LATIMES.COM/OPINION TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2019A
OP-ED
‘T
he purpose ofthe presi-
dency is not the glorifica-
tion of the president,”
South Bend, Ind., Mayor
Pete Buttigieg recently
declared, “but the unification of the
American people.”
Treacle like this has been a mainstay
of presidential candidates for decades.
But is it true? Or even possible? And if
so, is it desirable?
The answer to all three questions is
no.
Buttigieg’s description of a presi-
dent’s job appears nowhere in the Con-
stitution. But more importantly, ideolog-
ical ambition and national unity cannot
be reconciled in the presidency.
Listen to the Democrats running for
president. They all say they want to unite
the country. But most of them also say
they want to implement sweeping fed-
eral initiatives and policies, many of
which are deeply divisive.
And it’s not just Democrats. George
W. Bush campaigned on being a “uniter
not a divider” but won reelection in no
small part by opposing same-sex mar-
riage. Upon reelection, Bush pushed for
privatizing Social Security. I supported
the policy but it was hardly a unifying
cause.
Barack Obama made his name on the
national stage while a mere state senator
with a brilliant speech at the 2004 Demo-
cratic convention. He proclaimed,
“There is not a liberal America and a
conservative America — there is the
United States of America. There is not a
black America and a white America and
Latino America and Asian America —
there’s the United States of America.”
In 2008, he won the presidency on a
vow to unify the country. Did he succeed?
If he had, we wouldn’t have seen the tea
parties or the election of Donald Trump.
Speaking of Trump, he too tried to
make the case for national unity. “It is
time to remember that old wisdom our
soldiers will never forget,” he proclaimed
in his inaugural address, “that whether
we are black or brown or white, we all
bleed the same red blood of patriots, we
all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and
we all salute the same great American
flag.”
But here’s the thing: Trump’s florid
nationalist touches seemed unifying — to
Americans sympathetic to his agenda.
But they horrified many Americans
opposed to it in equal measure.
That’s the rub. Democrats recognize
that the Republican understanding of
“national unity” means “winning on our
terms,” and vice versa for Democrats.
Right now, on the left and the right,
politicians, activists and intellectuals are
trying to marry sweeping policy propos-
als to what Hillary Clinton and her guru
at the time Michael Lerner called a “poli-
tics of meaning.”
On the right such efforts go by many
labels, from “nationalism” to
“post-liberalism” to the most recent
entry, Sen. Marco Rubio’s “common
good capitalism.”
On the left, which has been at this
game longer, the old standbys of “social
justice” and “socialism” are most fre-
quently used. But the Green New Deal is
certainly another, marrying both nostal-
gia for FDR with crusades against both
capitalism and climate change. Both
sides have, at various points, tried to
flesh out some version of “one nation
politics.”
But politics in a republic is almost
never about unity. Rather, politics is the
art of negotiating differences. Democ-
racy is about disagreement, not agree-
ment. When a politician says “the time
for debate is over” or “let’s put politics
aside,” they’re really saying “shut up” to
those who disagree.
Americans discard political disagree-
ment for the sake of unity only when
confronted with extra-political emergen-
cies. When the country is attacked or
when there’s a grave national disaster,
the nation rallies around a specific goal.
At all other times, a democratic nation is
in glorious disagreement about what the
government in Washington should do.
Factions argue for their desired policies
against other factions. The place where
most of this fighting is supposed to re-
solve itself is called “Congress.” Sure,
presidents can ask Congress for things.
But they don’t get it just because they’re
president. That’s the stuff of kings and
despots, not a nation of laws.
What are presidents supposed to do
amid all the bickering? The answer lies in
the job title: They’re supposed to preside
over it. The president doesn’t get his or
her way; the president gets to either sign
off on or veto whatever comes to his desk.
After that, the job is to faithfully execute
the law.
There’s an epidemic of angry confu-
sion on this point and it’s making our
politics uglier because presidents and
partisans try to mask ideological victory
in platitudes about political together-
ness. When “my” team’s in power, the
dissenters are enemies of national unity,
which is just a clunky way of saying “un-
patriotic.” This is why “dissent is the
highest form of patriotism” is an argu-
ment that only the losers of the most
recent election subscribe to, and why our
politics get uglier with every presidential
election.
@JonahDispatch
Presidents
shouldn’t
try to unify
Americans
JONAH GOLDBERG
C
ollege football iscrossing over
to the high-tech gridiron age, a
new era that could end up making
competition unbalanced — in
football and other sports — with
technological-haves outstripping the have-
nots. But the reality of this modern athletic
age is far more nuanced than that.
Competition could not exist without op-
ponents possessing advantages and disad-
vantages. If each team was theoretically
equal, there would be almost no contest and
each game would essentially end in a tie. As
early 20th century American philosopher
George Santayana wrote: “Equality in these
respects would mean total absence of excel-
lence.”
