We spoke with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg earlier today.
The cabinet secretary and former presidential candidate has been one of the most effective communicators in the Democratic Party and has brought his breadth of experience to the job of fixing America’s infrastructure, a project the Biden administration has been committed to on a scale not seen since the New Deal era.
Buttigieg has distinguished himself as not only a political figure but also a serious thinker on a huge range of issues. He also has rare skills in conveying ideas — especially across the great American partisan divide. Nobody can sell a bridge — and we mean that in the best possible way — quite like Secretary Pete.
We asked Buttigieg to weigh in on the swirling debate about President Biden’s future, and to share his own experience of working with the president. And we spoke about his notion of infrastructure as a defense against extremism and authoritarianism: “Toxic politics arise in conditions of policy failure, in conditions of shared stress, and in conditions of inequality. And we're addressing all of those,” he said.
We also got into why he goes on Fox News and the changing nature of fatherhood and what it means to be a man.
(Note: Secretary Buttigieg spoke with The Ink in his official capacity and could not comment directly on the 2024 presidential campaign.)
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I don't want to ask you a political question. I want to ask you a kind of factual question because there's so much heat and passion and opinion, and everybody's got a take, and people have sometimes different takes on different days.
But I want to ask you, just as someone who has worked with President Biden, there are claims from some people that he's completely fine and absolutely nothing wrong. And there are claims from other people who've worked with him that there's a real decline. And even if it's survivable, it's something real that is observable with the eyes.
As someone who's just actually worked with him, have you seen anything that validates the concerns that lots of people have, or do the people who have those concerns just have no idea what they're talking about?
I mean, look, I'm not going to dismiss anybody. I will say a lot of the concerns you hear relate to things like campaigning and politics that obviously I can't get into here.
But what I'll say is, in terms of the administration, the presidency has been working very well in Joe Biden's hands for the Department of Transportation and for America's transportation. When I need something from the West Wing, I can go to the West Wing and get it. As you can imagine, it's not every day that I'm tapping on the president's shoulder over a transportation issue.
But there are times — most recently, the Baltimore bridge collapse — where I did need his attention, and I had it, and it was engaged, and he was on it for everything that we needed and was directing us as an administration to make sure that we delivered. So that's the experience that I've had.
And you know I think so much in evaluating anyone's leadership, certainly in evaluating an administration, is what's getting done? What's getting done by the president, by the president's appointees, by the administration the president has built? And I'm really proud of what we've gotten done, even knowing that so much of what we set into motion, so much of what he's set into motion is very much a work in progress.
I think setting aside a lot of the punditry and people speculating, the more grocery-store concerns that are out there are that unlike a lot of technical issues in government, this question of what happens to people when they get a little older is something millions of people have personal experience of? Millions of people.
Most people either themselves, certainly, or with aging parents, have visceral first-hand experience of very specific things that they may think they're seeing or may not be seeing. And so they're not riffing entirely the way they might be on some arcane issue of policy. They're connecting what's on a television screen to what happened with Nana or what happened with Dad last year.
And I know you don't dismiss what voters think and feel, even voters very different from your preferences. Why do you think so many people are seeing something and connecting it with their own experiences in such large numbers when, as you describe it, at the actual core, there's no issue that correlates with what they're seeing?
Well, look, I think everybody has a relationship with the president. Not just somebody like me who works with him, but any American has a relationship with the president. And a lot of that's kind of public and official, but on some level, it's personal too. And the president is a human being. And one thing about human beings is every year they get a year older. And we also have personal relationships with people in our lives who are aging. I belong to that sandwich generation, right?
I've got, you know, little kids and know what it's like to have parents who are growing older too. And I think you know that's kind of the millennial experience right now. So again, I get it. I try to be as kind of logical as I can about what anybody's personal qualities mean for the job. And again, I'm not here to weigh in on the job of being a candidate or anything on the campaign side of things.
