Hi. I’m the blogger/artist formerly known as Pachacutec. If you are old enough to remember me as a lefty blogger, you’ve been on this internet thing too long. But I digress.
My friend Ian saw me tweet something, and he asked me if I wanted to do a piece about it. Sure, why not? But I’m going to adopt a prose style that is quick and to the point, with a bit of punch, as an homage to my longtime friend Ian.
I tweeted in response to Congressman Patrick Murphy as he endorsed Peter Buttigieg for Congress. I’m sorry did I say Congress? That’s what mayors usually do, but this guy is running for president. Alrighty then.
Hi. I’m gay. Pete’s an empty centrist suit.
He’s the kind of gay guy who enjoys the drag show but thinks femmy guys are embarrassing. And he doesn’t even see lesbians unless one reminds him in a meeting that’s he’s droning on, interrupting women, and ignoring people of color.
— Pachacutec (@Pachacutec_) July 29, 2019
Let’s start with Patrick Murphy. My other longtime friend (and gay hero in his own right), Howie Klein, once described Murphy as:
“the perfect Chuck Schumer recruit– a slimy Schumercrat as corrupt as they come. Yesterday we looked at how he’s been selling his vote for campaign cash in regard to EB-5 visas, something I thought only real low-life Republicans did. Oh… that’s right; Murphy is a lifelong low-life Republican and just switched his party registration to get into Congress (where he votes with the GOP anyway).”
From that perspective, the endorsement of Mayor Pete makes perfect sense. But Mayor Pete is getting a fair amount of recognition for being a gay candidate. People who know me know me know that I’m a big old homo. And now with my tiara firmly in place, I’m here to call out Mayor Pete.
Okay, I don’t actually wear a tiara. I’m actually very much like Pete in my gay origins, in that I am a light-skinned person, presumed to be white (though I’m half Latino) with a good education, cis gendered, and a beneficiary of all the presumptions of competence and intelligence that accrue to light-skinned, well-educated men who are not effeminate in their conduct or manner.
Like Mayor Pete, I came out later in life, in my young 30s. That was a pretty traumatic time for me, actually. I made a fair mess of my life, and we won’t get into all that. But as Ian’s readers know, it’s what you do with your suffering that makes or breaks you. If you dive into it and learn from it, with the right support and process, you can turn it into your superpower.
Or you can become a preening, pompous, head-up-his-ass climber who cashes the cultural, social and political checks earned for work done by all the very homos, queers, transgender men and women, and people of color that you personally avoid engaging at all costs.
Everyone in the gay community knows these people. These are the white boys who stand and model, painfully preppy, in bars filled with other white boys, with a few token “ethnics” like black, Asian, or Latino men sprinkled in to provide a little variety, a little sexy “grit” and fetish fodder. Their Grindr profiles say things like “No offense, but I prefer white guys,” or “no fats or fems.”
These are cis gay white boys who might stay for the drag show and enjoy the bawdy jokes, but who feel painfully uncomfortable around effeminate men. As in my tweet, they don’t even see women, non-binary gender rebels, or black folk. Mayor Pete’s relationships with black folk in South Bend are a joke. Gay guys like Mayor Pete never go into a bar if the person of color ratio gets too high–say, higher than 15 percent, unless, for example, they really have a thing for Latin guys and it’s salsa night at the club. Some of these guys really fetishize some groups, be they Asians, black men, or Latinos. It gets very creepy.
I don’t want to belabor the point. This guy has no claim to stand for gay politics when he is precisely the kind of guy who wouldn’t have been caught dead anywhere near the Stonewall Inn, and lacks the self-awareness to know it or understand why. I personally know the type, because, in the beginning of my coming out journey, I had to overcome the legacy of cultural biases, blind spots, and presumptions of privilege (I know Ian hates that word, sorry) that would have made me into one of those guys.
For some people, the experience of coming out, and the experience of being marginalized or oppressed in some fashion, leads to expanded empathy and curiosity for others who are downtrodden or outcast. That’s clearly not Mayor Pete. Pete fundamentally believes in his inherent superiority, and subsequently wants to have it both ways: He wants people to overlook his gayness because he’s not that gay, and then he wants credit for being some kind of LGBTQ pioneer. But whether you look at his policies, his politics, or his presence in a room with real people, he is what he is: A conservative, wannabe frat boy who happens to be gay. No wonder Patrick Murphy loves this guy.