However, it is important to both competi-
tors and observers that these advantages
and disadvantages are regarded as fair, but
determining what is fair is not easy.
As we head into the long Thanksgiving
weekend, college rivalry games will be front
and center. The advanced technology that
helped coaches and players get ready for
these games will be in the shadows.
As Louisiana State University’s football
team prepares to go up against Texas A&M
on Saturday, it has a new virtual reality room
to simulate on-field scenarios — allowing
players to interact with life-sized projections
of an opposing team’s formations. Only two
other universities, Michigan and Notre
Dame, have this technology that gives new
meaning to screening game films.
LSU’s $28-million football operations
building that opened over the summer brims
with high-tech gadgets and gizmos that in-clude anti-gravity treadmills for improved
injury rehabbing and neuroimaging head-
gear that tracks brain functions of athletes
as they train.
Players at Clemson University may be
preparing to face longtime rival University of
South Carolina on Saturday by correcting
their form using motion-capture technology,
which has roots in early 20th century anima-
tion. Or they may be rehabilitating sore mus-
cles in the school’s sensory-deprivation tank
or its $60,000 cryotherapy chamber.
The sports teams at schools that pioneer
these technologies may be the first to benefit
from the advantages they could bring. But
early adopters also run the risk of wasting
time and resources on technology that ends
up not being effective or beneficial. For
instance, researchers have questioned
whether those expensive cryotherapy cham-
bers benefit recovery.
Technology could end up helping balance
some inequities between schools by improv-
ing recruiting. Potential college athletes
might seek out a school with a multimillion-
dollar sports lab because they think it will
help them improve their skill set, keep them
healthier — and help them go pro. Investing
in technology could help a lesser-known or
smaller school recruit more elite high school
athletes.
Yet some top high school athletes might
prefer an old-school approach that focuses
on fundamentals, which might give colleges
that haven’t invested in advanced technol-
ogy an unexpected recruiting advantage.
If the technology works as advertised,
teams heavily invested in it will likely have an
advantage on game day, especially if their
athletes are healthier and better prepared to
play. The moral question is whether that is
an unfairadvantage.
The problem is that we use “fair” in differ-
ent and sometimes conflicting ways.
A common reason we think something is
unfair is when a choice doesn’t follow the
rules or the rules are not applied impartially.
It is unfair when one team is allowed to com-mit pass interference while the other team is
penalized.
But it is not against NCAA rules for Clem-
son to use motion-capture technology to an-
alyze player movements even though its op-
ponent might not.
Similarly, it might seem unfair for West
Virginia University players to benefit from
pricey cryotherapy chambers that could
benefit rehabilitation when players at some
schools they might compete with must try to
soothe their muscles the old-fashioned way
— by immersing themselves in ice baths set
up in trash cans.
At first, only the best-funded programs
can bring this technology into their facilities
since the equipment and the costs to start
and run research labs to manage the tech-
nology can be prohibitively expensive.
If the tech succeeds in helping teams im-
prove on the field, then schools without ma-
jor research labs or deep-pocketed donors to
pay for such technological bells and whistles
will lag behind. In real time, that seems un-
fair.
But inequity has been part of college foot-
ball since the first intercollegiate game was
played 150 years ago this month between
Rutgers and Princeton universities. So
many other things come into play beyond fi-
nancial resources when it comes to competi-
tion and advantages — such as whether a
team plays in warm or cold climates, how
easy it is for a college to recruit and how
much academic support is in place to help
student athletes succeed off the field.
In the long run, early adopters end up
helping the schools that can’t afford to go
high-tech because the technology that
works well invariably becomes more widely
adopted and less expensive — and more
available to programs that otherwise
couldn’t have afforded it. That sounds fair to
me.Shawn E. Kleinteaches philosophy and
sports ethics at Arizona State University.
He blogs at sportethicist.com.CLYDEEdwards-Helaire, with the football, and his LSU teammates train in a $28-million facility packed with tech gadgets.Matthew HintonAssociated PressA high-tech college gridiron age
Football programs that adopt
cutting-edge technology may
have a competitive advantage.
Is that unfair? It depends.
By Shawn E. KleinW
hen Pete Buttigiegburst
onto the political scene, I
fell in love.
During his first appear-
ance on “The Breakfast
Club,” he sounded right at home chatting
with host Charlamagne tha God. Buttigieg
told the multimedia show’s black listeners,
“Let’s honor teachers like soldiers and pay
them like doctors.” Months later, when
Buttigieg answered a reporter’s question in
Norwegian, it practically closed the sale. As a
voter who studied abroad and is white-collar,
bilingual and gay, just like Buttigieg, how
could I not warm to the man? Our life stories
had so much in common.