But what I'll say is I have a job to do. The president has a job to do. And every time I've needed the president or the presidency to lead or act or direct in order for me to succeed at my job and our department to succeed at its job, that's there.
But yeah, I mean, all of us watch the people we care about, whether it's people we know well, people in our families, or people that we know as movie stars or athletes or as the leader of the country.
And part of what we watch is we watch them develop and we watch them age.
Last thing I want to ask you on this and then we'll move on. There's this quote, I think, today or yesterday from Congressman Adam Smith. And it was about the problem of politeness in organizations or in movements where no one wants to hurt someone, and how you can have very dangerous outcomes as a result of a cultural politeness, the idea that we were going to slow-walk into fascism because we don't want to hurt somebody that we respect’s feelings.
And a lot of the people I talk to, you know not in a recorded context like this, I think, do feel themselves to be part of something where they have to split private feelings and observations around this debate with what feels appropriate to say about someone they respect, about someone whose work and administration they admire.
And yet, as that quote suggests, the costs of people not saying what they feel can be very severe in moments like this. So setting aside just President Biden, how do you think people should think about that kind of dilemma of maybe holding truths in their heart, holding observations in their heart that feel very, very inconvenient given larger facts in the country?
That's something I think about a lot because, you know, I'm in a role where telling the truth and being candid is incredibly important. And whenever I'm asked my opinion, especially when I'm asked my opinion in a strategic conversation about an important administration decision, I know that a big part of my job is to think clearly about forming a good opinion and then to present that honestly, whether it's welcome or not.
And I've had lots of challenging conversations in this administration because my opinion wasn't the same as another agency, or maybe where the White House would have been going if I hadn't weighed in, or where the White House decided to go anyway. And then that's how an administration works. And I'm a Midwesterner, right? I probably put a premium on politeness. But you know honesty is the most important thing. Now, let me also say, a lot of times in doing work, I've discovered the importance of tact, right?
So not out of squeamishness, but in order to do your job. So it's one thing if we're in a conversation about strategy and I need my advisors to be brutally honest with me about the pros and cons of our course of action, or the White House needs me to be brutally honest with them about what I think is going to happen. But there are a lot of times where we're in a negotiation with maybe one of my counterparts from another country or maybe a member of Congress or a group of senators.
And as you can imagine, in any of those contexts, not only custom and politeness, but dare I say ego can even play a role, right? And you actually have to think about whether you just want to blurt out everything that's on your mind or whether you want to try to work with somebody to help them see your point of view and come into it open to the fact that your point of view, however strongly felt, could be wrong. And there's a humility in that too.
So you know all of that's to say, I think as citizens and certainly as policymakers, there's an obligation to dissent when you think things are headed in a direction that's not right. There's an obligation to give your honest view when you are asked for it. And then there's also just that very human responsibility to think about how we say the things we have to say.
And based on what you're seeing in these polls that are shifting in a negative direction, you don't feel personally you've seen anything that would trigger an obligation to dissent for you?
I'm going to take care again just because I'm sitting in this chair and I can't talk campaigns and elections here, right? But what I'll say is anytime I've been asked my opinion, whether it's in the political space or in the policy space, I give it. And I give it as openly and as honestly as I can, especially in internal conversations.
So I want to ask you about your job and infrastructure and all these things in the context of an administration that has been very focused on the kinds of things you focus on, which are physical, material things. I think this has been a more literally materialist, physically oriented administration than any in memory.
And I think the president seems to have a kind of metric of success that is really in the built, physical environment, whether it's industrial policy and what is made here versus somewhere else, what infrastructure we have versus don't have. And I'm curious about the notion of selling people on those kinds of accomplishments and having the political opposition not offer a different vision of accomplishments, but really stuff that’s much more in the emotional and psychological realm, fear and hatred of others.
What is it like to say Hey, I got a bridge," and be up against someone saying, "Those people are endangering your child”? Is it not difficult to sell worthy things like a bridge when the opposition is playing so effectively on that really deep human stuff? And how do you think about selling against that opposition?
