Pete Buttigieg at Lehigh University: hope, accountability, and a warning for Democrats

“We have made 27 constitutional amendments. Don’t tell me we can’t do more.”

The statement marked a rousing finish to Pete Buttigieg’s Kenner Lecture at Lehigh University last night. Throughout the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation’s hour-long stay, he emphasized the importance of an open mind about the country’s future.

“We must choose between accepting the chaos of today or endorsing the status quo of yesterday,” Buttigieg said.

In his opening lecture, he referenced conversations he’d had with classmates at college about issues like gun rights. He said they often told him he was arguing a slippery slope, and that “sooner rather than later, you’re going to end up with federal troops on roads.”

Amid laughs from the crowd, Buttigieg said, “I guess the joke’s on both of us.”

That wasn’t the only time Buttigieg indirectly referenced the current administration.

“We didn’t say, ‘make South Bend great again,'” he said. “We recruited opposite sides of political lines. It didn’t matter whose fault it was; we could change it.”

When he began his role as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2012, the city was considered a Rust Belt relic. Following the collapse of automobile manufacturer Studebaker in 1966, South Bend lost more than half of its jobs, and by 2009, 10.8% of its population had left in just the past decade.

Buttigieg, then 29 and coming off three years at the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Company, promised to revitalize his home city. Once a city that sported “hulking collapses of factory buildings,” South Bend saw unemployment fall from 13 percent in 2010 to under 3.2 percent in 2019 at the end of Buttigieg’s second term,

The mayor urged the sold-out audience to consider a future when President Trump wasn’t in office.

“Then what?” he said. “I’m very worried that not enough of us are worried about that.”

Buttigieg expressed frustration throughout the night with America’s political infrastructure. A candidate for the Democratic primary in 2020, Buttigieg received the most delegates in that election’s Iowa Democratic caucuses, before dropping out of the race a few months later.

However, his success pushed the small-town mayor onto the national stage. He eventually accepted President Biden’s nomination as Secretary of Transportation.

“The federal government needs to become more and less powerful,” he said. “Things like protecting people’s rights – your cable company can make you vote. We also need less capacity for surveillance and intimidation. How is ICE’s budget bigger than that of the FBI?”

He said it was unacceptable for the government to lie to the people and that the federal government was ignoring its own laws.

“It’s unacceptable for the government to lie to the people,” he said. “The harsh truth is that federal law tends to dominate. The problem is that the federal government is ignoring the law.”

It was the role, Buttigieg said, of the American people to hold those in government accountable.

“Laws aren’t self-enforcing,” he said. “Accountability has to come from people; that infidelity of the truth will not be tolerated.”

A few minutes after he’d finished the question-and-answer session with Lehigh Sociology Professor Ziad Munson, Buttigieg went on CNN to tell anchor Kaitlan Collins he had “little confidence that this administration can plan anything at all” in reference to the administration’s recent attacks on Iran.

He said Trump’s mission abroad seemed unclear, when domestic issues like the rise of gas prices and the federal deficit, as well as the administration’s flip-flop on its coverage of the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, deserve to be addressed.

In his lecture, he’d centered the idea of the “common good.”

“Civility doesn’t mean agreeing with something you don’t,” he said. “It means regard for one another as human beings.”

Last night, he said that larger issues often come back to household economics.

“Whether you can live a life with meaning depends on mundane questions like whether you can get a clean glass of water,” he said. “You should be able to find food that is affordable, and come home at the end of the day and afford your mortgage.”

Buttigieg is a man of many identities: gay, Christian, a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and a naval officer.

Given the diversity of his background as well as his courage not to compromise on his sexuality despite the potential political fallout — he was notably snubbed by Kamala Harris to be her running mate in 2024, and his leave of absence while Secretary to raise his newborn twins received ad hominem vitriol online — Buttigieg has always been a pragmatic, even centrist figure in politics.

Although considered by many a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections, he didn’t outline potential policies or even hint at what his future role in government might look like — the closest he came was mentioning his recent appearance at an Indiana rally opposing redistricting and gerrymandering.

His presence in the Lehigh Valley, however, spoke for itself.

On March 2, the day before the lecture, he campaigned at Weyerbacher Brewing Company in Easton for Pennsylvania congressional candidate Bob Brooks. He later met with Vice Mayor Frank Pintabone at Legends Cigar Bar, the downtown lounge owned by Larry Holmes Jr., son of the legendary local boxer.

“We need to fix Congress fast,” he said. “If that sounds high and sky, so be it.”

He placed pressure on the American people. He said that monuments were not erected for people who accepted the current state of things.

“Civil rights activists did not have any precious delusion facing down violence,” he said. “Those nonviolent marches took physical courage, and what they did turned the hearts and minds of people.”

He said America was built on resistance, dating back to when “[it] actually had a king.”

At one point, he asked the audience to raise their hands if they were under 30, and then keep them up if the majority of their knowledge of current events came from watching TV. Only one did.

“Now we don’t have a TV show, we have a feed,” Buttigieg said, after he’d referenced the late 20th-century CBS broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite. “Every time you scroll your thumb, you are voting on policy. [And] we always want to go with sources that confirm our priors.”

He said that social media sites like Twitter (now known as X) had made everybody a reporter, decentralizing event coverage away from big news channels but also eroding journalistic standards.

“We have more information, but we’ve actually never had less information. Everybody can be a reporter, but we don’t have an editor,” he said. “We had means before, and we need to establish means for when something is fact or fiction.”

He argued that old-fashioned agents of change, such as voting or contacting members of Congress, could still make a difference.

“If voting didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying to take it away,” he said.

Buttigieg rejected the notion that the government can’t serve the American people, but said it was important not to attempt to return to a prior era and to acknowledge the current moment.

“Hope is the consequence of action,” he said. “Our times are more precedented than we think, [but] this is a moment that requires more than this.”

When he was a high school senior, Buttigieg won a John F. Kennedy essay competition for detailing his admiration for Bernie Sanders, whom he would later oust in the 2020 Iowa Caucuses.

In the essay, he said that Sanders’ courage to identify as a Socialist and take hard stances on gun control and same-sex marriages was made only more impressive by the Vermont Congressman’s willingness to compromise for the best interests of America’s working class.

“Candidates have discovered that it is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters,” a young Buttigieg wrote. “Sanders’ positions on many difficult issues are commendable, but his real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system.”

Buttigieg seems hesitant to echo that same outspokenness — the kind that drew many to Sanders and has more recently fueled the rapid rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The former mayor is poised to be a calming voice amidst the current chaos. But whether that’s as President or as a father remains yet to be seen.

“Politicians have to be in rooms, negotiating deals,” he said. “The job of activists is to be pressing society to the windows. I get pissed off, but the more pissed off I am, the lower and slower my voice will be.”