THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 13
AK-47.” Politicians are often anxious to
offer assurances that no one is coming
for anyone’s guns, but O’Rourke said
he believed that these gun owners, too,
were sick of seeing children dying in
mass shootings. When he visited a gun
show recently, he added, some people
told him that they would be willing to
give up their guns, because “I don’t need
this weapon to hunt, to defend myself.”
Doing the right thing, O’Rourke said,
was not a separate task from bringing
all Americans, including conservative
Republicans, “into the conversation.”
The health-care segment of the debate
also hinged on questions of trust. The
Medicare for All bill, which Senator Ber-
nie Sanders, of Vermont, wrote, and Sen-
ator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts,
signed on to, includes a provision—“on
page eight,” as Senator Amy Klobuchar,
of Minnesota, helpfully pointed out—
that would effectively ban most formsCOMMENT
TRUSTME
R
esilience in the face of a personal
setback was the subject of the final
question in last Thursday night’s Dem-
ocratic debate, in Houston. When it
was the turn of Mayor Pete Buttigieg,
of South Bend, to answer, he spoke
about the years in which he lived with
the fear that, as a military officer and
an elected official in a socially conser-
vative community, revealing that he was
gay would end his career. But he reached
a point, he said, where he was “not in-
terested in not knowing what it was
like to be in love any longer,” and he
came out during the final months of a
campaign. “When I trusted voters to
judge me based on the job that I did
for them,” he said, “they decided to trust
me, and reëlected me with eighty per
cent of the vote. And what I learned
was that trust can be reciprocated.”
Buttigieg’s story was moving on its
own terms, but it also threw into relief
a fundamental question of the Demo-
cratic primary race: What vision of them-
selves—and of voters—are the candi-
dates willing to trust? At a basic level,
that question has to do with being able
to convince voters that they’re being
spoken to without deceit. Former Rep-
resentative Beto O’Rourke, of El Paso,
has that ability, and it was on display in
one of his stronger moments on Thurs-
day. Asked whether he was serious when
he said that he would require the own-
ers of military-style weapons to sell them
to the government, he replied, “Hell,
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDAyes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
of private insurance. In this respect, the
bill is far more restrictive than not only
the “public option” but also the Euro-
pean universal-health-care systems that
Sanders admires. Both Buttigieg, who
favors “Medicare for All Who Want It,”
and Senator Kamala Harris, of Califor-
nia, who introduced a plan in July that
includes a longer transition and a larger
role for private insurers, maintained that
people should be trusted to choose their
own option. (Harris has zigzagged on
the issue—she originally signed on to
Sanders’s bill—raising a different ques-
tion of trust. Senator Cory Booker, of
New Jersey, who co-sponsored the bill,
has also backed away from elements of
it.) When Sanders said that workers
whose unions had agreed to wage cuts
in return for private health-care cover-
age would be able to recover that money
from their employers, Vice-President Joe
Biden told him, “For a socialist, you’ve
got a lot more confidence in corporate
America than I do.”
That exchange, like several others
on Thursday, was largely about how
radical, or just how ambitious, the Party
is prepared to be. Is sweeping, struc-
tural reform the best way to effect
change, or is Obamacare worth build-
ing on? (Some factions in the Party
have been busy rejecting parts of Barack
Obama’s legacy—in the area of immi-
gration, for example.) Pervasive doubt
about existing institutions could make
it easier to persuade people to commit
to entirely new ways of doing things;
it could also lead them to give up on a
political system that they think is ir-
redeemable, or just mean. Julián Castro,