Hard pass. If you want more specifically on Pete from the great Howie Klein, I’ve got you covered.
Coda:
Very cool pic.twitter.com/EIKS8kj0fi
— Carlo (@yesthatCarlo) July 30, 2019
450.org
Yep, Pete’s gay like Obama’s black and yet black folks overwhelmingly voted for Obama even though he wasn’t, and isn’t, REALLY black except in face only.
I agree with what Ian said on Twitter. All this identification nonsense is going to be just that considering what we’re facing in regard to climate change and, truthfully, what we’re already experiencing in regard to it.
Just like honey badger, the rising heat index doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s identity. It’s an equal opportunity dehydrator & kidney destroyer.
Bill Hicks
I’m a middle aged white guy, and I couldn’t possibly care less whether a candidate is gay, even if they are flamboyantly so. I only care about their record and what they are likely to do if elected to higher office. If this arsehole were 40 years older and straight, he’d be Joe Biden, and if I want a racist, misogynist, neoliberal Pentagon whore as president, I’ll stick with Trump.
DMC
The DNC are throwing everything at the wall in an effort to stave off Bernie(or the other lefties for that matter) getting the nomination. Wiser heads than mine have concluded the Dem party leadership would rather lose to Truump than win with Bernie. Which makes sense when you consider the donor base.
UserFriendly
I’m gay too, and 100% agree. If you didn’t catch it, Dale Peck wrote something similar for the new republic that was live for at least an hour or so before it got taken down. Here is a screen cap. https://imgur.com/IpcN1Cw
Literally the last thing I need is for Pete to do for gay people what Obama did for black people.
atcooper
The Peck piece is amazing and I’m glad to see the mention. Here’s the whole article:
https://archive.is/bPNOu
someofparts
Thanks to folks here for saving archived copies of Dale Peck’s post. I just did a search on it and it is nowhere to be found. Given all the discussion about it, how annoying that our media managers won’t even leave a copy up somewhere so a person can read it for themselves.
someofparts
The assimilationist vs. radical distinction reminds me of a version of the same conflict that happened to feminists. The emergence of transgender issues functioned to sideline radical feminists. (I can’t think of any reason it should have, but it did.) With radfems silenced, feminist assimilationists became dominant. The distinction between radfems and female assimilationists are the difference between socialists and neoliberals. I also get the impression that the same process has played out in the black community.
It is disheartening, but so instructive, to live long enough to see what the culture at large does, decades later, with important historical movements that one understands from personal experience. In History and Class Consciousness, György Lukács noted that the dominant culture will always appropriate and domesticate challenges to its hegemony. That book was published in 1923, so I guess people have been analyzing the process of cultural appropriation for a long time.
I do get the sense that the thinking of various radicals converges toward socialism. I guess it’s just tricky if it is even possible, to keep rediscovering important understanding when radicals keep getting purged and history keeps getting rewritten.
Pachacutec
The problem with the piece in TNR was it turned around and tried to weaponize the same kinds of coded, latent misogyny and anti-fem bigotry against Pete that simultaneously form a part of the indictment of Pete and his politics, just from within a certain kind of dishy banter common among some gay men. It was a critique, rightly criticized, that ate its own tail and impeached itself.
I am very clearly not doing that here.
Hugh
For me, Buttigieg illustrates the fallacy of the generational argument he promotes. He is a conservative Establishment Democrat. So what if he is 40 years younger than Sanders. Sanders’ ideas are younger than his.
I think we spend way too much time on personality and way too little on policy. If we have the policies, then the only question is will candidate X fight for them. For me Medicare-for-All is a good litmus test. As far as I can tell, Sanders comes closest to the Jayapal bill, which like the Conyers bill before is considered the gold standard. Every other candidate is either talking out of both sides of their mouth on it or overtly against it. So so far, I would support Sanders. I am seriously conflicted about Warren, and pretty much everyone else is a non-starter.
Kevin Hefty
the Patrick Murphy who endorsed Pete today was the former Pennsylvania congressman not the Florida one.
bruce wilder
I am very clearly not doing that here.
Not that clear to me.
You had this lovely paragraph:
Eric Anderson
Damn, UserFriendly.
