This piece by @MilesKlee succinctly cuts to the bone of why Mayor Pete is a nightmare for many young people. As someone who wrote a book about today's young voters and the forces that shaped our politics, I'd like to offer some additional words on this. 1/
melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wh…
melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wh…
Back in 2013, I began taking dirt cheap bus trips across the U.S. to interview young adults about how they were coping in a post-recession economy. It began as a curiosity (inspired by my own shitty recession job market experience.) Slowly, the conversations became political. 2/
The more young people I spoke with, the more politics took over the conversations. We talked about why so many youth voters don't vote. The short answer: many young folks don't trust typical politicians. And given what young people have put up with, can you really blame them? 3/
Today's youth voters grew up against a backdrop of abject wealth inequality, forever wars, climate change, and a slow creep of Hustle Culture that puts WORK above all else. The vast majority of politicians (including Obama) upheld that system. Hence youth voters' antipathy... 4/
As I transcribed all these interviews and began turning them into a book, I wondered what the first superstar Millennial politicians would look like. Would they be liberators who would reform the system? Or well-groomed managers whose task would be to keep that system running? 5/
AOC, in my opinion, is the first major Millennial politician. She's the manifestation of Millennial' frustration with the system as it exists today. She's a reformer. But there was always going to be pushback to a reform-minded leader, and that's where Pete Buttigieg comes in. 6/
In every group of disadvantaged people, there's a spoiler who sympathizes more with the powerful, either for personal advancement or pathological reasons. They join forces with the powerful and they betray their struggling peers. This is basically what Pete Buttigieg is doing. 7/
Youth voters are not a monolith. Some of us are leftists. Some are liberals. Some are fascism-curious. But most young people I've spoken with agree that things need to change in some shape or form, and not in the incremental (inconsequential) way that technocrats would prefer. 8/
When I published my book about youth voters, I originally tried to hold back from soapboxing too much. I simply presented what I heard from the folks I spoke with. Today, with Buttigieg pursuing the presidency, I've got to say it. This guy would be a disaster for young people. 9/
Interviewing hundreds of young voters about their lives changed my life. Beforehand, I was a leftist at heart but *very* impressionable to the neoliberal consensus of what's possible and pragmatic. Meeting so many young people who had lost hope made me a full-fledged leftist. 10/
Pete Buttigieg has been around the block, and the world, in a way that most can only dream of. But this exposure to the world did not make Pete more empathetic to the disadvantaged. It made him more conservative and self-interested. That doesn't just appall me. It scares me. 11/
Young people have the potential to transform America by waging a progressive reform movement, fueled by the deterioration of our lives and futures. Mayor Pete is undermining the sparks of that movement while framing himself as part of a new generation of leadership. Fuck him. /12