It's a real challenge for us because you know the nature of infrastructure is actually, like most things, you just kind of need to work. The only time you usually get emotional about it is when it doesn't work, right? So I'm kind of the exception. I'll be very emotional about a bridge being built perfectly well and doing exactly what it should without incident, right? But that's because I work on it professionally and I'm in a building full of people who work on it professionally. But for the most part, the nature of good infrastructure is you don't have to think about it.
And then the question becomes, okay, in a space where policy is often animated by people claiming and earning credit for things that get people excited about or pissing people off about something you can make people mad about. How do you navigate that when you generally see how good infrastructure policy is in people not getting mad?
Nothing about a bridge goes straight to your fear centers of your brain, except, of course, in those awful moments like when we saw one destroyed. So look, I think there's a couple of different layers on how you deal with that. One is you plug away and you make sure that you do actually draw attention to it. So the algorithm, the Twitterverse, and the cable news cycle will generally not arrive at telling the story of a well-done project going exactly the way you hoped it would.
But there might just be enough attention if the president shows up or even if I show up. And I'm standing next to the governor saying, "Hey, look at this." I was just doing this in North Carolina last week with Governor Cooper with a project that was being announced and another project that was going into construction. One of them was a relatively modest thing that's going to create a multi-use trail. Another is a billion-dollar grant that's going to set up a railroad going from Raleigh to Richmond. And just reminding everybody like, "Hey, this didn't just happen. This didn't just randomly happen. This happened because President Biden led, because Governor Cooper led, because my department worked on this.” That's why this is happening.
But I actually think some of the rewards — and even in kind of a political sense of it — they don't accrue because people consciously say, "Oh, you did this good infrastructure thing. I'm going to give you credit for it." It happens in a more indirect, but I would argue, actually, more foundational way, which is the more you do that, over time, the more you wind up having a level of stability and trust where all of the kind of negativity and the kind of anger-rousing that plays on social mistrust is less likely to find purchase.
Now, I know that's a very long-term thing to talk about in a kind of 24/7 news cycle kind of world. But I do think that's part of what's at stake in what we're doing. The challenge, of course, is it takes a long time for that to mature.
You're saying that — if I get it right — that essentially making people's lives less stressful, less full of anxiety because they have easier commutes, because their car doesn't get damaged, because of things they may not have been aware are happening, but are happening, reducing the collective stress and anxiety, increasing the mental health and well-being of the country at large through infrastructure and other things, makes toxic politics less salable?
Yes, I think so. Absolutely. I think toxic politics arise in conditions of policy failure, in conditions of shared stress, and in conditions of inequality. And we're addressing all of those. Nothing's more stressful than a commute that goes poorly. We're working on that. But also, the inequality thing is very real. I think it's perverse how some of the people whose agendas are to make inequality worse have benefited from the kind of psychological stresses in the public psyche that I think are attributable to inequality. But that's where we're at. That's how this happens sometimes. And probably an undersold story of what we're doing with transportation is using it to bring access to people whose lack of access helps diminish social mobility.
And you know, also in a way that you don't have to go through all these kind of deep, complex layers of sociopolitical examination to look at. Just like something like making sure that folks in the building trades have really good jobs, right?
I mean, when I became mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and I ran my first campaign out of the basement of the Building Trades Hall, so I was very, very close to these guys. And unemployment was in the double digits. And it was actually worse at times if you were a union construction worker in northern Indiana where I live.
That wasn't that long ago. We're talking 12 years ago. And now, the only conversations we have when we're out with the building trades are, "What can we do to keep getting more workers ready for all this work?" So getting things like that done, I think, really matters, not just explicitly because somebody will say, "Oh, I have this job because Joe Biden signed this bill. Therefore, I love Joe Biden." But more generally because I think those toxic impulses are less likely to take root if you're not just sour about your country and your economy.
