There’s No Going Back
A persistent theme demonstrated explicitly and implicitly in the book is a direct counterpoint to the campaign slogan that defined a generation of Republicans. Mayor Pete diligently undermines the ideological imperative underlining the concept behind Make America Great Again. The unspoken directive to that slogan of the Trump campaign is not making American great again by doing something different and progressive or in ways that address the needs and abilities of the time, but is rather a pipedream of taking America back through time in a way that pushes progress aside. To do what MAGA stands for is not making America great again, by trying to replicate what the white majority of America felt was great about the country over half a century before. Buttigieg directly confronts this delusion with a simple: it’s not possible and even if it were, that time was not great for every American and was, in fact, much worse for many.
But You Can Go Home Again
Buttigieg in insistent on the reality that American simply cannot try to return to an earlier point in history when it was king of the world as a means of regaining some of the greatness it showed back then. But the book is a wholesale vindication of the idea that you can go home again, after all. Equipped with a resume that would be the envy even of heirs to multi-million dollar estates who became White House advisers just fifty-three weeks older than him, Buttigieg left military service with a world of money-making opportunities set before him thanks to his education and experience. He could have gone off to make a fortune on Wall Street without barely having to fill out a job application, but instead he headed home to his smallish hometown with the intention of entering politics and making South Bend great again. The rest is history, proving that not only is it possible to go home again, but it is possible it make home better than it was when you left it.
The Anti-Trump
The book was published in concert with the Mayor’s decision to run for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President. While technically competing against a slew of other fellow Democrats, everyone in America knew that the real opponent in the race for the nomination was the incumbent President who had somehow managed to win a majority in the Electoral College even as the popular vote in the 2016 Presidential election revealed an America distinctly at odds with the idea of Donald Trump in the Oval Office. The result is a book that capitalizes on the flaws and failures of Trump’s four years in office by consistently casting Buttigieg in opposition to his would-be opponent on every level: experience in executive public governance, military experience, a homosexual married to his first love, a Rhodes Scholar who attended graduated from an actual Ivy League school before attending Oxford University in England, an educated economist without a single bankruptcy and a well-read winner of writing competitions.