Can you send me your bookmarks list?
Mallam
Pete is a McKinsey Consultant pol who always dreams of potentially being president. He just adjusts his resume for this purpose. I do have some gay friends who like what he’s doing just by being on the stage and I don’t want to downplay their exuberance and lived experience. I think it still matters that he’s out and on the stage. I don’t see the overall appeal, however. But, I will say in Pete’s favor that he’s one of the only candidates to say we need systematic reform to our government from the Supreme Court to the filibuster.
After tonight’s debate, it’s clear that Warren is the best communicator and knows how to rip out the heart of Wall Street. Sanders is my own lodestar, but I think Warren brings the coalition together.
atcooper
‘latent misogyny and anti-fem bigotry’
I’m unconvinced the anecdote that acts as the main thread in Peck’s piece undermines the argument, but rather reinforces it in an extremely self aware way. I’m willing to concede his style rubs cancelling culture the wrong way, and I wish many of those folks would learn to read more closely.
And on a related note, I tried explaining co-option, a point from someofparts, to some young folks, and did an extremely bad job of it. I feel much better about it now. I’d severely underestimated the experience it takes to understand how ‘isms’ are so quickly subverted by the marketplace.
Eric Anderson
Hugh:
People that don’t understand policy focus on personality.
Two types of thinking in this world. Rational & heuristic (everyone is some mixture of both). But the personality focusers are generally unaware of the difference and actively avoid the rational because it’s really hard to do. When forced, they can employ it — but usually poorly b/c it takes practice.
Just ask the average person walking down the street the definition of deduction, induction, or syllogism and watch them go blank.
But, Dunning-Kruger reigns so you’ll never convince them it’s true.
Herman
People need to recognize that many Democrats are simply not very left-wing, or at least not socialist or even social democratic in ideology. It is not some DNC plot to sink Sanders, it is just that the Democratic base is not radical in the way many on the socialist left want it to be. I know a few gay guys who would be Republicans if the GOP wasn’t so implacably conservative on social and cultural issues. The same could be said for many women and many people of color who see the Republicans as anti-woman and racist and therefore vote for the Democrats but who are otherwise fairly moderate or even conservative on other issues.
Identity politics produces some weird and sometimes terrible results and those comparing Buttigieg to Obama make a good point. But at the same time I understand why people might want somebody like them in office. When you are part of a group that has been despised by the dominant majority culture it can feel good to see one of your own make it to the heights of power. JFK did it for the Catholics, Obama did it for African-Americans and now maybe Peter Buttigieg will do it for gay people. All three represent safe, clean-cut members of the establishment because that was what it took to make them palatable for the wider electorate.
I am not saying that people shouldn’t criticize Buttigieg or Obama or JFK but it is important to recognize why people vote based on identity and that it doesn’t mean that people are dumb. Most people are not well informed and do not put a lot of time into thinking about policy so they vote based on identity and image and other factors that are not directly related to policy. It happens on the right as well as the left. Additionally, many people are simply not very radical and so Buttigieg and Obama types are more to their liking anyway.
Pachacutec
Bruce Wilder: me calling Pete out on his unexamined racism is nothing like the TNR piece calling him “Mary Pete” as a slander and shaming him by characterizing him as a femmy bottom.
One is a legit critique of his blind spots and associating him with a well known type of white racist gay man and the other is weaponizing latent misogyny within the gay male community to express hate for culturally defined femininity and submissive sexuality.
JimF
As noted above, the Patrick Murphy who endorsed Buttigieg is the guy from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not the one from Pseudo County, Florida. Can we fix this? There\’s no reason to demean this guy\’s reputation with somebody else\’s slime.
someofparts
“But, Dunning-Kruger reigns so you’ll never convince them it’s true.”
The weather is always pleasant in the Matrix baby.
someofparts
“People need to recognize that many Democrats are simply not very left-wing, or at least not socialist or even social democratic in ideology. It is not some DNC plot to sink Sanders, it is just that the Democratic base is not radical in the way many on the socialist left want it to be. I know a few gay guys who would be Republicans if the GOP wasn’t so implacably conservative on social and cultural issues. The same could be said for many women and many people of color who see the Republicans as anti-woman and racist and therefore vote for the Democrats but who are otherwise fairly moderate or even conservative on other issues.”