I love what you said because I think it actually fits with a broader doctrine of this administration in a time of rising authoritarian tendencies that it is not the one-to-one of, “I saw the name on the bridge.” It is that larger thing of reducing collective stress. But the question I have about it is the one you mentioned in passing, which is the timescale.
Does this theory of change work on a timescale where the opposition that you are often testifying in front of in Congress or dealing with in other ways is right now and quite effectively — with very powerful tools like Fox News and Steve Bannon's podcast and whatever else — inflaming people in an immediate way.
In other words, to shift it to a medical thing, it's sort of like switching people to a Whole Foods diet while someone else is offering them heroin. And while you are clearly right that the Whole Foods diet would make them feel better, etc., etc., over the long term, some number of people are going to do the heroin.
Yeah, but you still have to make sure people are healthy, right?
So it's like a leaky roof. The best time to do it was yesterday. The next best time to do it is today. So yeah, I don't think the kind of political economy of infrastructure development is going to single-handedly save us from this kind of toxicity. I do think we've got to be doing it, and we've got to be doing it now. And you know in the shorter term, there are ways to make sure that it gets some level of attention and that the people who make good choices get some amount of credit.
I mean, it's one reason why we have not hesitated to point to the people who I mean, here's a sign that there's something to it in the short term, right? The fact that a lot of people who voted no in Congress on funding these projects rush to the scene of an announcement when one of those projects gets funded, right? And some of them, frankly, are the ones who traffic in the sort of toxic short-term lizard brain sort of politics you're talking about. And they're still there.
So A, the fact that they're still there shows you that there's something to it. But B, the fact that they're there and we call them out when they're there is a way to remind people that these projects are happening in the first place. It's not just that I think it's appropriate to tweak hypocrisy, although I do. It's that when moments like that happen, that does, I think, stop and make people think. And you can see the difference between people who take a somewhat cynical approach and people who are trying to solve a problem.
And by the way, I don't mean that in partisan terms. One of the really compelling things about the Biden infrastructure package is it was built through a lot of bipartisan cooperation of the sort that they told us was dead on arrival when we got to Washington three-and-a-half years ago.
You are someone who comes from a state that's a red state, and your dad, I think, was a translator. You speak multiple languages. You've been a very good translator across the red and blue divide for a lot of people, explaining different sides of America to each other. And I want to ask you a very basic thing which troubles me in this moment, when we talk about toxic politics, that kind of lizard brain politics. You come from a place, a community with lots of decent people. And I think generally — I assume most people are decent people.
And yet we're in a moment in which a very, very, very large number of our fellow citizens — forget the elites on top — just very, very large numbers of soccer coaches and moms and dads and deacons and community leaders of all kinds, are attracted to authoritarianism, are attracted to a politics of hatred, are attracted to, you know as you deal with all the time, just like outright lies as a kind of structure of belief.
So at a very basic level, what do you think has happened to very, very large numbers of our fellow citizens that they have fallen in the thrall of these kinds of ideas and tendencies?
So my view of human nature has always been that the world isn't made up of a lot of good people and a lot of bad people, that we're all roughly equally susceptible to good and bad influences and doing good and bad things and making good and bad choices.
And what really matters most about leadership in my view, what really matters most about politics is that it can either call to what is best in us, what is most generous and forward-looking and decent and brave. Or it can call out what is worst in us, what is most backward-looking and zero-sum and harmful. And any of us, I think, is actually vulnerable based on our situation and our information diet and a whole bunch of other things to getting pulled in either direction.
And a lot actually just depends on who our leaders are and how they operate. You know I've been thinking a lot about how generally decent people can become part of what I consider to be policy projects or national projects that are indecent. I think all of us have looked the other way on various indecencies in some movement or cause or candidacy that we overall believe in.
And that's why we've got to go back and constantly revisit that. And we've got to recognize that different standards of decency can't obscure just some fundamental moral things that we’ve got to care about most of all. A few weeks ago, I was in Jackson, Mississippi. It was one of the most haunting visits I've ever had to a national monument.
