The Buttigieg backlash, just like this spring’s first flush of Buttigieg mania, has a dorm-room atmosphere about it; it is most intense within his own cohort of young, mostly white, college-educated liberals, who are torn between a mounting discomfort with their own privilege and an instinctive comfort with their own class. Buttigieg is his demographic’s most natural avatar in the 2020 race, and that is precisely his problem. To see Buttigieg on the stump, evoking the spirit of that moment, is to realize with a shock just how far away it feels now. In the intervening decade, his demographic has undergone a pair of profound shifts. The other is a radical leap in how the same cohort thinks about race, social justice and immigration.

Source: New York Times December 16, 2019 20:03 UTC