Now, however, my attraction to Buttigieg
reminds me of “The Snowman,” a Hans
Christian Andersen fairy tale. In the story, a
snowman falls in love with a glowing stove he
sees through a kitchen window. The house-
hold dog warns the snowman that his love for
the stove is doomed, that he will melt if he
gets too close to the object of his affection.
Not only is “The Snowman” an underrated
parable on the dangers of falling in love; it
also captures my Buttigieg predicament:
The closer I get to him, the more I feel the
danger.
My native love for Buttigieg is melting be-
cause of how he mishandles race.
Recently, a 21-page memo emerged from
the Buttigieg campaign reporting the re-
sults of an internal focus group conducted by
the campaign: Many respondents, unde-
cided black voters in South Carolina, report-
edly said they would not support Buttigieg
because they were uncomfortable with his
sexual orientation. That information was
featured in news outlets across the country.
But is that really the problem? Some
black voters may well be uncomfortable with
Buttigieg’s sexuality. But I strongly suspect
that homophobia is just a distraction from
the more plausible cause of his sagging sup-
port among us black voters: his record on
race.
Buttigieg’s missteps with black votersdate back more than a decade, to before he
became mayor of South Bend, Ind., in 2012. A
recently resurfaced video from 2010 shows
the future mayor talking about a South Bend
tea party organization, Citizens for Common
Sense. In the video, he reaches out to the
group, saying he believes “we might find that
we have a lot in common.” Did the candidate
have no worries about the tea party’s racist
associations, which were evident even then?
As I wrote earlier that very year, the tea party
was peddling white resentment against
President Obama and racial minorities, dis-
guising it as a principled economic stand.
Rather than relying on economic argu-
ments, many tea party groups also exploited
violently racist falsehoods to oppose tempo-
rary relief programs for people most affected
by the recession and to stymie passage of
healthcare reform.
Then, after taking office in 2012, Buttigieg
quickly demanded the resignation of South
Bend’s first black police chief because of se-
cret phone recordings the chief had listened
to. On them, white officers, who had been re-
corded without their knowledge, allegedly
made racist comments. Did the new mayor
have no idea what kind of impact this would
have on his black constituents? As they saw
it, he came into office and fired the guy who’d
uncovered racism on the police force.
And Buttigieg doesn’t seem to have
learned from his errors. This week brought
another misstep, when his campaign an-
nounced a list of prominent South Carolin-
ians who had endorsed his “Douglass Plan
for Black America,” which aims to “disman-
tle racist structures and systems.” Since its
release, a number of the black leaders listed
as supporters of the plan have said they do
not back it, and many have endorsed other
presidential candidates. Moreover, more
than 40% of those on the list of plan support-
ers put out by the campaign are actually
white. If that wasn’t enough, in promoting
the plan, the campaign featured a stock
photo of a black woman — who lives all the
way in Kenya.
It’s not as though black voters are a
monolith or that we vote strictly according toskin color. We are a diverse bunch, full of nu-
ance shaped by our geographical location,
gender and generation. The Democrats
among us — a large majority — care about
the same issues as other party members: a
candidate’s ability to beat Trump, health-
care, education, reducing income and wealth
inequality, student debt and climate action.
That said, after an especially savage five
years — police brutality, Charlottesville, ra-
cially motivated mass shootings, continued
mass incarceration, calculated legal as-
saults on our voting rights — we are tired of
being taken for granted and betrayed. We are
in no mood for yet another “triangulating”
president who preaches to us about unity,
then makes compromises that split the dif-
ference — with concessions delivered to the
powerful and sacrifices made on our backs.
My shrinking love for Buttigieg boils
down to this: His warm, everyman quality
makes it difficult to tell: Is he Tony Blair 3.0, a
monstrous lackey to the powerful, a closeted
apologist for globalized inequality? Or is he a
pragmatist who really will have everyone’s
back?
By itself, any one of Buttigieg’s racial bun-
gles is forgivable and not disqualifying. Tak-
en together, however, they paint a picture of
someone who is racially indifferent at best
and a racial opportunist at worst. Any sen-
sible black voter asks these questions of a
politician: Is your concern for me authentic
and do you have concrete plans for address-
ing that concern? I have not yet heard plausi-
ble answers from Buttigieg.
Being gay should not disqualify him in the
minds of voters, including blacks; nor should
it shield him from criticism. But as a voter, I
get the sense that supporting “Mayor
Pete”— and all his warm visions of pragma-
tism and compromise — will come at my ex-
pense. And that means I am nervous, as the
snowman should have been, about getting
too close.Rich Benjamin, the author of “Searching
for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the
Heart of White America,” is a contributing
writer to Opinion. @IAmRichBenjaminButtigieg’s ongoing racial missteps
By Rich Benjamin