SKILL INDIA

In December 2020 Biden nominated Buttigieg to lead the Department of Transportation (DOT). The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Buttigieg on February 2, 2021, and he was sworn in the following day. Not only was he the first openly gay person to hold a U.S. cabinet post, he also was the youngest person to serve as secretary of transportation. Among his top priorities were plans to rebuild roads, bridges, railways, and other transportation infrastructure across the country. In addition, he sought projects that would increase racial equity. Later in 2021 he was a vocal supporter of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed Congress in November. The legislation provided billions of dollars to DOT. The Curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines,

down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring—though not in the original Norwegian (slacker).

Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.

Because Buttigieg, at 41, is an old millennial; because as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he got a first in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), the trademark degree for Labour-party elites of the Tony Blair era; because he worked optimizing grocery-store pricing at McKinsey; because he joined the Navy in hopes of promoting democracy in Afghanistan; because he got

gay-married to his partner Chasten in 2018; and because, as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he agitated to bring hipster entrepreneurism and “high-tech investment” to his rust-belt hometown, I had to ask him about neoliberalism, the happy idea that consumer markets and liberal democracy will always expand, and will always expand together. I was also fascinated by the way that Buttigieg, who has long described himself as obsessed with technology and data, has responded to the gendering of tech, and especially green tech, by fearsome culture warriors, including Marjorie Taylor Greene.Buttigieg, whose father was a renowned Marxist scholar, was himself a devotee of Senator Bernie Sanders as a young man. He now recognizes that the persistence of far-right ideology, with its masculinist and antidemocratic preoccupations, is part of the reason that neoliberalism has come undone. Not everyone, it seems, even wants a rising standard of living if it means they have to accept the greater enfranchisement of undesirables, including, of course, women, poor people, Black people, and the usual demons in the sights of the world’s Ted Cruzes and Tucker Carlsons.

He also talked about his faith. Lefties these days are said to be less religious than right-wing evangelicals, but between Buttigieg, whose Episcopalianism grounds his decisionmaking, and his boss, President Joe Biden, whose robust Catholicism drives his sincere effort to revive America’s soul, perhaps a religious left is rising again.Pete Buttigieg, the only child of Jennifer Anne (Montgomery) and Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II, was born on January 19, 1982, in South Bend, Indiana. His mother uses the name Anne Montgomery. His parents met and married while employed as faculty at New Mexico State University.

Last name is pronounced “boot-edge-edge.” It is the designation for “poultry” in Maltese, a Semitic language.

He was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana from January 1, 2012 until January 1, 2020. Announced his candidacy for the 2020 US presidential election in January 2019. He is the first openly gay Democratic presidential candidate.

Came out as gay in an essay published in the South Bend Tribune in June 2015. Served seven months in Afghanistan in the Navy Reserves while also serving as mayor of South Bend.Met his eventual husband Chasten on the dating app Hinge.

Son of Jennifer Ann (Montgomery), a professor, and Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II, a literary scholar, professor, and translator. His father was an emigrant from Hamrun, Malta. His mother, whose family is from Indiana and Oklahoma, is of English, Scottish, German, and more distant Swiss-German, Welsh, and Cornish, descent.

Spent several months working on Senator John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, where he specialized in policy.

His father passed away eight days after his 37th birthday.

In November 2016, President Barack Obama included him on a short list of gifted, rising Democrats.

Taught himself Norwegian in order to read Erlend Loe’s “Naïve. Super” in its original language. Later started periodically attending a Norwegian church in Chicago to keep up.