Medgar Evers, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement, was assassinated in the early 1960s at his home. That home, which is kind of an ordinary middle-class home with this extraordinary heritage, is now part of the National Parks system. And because we were redoing Medgar Evers Boulevard, a road that bears his name near that neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, we also took the opportunity to visit that monument with his daughter, by the way, which was this incredibly moving experience.
The National Parks interpretive guide who was there began her commentary, kind of set the scene on this place as we're standing in the driveway, the very carport where he was cut down by saying that if you just looked at the standards of kind of who and what was good and decent at the time, you would look at Medgar Evers and you would look at the man who killed him and see that both of them belong to the so-called greatest generation, the generation that saved American democracy in World War II.
Both of them served. I think both of them were believed to have served honorably. Certainly, Medgar Evers, I didn't know this, but actually he participated in the Normandy invasion. Both of them were active in their church. Both of them were considered good family men. And yet, that didn't stop one of them from killing the other in cold blood.
And of course, the big problem, especially when we get into the darkest things that can happen in history, in society, and in politics, we need to think a lot about how otherwise decent people get pulled into not just indecent, but deadly projects. And I think you know when I think about the things that trouble me most about the administration that preceded the one that I serve in, more than transportation policy decisions I disagree with, more than judicial appointments that arrived at decisions that I disagree with. It is the return of political violence to America that is the most troubling.
I want to ask you about selling things. You are very gifted at selling things to the American public. You are, I think, gifted at selling things to the other side, your opposition. The things you're working on now, you've been gifted at that in campaigns as well.
And often, I think when I see a video of you talking about infrastructure on Fox News or whatever else, the comments are always very interesting. And without embarrassing, they have to do with, "Why can't many Democrats do this?"
Why is it so hard for Democrats to explain things in a certain language? I'm not asking you to put down anybody else, but can you talk a little bit about your philosophy of communication? You do seem to come at it just differently from lots of people in your world. You come from a different background in multiple ways than maybe lots of your colleagues. Again, not putting anybody else down, but what is your philosophy of communication when it comes to reaching other people, tapping into other people's moral frames, being able to be kind of hearable to people while also insisting on your truths? Tell me a little bit about your philosophy of communication.
Well, I think, in a way, it goes back to what we were saying earlier, that people can possess a certain decency even across incredibly strong, even ugly political divides.
And I think it starts with understanding the people you're engaging are human. It sounds like a super basic thing, but I think it's actually gotten harder in these times. It’s not basic in 2024. Yeah. I mean, we really forget the humanity of people who we're even people that I'm like, let's be clear, like very committed to stopping them from achieving certain what I think are harmful agendas. They're still people. Part of it probably is where I come from, right?
I was raised with more progressive values in a very conservative place. I was very different from a lot of the people around me. And I think when you're around when you stick out, when you're different, there's different ways you can approach that. One is to just conform. I couldn't do that. I couldn't just conform to values or styles that weren't me. Another is to kind of do the opposite, to just kind of rage against all the things that you don't align with.
But another is to figure out how you can engage people. Often, I think about, honestly, sometimes I even think about this with media folks on the right that I might be in an appearance with, like a somewhat hostile interviewer. And I just think about the guy at the end of the bar in South Bend, Indiana who I don't just know but like, who also has political views that I find horrifying. How would I talk to him? How did I talk to him? I mean, this is not a hypothetical. And it's different if you imagine liking and caring for the people you're talking to. It doesn't mean you're always going to get through to them, but it begins to give you the terms to meet people where they are without pretending to be like them more than you are.
And it turns out people also respect that. We all know from a mile away when someone is insincerely trying to clothe themselves in our values or our style in order to appeal to us, right? And young people in particular have a nose for that, but we all do. Sometimes you get more respect from somebody who you still haven't won over in terms of convincing them that they were wrong and you're right, but maybe moved them an inch because they saw why you believe what you believe. And if you just explain what you believe in terms that make sense to you and could make sense to them, they can see it. They can feel it. I think there's something really powerful in that.
