Pete Buttigieg has earned a reputation as a rare Democrat who can go on Fox News and hold his own, but he said there's no secret to his success there.
The transportation secretary sat down with Rolling Stone for a wide-ranging exit interview on his time in President Joe Biden's administration, and he was asked to comment on his technique in communicating to a conservative TV audience.
"I don’t know if there’s any magic to it," Buttigieg said. "A lot of it’s just simply going there. If there is a technique, what I do is I think about people in my life, or people in the community where I came from, who I might jostle with or spar with or disagree with, but I also actually like. And I imagine that’s the viewer, and I imagine I’m talking to them."
"Because another thing — and I say this without meaning in the least bit to propose that the answer is ideological centrism — it results not only in a lot of ugliness, but something that’s even more dangerous, which is people checking out," he added.
That dynamic reminded Buttigieg of his time as a student in Tunisia under the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
"I mean, framed pictures of the dictator in your dorm, and on the street, and everywhere," Buttigieg said. "Everything seemed to be named after the 7th of November. The main square, the avenue. I kept asking, 'What is this?' And they’re like, 'Ah, something historical.' Because that was the day in 1987 when the leader took power. But what you felt wasn’t this overbearing — well, it was overbearing. A lot of what made that authoritarianism work was that a lot of people were just checked out. Or at least they created the impression of being checked out."
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"The newspaper didn’t have an opinion page," he added, "and if you talked to people, even young people, students, they just didn’t want to engage in it. And that’s even more dangerous, and I think that happens when politics is exhausting. And politics is less exhausting if we imagine it as a dialogue."
Buttigieg butted heads publicly with tech billionaire Elon Musk, and he was asked to comment on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's influence on President-elect Donald Trump.
"It’s not unusual for the richest person in a country to be very powerful in that country," Buttigieg said. "It’s a little more unusual for them to have a government or quasi-government role, but not unheard of. What I think hasn’t happened in a while is the concentration of so much wealth and so much power in the hands of so few people.
"And we’ve talked about that generically as a problem in our politics and economy for the last 20, 30, 40 years. But in the last three, four, five years, we’ve seen whole new forms of it that I think will require us to change and think differently about how we manage the access that some people, who haven’t been elected to anything, get to power over everybody’s life. And I think those are the questions that are at stake when you have very powerful, wealthy people given sweeping, undefined roles in or around government."