Sounds like people in desperate need of a multi-party system. Imagine how much more intelligible and functional things might be if we had something closer to the Canadian system.
450.org
Stoller retweeted the loathsome Shaun King as follows.
It’s also true that Tulsi is an AIPAC shill as are Pelosi & Schumer & Biden & Harris and so on and so on and so on and so on and she’s a member of the CFR as was Epstein and countless other notable scumbag politicians.
Tulsi is not the answer, as if anyone on these stages truly is, and I’ve crossed her off my list. Needless to say, it’s a very short list. In fact, it’s so short it’s a blank sheet of paper waiting to be filled.
450.org
It’s well beyond needing that, not to mention but I will, multi-party systems like Canada & the UK have their own set of problems as we all know and it’s getting worse by the day or worse by the minute & second even.
What we need, what everyone needs both in America and in Canada and the UK and elsewhere, is to get money out of politics. Politicians and elections should not be bought and yet they are. The Supreme Court Justices, in a fair & just society, should have been executed for the decision they rendered in the Citizens United case. In the least, it underscores the fact that Supreme Court Justices should not have lifetime terms just as Congress shouldn’t have lifetime terms.
The number one issue, job one, is to get money out of politics and that starts with a reversal of the precedent set by the Citizens United case via legislation making it illegal to buy politicians and elections. If the Supreme Court blocks said legislation, then violent revolution will be the only card left and it’s the card they dealt. It will be by their own hand that their fate is sealed.
Ché Pasa
I said it when he first emerged as a contender, and I still think it’s true: Mayor Pete is very likable, especially to a certain subset of well- off, educated and aware (if not necessarily “woke”)white people to whom he radiates comfort. Obama was skilled in much the same way, but he had crossover appeal that Pete apparently doesn’t have.
Mayor Pete’s gayness is subsidiary to his very conventional (white male) upper middle class identity. Speaking in the right class-coded way, dressing in the correct class-coded fashion*, working hard to understand and relate to others, seeming to be on top of the issues, and presenting as both forceful and “concerned” add up to a tightly wrapped package of… usefulness.
He is his parents’ son — both were professors at Notre Dame — and it shows in too many ways to count.
The fact that he is a military veteran (Naval intelligence) as well simply gilds the lily, so to speak.
Does any of this make him “presidential”? As a contrast to the current one, damn right it does. But in the vast, eternal scheme? No. He could easily be tapped as an assistant under secretary of something or other, and he probably will be if there is a Democratic president in 2021.
But otherwise? Enh. Probably have to stay in South Bend unless he’s tapped for a DNC position.
*I noted early on that his shirtsleeve fashion choice seemed to be a calculated dig at an Ohio congressman and fellow modest-sized politician, former NCAA wrestling champion Jim Jordan.
Whereas Jordan is endlessly in-your-face, combative and insulting, Mayor Pete is anything but. Note which one is running for president as a peacemaker. Note whose shirtsleeved fury serves on behalf of the Trump White House and not the people of Ohio. We could draw many parallels and contrasts between the two of them, and it is something Mayor Pete appears to be very conscious of.
450.org
I love Colbert. I think he’s hilarious in his satirizing & skewering of not just Trump, but the entire panoply of politicians. That being said, Colbert must operate within the confines of his network and his network is clearly biased. In his most recent hilarious monologues related to the most recent democratic debates, Colbert has left Kamala Harris untouched and unscathed, thus telegraphing that she is the establishment’s pick. Biden is the foil. He’s a strategic, whether he’s witting to it or not, political piñata that will take all the heat and criticism until such time when Harris, much later in the game, takes the lead in the polls and avoids all the heat, taken by Uncle Joe, in the process.
Not ironically but instead tellingly, Colbert’s first guest last night was Rahm Emanuel. Go figure! Who would have thought? Me, that’s who. That should give you all the insight you need into who are the puppet masters pulling the strings at the establishment networks and they’re working both sides of the faux aisle, meaning Fox as much as CNN & MSNBC.
bruce wilder
associating him with a well known type of white racist gay man is not legitimate, and certainly not on the paucity of evidence offered
stereotyping and ranting against the stereotype is not “critique” — it is just reproducing that which you so righteously claim to oppose
peck, whatever else one might say, both owned his attitude and studied his text*
that said, peck’s views are his own and not mine — i am honestly not sure how i feel about the long personal anecdote or the use of “Mary Pete” but my politics are not about the correct form of slanderous insult
* meaning that he paid explicit attention to particulars of Buttigieg’s biography and self-presentation, and explained his own reaction by reference to his interpretative inferences from those particulars
(note: i am not going to respond further — i cannot imagine it will be productive)
450.org
You’re right about that. It’s irrelevant when you consider Pete has no chance and his running is a sideshow distraction. The democrats get to say, “look, see how diverse we are.”
