What’s The T: Moderatism isn’t historic, even if he’s gay

Pete Buttigieg experienced a historic rise throughout his 2020 presidential campaign. Starting out as a small-town mayor who no one knew anything about when he first announced his candidacy in January 2019, Buttigieg was one of the five or six main competitors vying for the title of “Most Powerful Man of the Free World.” This included a historic “win” at the Iowa caucuses where he took home the most delegates but lost the popular vote to Senator Bernie Sanders.

However, despite this historic campaign, there was one narrative that strongly followed Mayor Pete. To put it quite simply, he didn’t have the support of marginalized communities. It is well known that people of color and people in the LGBTQ community did not get behind Pete for president, and by looking into the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for even a second, it is not hard to see why.

Buttigieg’s record before 2019 highlights the blind spots that he and his campaign had when it comes to race, race issues and race relations. 

On top of his 2011 comments about how young black people are failing due to the lack of role models and his various “All Lives Matter” comments from a couple of years ago, Buttigieg’s campaign continued to reflect his ignorance in the power of his words by tokenizing black supporters or making them up completely. 

This was not a desirable quality in a potential president. At best, these incidents showed a continued pattern of waving off issues felt by people of color and an effort to ignore the impacts of systemic racism in the United States.

One of the talking points that Buttigieg’s supporters liked to bring up was how historic his campaign was: “A gay man was a serious contender for president of the United States! A gay man won the most delegates in the Iowa caucus!” and so on, but in actuality, what was historical about this campaign? 

What was historical about a white man in a striped button-down ignoring the problems of marginalized groups while he promised everyone else that nothing in America would change? 

That happens every four years, and being the most conservative, sanitized, Christian, veteran, monolithic member of the Mattachine Society did not suddenly make his plans or policies new. That was the true heart of the Mayor Pete campaign and the people that supported it. 

People who supported Buttigieg could rest safely knowing that if he won, nothing would fundamentally change in America and they could go back to ignoring issues like racism, transphobia and xenophobia just like they did before Trump was elected.

Mayor Pete’s campaign ran on the desire inside of every white moderate over 35 in America – to live in a “colorblind” society that still prosecutes black men disproportionately compared to white men, that still lets the rich receive better healthcare than the poor, that still overfunds our military more than every other nation in the world. 

With Buttigieg they could have had all that while still getting to feel “woke” as they voted for him. Look, I am not going to call Peter Paul Buttigieg a racist; I do not know this man – he could be walking down the street and I wouldn’t know a thing about him. But if it walks like a racist, talks like a racist and has a past of arresting innocent black and brown men like a racist.

“What’s the T” is an op-ed column by Serena Payne, a senior psychology major and trans woman.