Pete Buttigieg’s Coded Use of <em>American Heartland</em>
The phrase’s political currency as a folksy label for Middle America can reinforce a poisonous “us versus them” mentality.
Yesterday afternoon, Pete Buttigieg found himself on the receiving end of a good old-fashioned ratioing—that quantifiable flood of Twitter rage when a bad take elicits far more (negative) replies than likes or retweets. The backlash likely took the Buttigieg campaign by surprise, given that the tweet in question might have seemed like anodyne boilerplate at first glance.
In the face of unprecedented challenges, we need a president whose vision was shaped by the American Heartland rather than the ineffective Washington politics we’ve come to know and expect.
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) January 29, 2020
It was a populist message evidently directed at Democratic voters in Iowa heading to the caucuses on Monday, reminding them of Buttigieg’s