Mike Barry
Lotta love for Tulsi on that Stoller thread, 450. Maybe they’re prosemitic over there.
Phil Perspective
But, I will say in Pete’s favor that he’s one of the only candidates to say we need systematic reform to our government from the Supreme Court to the filibuster.
I think both Warren and Sanders understand this, even if they don’t want to touch it right now. Part of the reason, I believe, they don’t want to touch it is in case Yertle the Turtle is still Majority Leader come 2021.
Phil Perspective
Herman:
People might not be left-wing but they sure love their Social Security/Medicare, among other things.
bruce wilder
Herman: “People need to recognize that many Democrats are simply not very left-wing, or at least not socialist or even social democratic in ideology. It is not some DNC plot to sink Sanders, it is just that the Democratic base is not radical in the way many on the socialist left want it to be.”
Lot of people do not vote at all and a large part of the Democratic electorate votes reluctantly, with low expectations of getting any benefit, because of who and what the DNC puts on the ballot. So, of course it is a DNC plot, always, in part. Do not kid yourself.
Most people are just not very political; the foundations of their thinking on politics are typically laid in about an hour and a half during their twenties when politics grabs their attention for a brief moment and, most shift only slowly thereafter, baring really dramatic national or personal epiphanies.
A left-wing politics — a politics that represents the masses against the classes, the workers against the bosses — requires a lot of sustained social organization to educate people into even partial immunity to reactionary sloganeering. People en masse have to be led into thinking thru an issue and get used to acting together on it, even if it is only to show up in person at a meeting twice a month. Sanders, give credit, sees the necessity even if he has not especially good so far at leading the revolution he thinks the rest of us should be organizing for.
But almost any kind of reform program — even not very radical in theory — would have broad electoral appeal if credible and if well enough organized to make space to be heard out.
Watching the Dem candidates propose a zombie public option as a gambit to stop M4all does not make think the root problem is an electoral base that is not natively radical sitting in front of the teevee.
I think the concentration of income and wealth creates a politics that makes it very hard to reform the concentration of income and wealth at the top. The rich do almost all the political organizing and putting forth “viable” candidates and even not viable ones.
StewartM
I guess my initial “feel” to this article, and certainly reinforced by the accolades to Peck’s article, was a backlash to their central points driven by the “Mary Pete”-style personal attacks. In that way, I agree with Bruce Wilder.
Pete B. is a social climber; true, and just reading between the lines of his history he’s full of ambition. But he’s not “privileged”; “privileged” people who are the ones who get into elite schools because their parents are rich and well-connected despite them being dumber than bricks (Hi Trump! Hi Duyba!). Ironically, having a closer friend who arose from a similar background, navigated through the higher education system, and graduated from Harvard and who shows a similar drive made me all the more likely to dislike the characterizations put forth….this guy got to where he was because he worked his butt off, not because of “privilege”; he was hitting the books when his classmates were hitting the booze. (I have told many that he’s functionally the smartest person I’ve ever met, as in “you put this mouse in the maze and he always finds the cheese”). And, to top it off, not only is he gay, but also gay and *non-white*. Since he lives now in a big East Coast city, maybe he shows up for the Pride Week celebrations; but I doubt it.
Also–I think you are forgetting that maybe it was the very “white boys” who very likely did a lot of the legwork for all those court decisions which help strike down both the sodomy laws and also the state laws against marriage discrimination. In my region of Appalachia I doubt they’d ever have been repealed by legislative act or by popular referendum. Marches down the streets of a large gay-friendly town like San Fran by the flamboyantly dressed does very little help here. There are significant divides among gay men; between the ‘gay rights’ types versus the ‘gay liberationists’, as well now among racial, ethnic, and income lines. That’s rather sad, because at time point gay men broke such barriers in their relationships that were unheard of in straight relationships (and probably still break them more) but with overall social acceptance there seems to be a decline amongst gays on what ‘real gay people’ do.