But look, I also think that in policymaking, different people excel in different parts of the flying formation, right? Some people are effective because they're so good with language. Other people are effective because they have such command of the technical details. Other people are effective because they have that human touch and they can figure out how to get somebody to do something they didn't think was possible. All of us fit into this bigger picture.
So I'm really proud to be part of this team I'm on where I feel like each of us brings something great, but none of us has it all.
More specifically, why do you believe in going on Fox News? And why do you think it's a good use of your time? Do you get feedback that makes you think that it is going somewhere in people's heads, even though it is a lion's den?
I'm under no illusion that a Fox News host is ever going to say, "You know what, Secretary, now that you've explained it, I see the error of my ways and you were right all along." It's not like that. But I think, first of all, you know there's a lot of folks who tune in in good faith and may literally never hear our message crisply put unless somebody like me gets on there and delivers it.
I also think that you know for every person who chose to turn the news to that channel, there's a family member or two or three, maybe a spouse, maybe kids who didn't make that choice, but they're consuming that media as well. Also, the fact you know the way that everything we do and say on television now circulates online 10 times more than what anybody saw while it was being broadcast. Matters. And frankly, I hate to admit it, but often they are just better interviews because there's more tension on the string.
Sometimes I say something on one network and say pretty much the same thing on another network the same day, but it's having said it on Fox that gets more energy out of people because you can just feel that there was more opposing energy to whatever it was I had to say. It's just like a basic human thing, I think, that sets us up to pay more attention to certain kinds of conversations. But most of all, I go there because that's where a lot of people get their information. And those people are citizens too, and I want to try to get through to them.
And you know when I said back when I was running for president that you can't love your country and hate half the people in it, you know that was something I felt about the other side. But it wasn't only something I was saying as a message to the other side.
I want to ask you, in a very different vein, about fatherhood. You and I both have the pleasure of being fathers of young kids. Yours are a little younger than mine. I think right before I had kids or when we were pregnant, I think I met someone who was an art historian or very knowledgeable about art.
And they said something which really blew my mind. I can't fact-check if it's true, but they said that there's almost no paintings showing fathers holding a child until the 20th century, you know partly because it probably didn't happen as much as it does now. So if you go to these old museums, wherever you live, there aren't a lot of 16th-century paintings with dads with a kid on their lap, right?
So a two-part question. I'm curious how fatherhood you've had many experiences in your life. How fatherhood has changed you as an experience. And do you feel that you are, as I think so many men do right now, at the edge of some kind of figuring out something for which there aren't really well-worn tracks? There aren't really all the models that are available because it all just feels somewhat new.
You know, I hadn't thought about that. That's a really interesting fact. I have thought about, sometimes maybe just because I'm into history, I indulge in imagining what it would be like to be in a job like mine at a different kind of time and place in history. So whether it's like imagining what it would have been like to be the first Secretary of Transportation under L.B.J. or what would my equivalent be in the years of Henry VIII? I guess like a nobleman of medium importance at the King's Court or something. And like how would I have conducted myself then? And what would the pressures and forces be?
So much less pressure to manage aviation in those days.
But I bet there was a lot of tax revenue stuff that maybe wasn't so different, dealing with constituencies. I don't know. But one of the things you think about, of course, is the expectations then, I think, for those people as fathers were just different in a way that may have seemed convenient for their ability to do their job.
But I think it's also tragic when I think about how some of the sweetest moments and the best moments of being a parent have been immediately in between the moments that maybe weren't expected of fathers until recently, of just like you know feeding them and you know in between doing their diapers and just stuff that you just kind of was either outsourced by families with means or was just considered, "women's work." And you know there's a double dose of it in our household.
My husband and I joked at one point when there was a controversy about me taking some time for parental leave. Somebody online was saying, "You know Those first few weeks, you know the man doesn't really do very much anyway." And I'm just thinking, "Who do they think is feeding our kids?" You think we're just like leaving them with a can opener and telling them, "Eat"?
