Pete Buttigieg s high class problems – The Spectator World
Plenty of banana republics, kleptocracies and dictatorships work by the brown envelope and the mutual back-scratch. The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, aspires to a new low in public ethics when it imports this kind of practice into domestic politics. We don t need a lecture from Michael Sandel to know that meritocracy has badly misfired. A new ruling class is hardening its defenses and pulling up the ladders in plains sight.
Twenty years ago, American politicians sold globalization to their voters by promising that Brazil would become like us. Today, we are becoming like Brazil: a low-trust society with apparently insurmountable differences of class and race, in which the rich live in private spaces defended by a militarized police force, and politics has deteriorated into a theatrical.
I’m still hoping for more like Argentina than Brazil, but I take the point. Neither in truth seems very attractive.