We know that Bernie Sanders is an avowed communist, who honeymooned in
the former Soviet Union and tries to pass himself off as a socialist, like
there is a difference. Sen. Warren is
another socialist that believes government knows better than you. Sen. Klobuchar will
not go to far and will not make it. But,
besides Bloomberg, the other candidate the socialist party may push is Pete
Buttigieg. So, who is the real
Buttigieg.
Pete Buttigieg's
father was a Marxist professor who lauded the Communist Manifesto
The father of
Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who
spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of
his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio
Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.
Joseph Buttigieg, who
died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from
Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught
modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version
of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories,
though he was undoubtedly Marxist.
He was an adviser to
Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to
discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the
editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature,
and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other
gatherings of prominent Marxists.
In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach
of Human Rights Watch,
Buttigieg, along with
two other authors, refers to "the Marxist project to which we
subscribe."
In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an
event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He
also participated in the event.
"If The Communist
Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent
years needed liberating from Marxism's narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and
exclusive cadres. It has been freed," he wrote.
"After a musical
interlude, seven people read different portions of the Manifesto. Listening to
it read, one could not help but be struck by the poignancy of its prose,"
he wrote. The readers "had implicitly warned even us faithful to guard
against conferring upon it the status of Scripture, a repository of doctrinal
verities."
“Equity, environmental
consciousness, and racial justice are surely some of the ingredients of a
healthy Marxism. Indeed, Marxism's greatest appeal — undiminished by the
collapse of Communist edifices — is the imbalances produced by other
sociopolitical governing structures,” Buttigieg wrote.
Paul Kengor, a
professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism,
said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting
Marxism into the wider culture.
"They’re part of
a wider international community of Marxist theorists and academicians with a
particular devotion to the writings of the late Italian Marxist theorist
Antonio Gramsci, who died over 80 years ago.'
Gramsci was all about
applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often
referred to as a 'long march through the institutions,' such as film, media,
and especially education," Kengor told the Washington Examiner.
Pete Buttigieg, an
only child, shared a close relationship with his father. In his memoir Shortest
Way Home, Pete called his dad a “man of the left, no easy thing on a campus
like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s.”
He wrote that while he
did not understand his parents’ political discussions as a young child, “the
more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to
decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns
that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.”
Pete wrote that his
dad was supportive when he came out as gay. He and his husband bought a house
in South Bend around the corner from his parents, which gave the couple “a good
support network despite our work and travel schedules” when they decided to get
a dog.
The elder Buttigieg
was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci.
Gramsci thought
cultural change was critical to dismantling capitalism. Nevertheless, although
critical of certain aspects of Bolshevism,
Gramsci endorsed
Vladimir Lenin’s “maximalist” politics and identified within the Leninist
faction of the Italian communists. He went to Moscow in 1922 as the official
representative of the Italian Communist Party and returned home to lead the
resistance against Italy’s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, on the orders of
Lenin, while his new wife and children stayed in the USSR.
Those efforts landed
Gramsci in an Italian prison, where he lived much of his brief life, which
ended in 1937 at the age of 46. Yet his time behind bars was also some of his
most prolific, leading to a collection of essays called the Prison Notebooks.
Buttigieg completed the authoritative English translation of Gramsci’s Prison
Notebooks, and his articles on
Gramsci have been
translated into five languages.
Buttigieg was a
founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, an
organization that aims to “facilitate communication and the exchange of
information among the very large number of individuals from all over the world
who are interested in Antonio Gramsci's life and work and in the presence of
his thought in contemporary culture.”
In 2013, Buttigieg
spoke at a $500,000 outdoor New York City art installation honoring
Gramsci.
Buttigieg died just
days after Mayor Pete announced his 2020 presidential exploratory committee.
Lis Smith,
communications adviser for Buttigieg’s presidential exploratory committee,
declined to comment on how his father influenced his political beliefs or on
Pete Buttigieg's thoughts on Marxist thinkers such as Gramsci.
Pete Buttigieg said in
an MSNBC interview on March 20 that he considers himself a
capitalist but that the system needs changes.
“The biggest problem
with capitalism right now is the way it's become intertwined with power and is
eroding our democracy,” Buttigieg said, noting the influence of big businesses
in government.
A self-described
progressive, Buttigieg has called to abolish the Electoral College system,
supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals program, and thinks that climate change is a national
security threat.
In another MSNBC
interview in February, Buttigieg said that socialism “is a word in American
politics that has basically lost all meaning” and “has been used as a kill
switch to stop an idea from being talked about.”
After his son won his
mayoral election in 2011, Joseph Buttigieg told the Notre Dame student newspaper that he never expected him to run for
office.
“I know Peter has been
interested in politics for a long time,” Buttigieg said. “At home we always
discussed government affairs, but never in that way …