And so it is like the parenting is more hands-on, I hope, for lots of fathers in our generation and the generations to come. I think that's a wonderful, beautiful, challenging thing. I think if nothing else, it gives fathers more than a rhetorical appreciation for how physically hard and demanding it is to take care of parents in a way that like a lot of middle-class fathers, one or two generations ago, literally just didn't actually know.
So when they were going into legislative chambers or going into agency meetings, they were not bringing that.
Yeah. I'm sure they loved their wives and believed in the importance of motherhood. But there's a difference between if you're 50/50 on diaper duty or if you're admiring that your wife took care of all of that, right, however sincerely. And so you know my views on the importance of things like family leave for every American have definitely become more intense.
My sense of how some of the things we ask people to do, especially low-income working parents, really are bordering on impossible in terms of what we expect of them without some kind of support. And you know the other thing at the other end of the scale, from just how the world looks differently to you when you're tactically involved in all the just physical work of being a good parent, is the kind of cosmic change that happens when you personally know and deeply care about somebody who you hope and expect will be around in the 2100s, right?
Like I hope and expect that our twins, you know they'll be getting up there, but they'll be around for the 22nd century. I remember when my claim on being somebody who could say I have more at stake in the future than most came from me thinking of myself as young. And often I was the youngest in the room. I'm still the youngest in the room at a cabinet meeting, maybe. But now it's not about me at all.
It's about the fact that whatever I do manage to get done by the middle of this century — and I mean whatever our generation manages to get done by the middle of the century, societally, especially tackling things like climate and handling the rise of AI and all the other ferocious challenges that are on top of this country — is going to set up how the second half of the century, that I don't imagine that I'll see much of, but I know will be when they might live out their best days, how that's going to go.
I mean, as you know, for that same litany of issues you just went through, there is this phenomenon which you and I are obviously not part of, but people our age and younger are pulling back from having children, saying they don't want to have children in a world where A.I. is taking over everything, in a world where climate dooms everything. And there is this big movement. It's happening in European countries also.
And it's not something I ever considered or felt personally, but it's out there. And it seems like having a child in this moment is, in some ways, a vote of optimism that in spite of these things, there will be a world you'd want to bring life into. Can you talk about that, and then I'll let you go?
Can you talk about choosing to be a parent in a moment of so many crises, when we are talking about, "Could this be the last free and fair election? Is the planet going to be habitable in half a century?" Talk about the act of optimism of choosing to be a parent in such a world.
So you know as ferocious and perhaps deadly as these challenges are, I just don't think that they justify that kind of pessimism. Partly because of history. I mean, you know our climate has seen times when people died by their thousands in the toxic smoke of a London fog. And we found ways to make that better. Our democracy has seen times in which one-half of this country broke off and fought a war against the other half in order to be able to keep enslaving people. And we got out of that, maybe not perfect, but better.
And I just don't think given that we got through all of that, I don't think that pessimism is justified. But more than that, I don't think it's permissible in a way. And what I mean by that is that there's a kind of obligation that is laid at our feet. Anybody who is in a position of responsibility, whether it's the enormous privileged responsibility of having a high federal office or just the responsibility of being a citizen to build on what came before.
And so when I think about the fact that, for example, something as basic as a family like mine existing, right? Couldn't have happened 10 years ago, at least not in the state I grew up in. And it was unthinkable 50 years ago. And people marched and sometimes got their heads bashed in over that, and they won to say nothing of any of the other struggles for equality, injustice, or just improvement in the life of our country, who are we to say, "This is where the video game ends, and it's all going to get worse from here?" That is such a disservice to all of the people who did so much to make things now, even on these metrics we think about, like the quality of the environment, radically better than at other times in the life of our country or our world that they were.
Who are we to be the ones who say, "You know, this isn't going to work out.” How could we?
So that's what propels me as a parent and definitely as a policymaker.
I love that. Perfect place to end. Thank you so much, Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Thank you.
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