That all being said, I agree it’s likely that Pete is an empty centrist suit, who–as Ian says–people can pour their hopes into and make themselves believe he is really for them. My Harvard friend I alluded to above tends to agree, and says about Pete (and Beto) “can’t they just run for Congress or Senate first?” (he’s wholeheartedly for Sanders, but dislikes Warren rather intensely, because he feels she *did* use her Native American DNA (but not cultural heritage) as a career boost. My friend himself turned down careers in law despite having a law degree and having passed the bar exam (“because most lawyers are in the business of making rich people even richer”) or finance (he said “I’d have to shower every time I came home”) to take a lot less pay in education.
Our first gay president may not be Pete, but based on past evidence it will be someone more like Pete, or even someone more right wing. Just like Obama was no Dr. Martin Luther King, let alone a Malcolm X, and you see what one of the first woman leaders was like (Thatcher). So this shouldn’t be surprising.
450.org
I wonder who will be the first opioid addict president since this “first” thing is so appealing? Maybe they’ll kill two birds, make that three birds or four or five if you prefer, with one stone and there’ll be one candidate who will be the first female, gay, opioid addict president. How cool would that be?
As the tundra burns and the clathrates release and the glaciers dissolve and the aquifers run dry, there can be so many firsts as all traditional political caution is thrown to the wind. A little late, sure, but better late than never.
Ukraine just got a comedian as its president so maybe we can throw that into the mix of firsts as well. Trump’s a clown for sure, but he’s no comedian or at least not an intentional comedian whereas he’s serendipitously a tragically humorous riot.
Ellen for president. We just have to figure a way to get her hooked on opioids and we complete the square.
brucew07@gmail.com
Wasn’t our first gay President, James Buchanan? Preceded by our first gay Vice-President, Buchanan’s long-time companion, William Rufus King.
(Of course, they were not photographed in flagrante delicto on the Mall at noon, so, of course, “different customs and conventions” blah, blah, blah)
KT Chong
Booty-juggs.
KT Chong
Relevant:
The Hill’s Krystal Ball: This item on Mayor Pete’s resume is disqualifying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G11eWbKNoBk
Fuest
You didn’t call him Mary Pete but you did say
“Everyone in the gay community knows these people. These are the white boys who stand and model, painfully preppy, in bars filled with other white boys, with a few token “ethnics” like black men, Asians or Latino men sprinkled in to provide a little variety, a little sexy “grit” and fetish fodder. Their Grindr profiles say things like “No offense, but I prefer white guys,” or “no fats or fems.””
Which is a less extreme version of the same thing, and from my own experience in the gay community not even close to how I would stereotype mayor Pete. I could give myopinion on him or Pahoutec gay types for that matter. But who cares? Isn’t it enough to say he’s a useless neoliberal and the centrists will use his minority status the way they used Obummers (who most blacks I know still think was great, and they don’t want to hear any criticism Obamacare because they got theirs out of it and fixing it to help others isn’t worth the risk). Anyway, we gays aren’t cohesive enough and there aren’t enough of us to matter, so I doubt that trick will work again.
450.org
KT Chong, thanks for that link. McKinsey is CIA for all intents and purposes, so yeah, BootyJudge is disqualified no doubt about it. I didn’t know he worked for McKinsey.
I had the misfortune of having to work alongside some McKinsey consultants during my prior life as a corporate stooge and they are exactly as Krystal describes them. One of them was this woman, a Davidson College graduate at the time. She was sweet in her own right, but incredibly brainwashed and naive.
Amee Patel
I initiated a discussion with these up-and-comers about America’s history of hegemony especially as it related to North America, Latin American and South America. What was done to Allende in Chile, for example, and America’s support of Pinochet. America’s support of Batista in Cuba and the many assassination attempts by the CIA on Fidel Castro. We moved from all of that to the Middle East and when it was all said and done, she had the temerity to say, “yeah, that was despicable & wrong but that’s all in the past and America isn’t like that anymore and it doesn’t do things like that anymore.” When I informed her she was sadly mistaken and provided examples, she condescendingly laughed at me along with her two male colleagues.