence and learned something about the world, but we did not suddenly become wise. Americans were facing the first case in a generation in which a chain of events that started overseas shook and changed all of our lives. It’s impossible to expect that we would respond by leaping to a new moral plane, or that we would immediately grasp the complexity of the global forces that had just come to harm us. Nor were we remotely prepared for the idea of modern asymmetric warfare.

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.

We might have had, in those years, a more serious conversation about what each of us owes to the country in a time of conflict. We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country. But after those first few seemingly enlightened days, the country’s leadership showed little interest in helping us confront the choices we would have to make between safety and freedom.

After years of painting, with broad verbal brushes, the kind of beautiful images that earn good grades in certain American college literature courses, 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.

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.

while sensing that the time had come to learn what wasn’t on the page and get an education in the real world, if there was such a thing.

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story.

Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way.

Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of t...

Up to that moment, at virtually every juncture in my life there was a powerful brand name associated with whatever I was doing. Harvard. Rhodes. McKinsey. United States Navy. When you are connected to an institution with that strong a name, people use it as a shortcut for understanding who you are. And if you’re not careful, you use it as a shortcut, too, taking on the shape of that name yourself over time.

there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

It was a gradual conversion that began, like most important growth, in a moment of pain:

Small talk felt unnatural in the midst of grief—but isn’t that what we need, sometimes, when grieving? Just someone to talk to, about nothing in particular. Nothing profound. Just being there.

David Kennedy’s book Don’t Shoot,

As a manager, a mayor must focus on what can be measured and proven, difficult decisions, and the use of new and old tools to solve important problems. But as a leader, sometimes the most important thing is simply to show up, or to gather the right people together, to send a certain kind of message.

that leaders make themselves vulnerable.

PTSD had been treated partly by having subjects train their minds to reframe the events that had harmed them from an outside perspective.

Those at the university can come to see community members not as the subjects of a service project but as genuine neighbors who can draw benefit from their work, while helping to educate them in the realities of the problems they are trying to solve. The residents can offer the students a far richer education than they can get on campus alone, and in the process the students form a relationship with our community not just as a place they passed through but as part of what shaped them, no less than the university itself.

this is a style of development we have only begun to understand—one in which talent is reinforced through a community that knows how to connect talent with purpose.

“Subconscious Operations.” The question John brings up is how to get processes and procedures onto paper—outside of the supervisors’ heads, mapping steps that they don’t even know they’re taking.

They have found, for example, that by the time the downtown grounds maintenance supervisor gives the daily list of jobs to his staff, he has gone through sixteen previous conscious and unconscious steps.

know the difference between reporting an issue and resolving it.

responsiveness and efficiency are not the same thing; in fact, they can sometimes pull against each other.

be honest at the beginning about whether you are willing to follow the data where it leads.

The right thing to do here, it seems, is to tolerate an inefficiency for now, even though the data tells us how it could be eliminated.

No math could solve this problem or present an obvious right answer; we just had to make a call, and then be willing to explain it to those affected.

The question of suffering brings me to one last concern around the use of data-driven techniques to bring about better government: the importance of exceptions, otherwise known as mercy.

Efficiency, almost by definition, has to do with following rules and patterns; if there is an inefficiency within a rule, it can be ironed out by making a sub-rule. But sometimes our moral intuition just tells us that making an exception is the right thing to do, even if we can’t explain or defend the precedent.

But without exceptions to rules, the world would be a colder and probably worse place to live.

There is great power in human pattern recognition, which actually resembles big data analytics in its most important characteristic: the ability to know things without knowing exactly how we know them.

More often than we realize, humans rely heavily on knowing things that we can sense, but not explain.

computers and their programs can only imperfectly replicate the human function we call judgment.

In a sense, it was also proof of the great faith and optimism shown by our cautious Founders in placing this much authority in the hands of one democratically elected human being. Imagine the implications, I thought as I eyed the SUVs, the security men, the big graytail military jet in the distance, if all this were to fall into the hands of someone unfit to wield it.

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

I would spend the rest of my deployment wondering exactly what it means for one of today’s wars to be truly over, and how anyone would be able to tell.

Quickly, I learned how to drive at war. But what I saw through the windshield didn’t look like a war.

If you manage to get killed in a war that’s “over,” what does that make you?

As with a human life, the span of a war is there in parentheses right after its name. The implication is that wars, like people, go from nonexistence to being and then back to nonexistence, all at a precise time and date. We grow up assuming wars have beginnings and endings. But that date is only the object of consensus after the fact, if at all.

“How do you ask a man,” he had asked the senators then, “to be the last man to die for a mistake?” I did not believe the Afghanistan War was a mistake. But as I weighed my place in a war most people at home seemed to think was already ending, I couldn’t stop wondering, how do you ask a person to be the last to die for anything?

Visiting the forest of white markers in the Afghanistan section at Arlington is not just for honoring the individuals lost there; it is a place to seek some reason why they should be under the headstones while the rest of us walk around on the grass.

But my real purpose visiting his grave site and the others at Arlington is to confront the dictatorship of chance, which compounds the cruelty of loss by allocating it for no clear reason at all.

To die taking a hill is one thing, but a soldier hit by an IED is basically the victim of an assassination. Like an assassin, the bomber is out to destroy a symbol, who happens to be a human being, without really knowing ...

These days, as a society, we have learned how to separate how we feel about a policy from how we treat the men and women sent overseas to serve. That wasn’t true for Vietnam veterans.