Slate: Queer Like Pete

I’ll be the first to admit that Buttigieg is missing a certain warmth. And I’ve critiqued his lack of familiarity with gay history in the past. Even so, as a gay historian, I can’t help but witness his rise with interest and excitement, and in the wake of last week’s presidential debate and a revealing interview with Buttigieg on the New York Times’ Daily podcast, a worry has emerged. I’ve come to believe that those who find his self-presentation off-putting are missing an important bit of context—one that has to do with the set of archetypes through which we (queer and straight folks alike) make sense of gay men. [...]

Viewed through the lens of Schedule Spice, Buttigieg’s persona and life trajectory make complete sense. To my mind, he is the natural end result of a very familiar queer pattern that groomed him for this moment. His religious devotion to mastering the perfect pedigree, his refusal to be single, his denial of any type of popular gay aesthetic (which is, itself, another kind of gay aesthetic) make him legible to me. His academic nerdiness combined with his über-masculine military service is not a genuflection to heteronormativity, as some have claimed, but a familiar gay identity curated among upwardly mobile white gay men who have often turned to politics in one form or another. The only difference is that Schedule Spice is now vying for the presidency. [...]

While his model of gayness might not be widely familiar, Buttigieg’s Boy Scouting, his default of being the best little boy on the stage, is legitimately queer. If it strikes us as odd, it’s only because we have too narrow a definition of how a gay man can be in the world. Understanding Buttigieg through this lens does not, of course, have any bearing on his proposals or problems, such as his poor track record among black voters back home or his campaign’s recent foible of using stock images of Kenyans to represent black Americans. By all means, criticize those. But attacks on his “wonder boy” perfection, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his manner demean him and the many gay men like him—men who marry the first guy they date, who don’t come out till their late 20s, who are socially awkward, who have devoted their lives to work, and whose musical default is not gay pop. Men who, most of all, are raring to discuss politics at any moment, particularly on Sunday morning.

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National Public Radio: Warnings, Wariness Mingle With Joy After Hong Kong's Pro-Democracy Landslide

Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, adopted a conciliatory tone. She pledged to respect the election's results, which represented a veritable drubbing of her preferred slate of candidates. After months of massive protests, voters turned out in record numbers and give pan-democratic, or pro-democracy, candidates more than three-quarters of the total 452 district council seats. [...]

Chinese officials, for their part, reacted more tersely than their ally in the chief executive's office. At a briefing Monday, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not mention the results, instead choosing to reassert Beijing's sway over Hong Kong's governance. [...]

Still, the newly elected councilors aren't entirely bereft of ways to make their weight felt. District councilors represent a sizable chunk of the Election Committee, the roughly 1,200-member body of politicians and business figures responsible for deciding the chief executive.

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The Conversation: Men feel stressed if their female partners earn more than 40% of household income

The findings are based on an analysis of over 6,000 married or cohabiting heterosexual couples over a period of 15 years. Levels of distress are calculated based on feeling sad, nervous, restless, hopeless, worthless, or that day to day life is an effort. [...]

Men who are the only earners are relatively unhappy but they were not as stressed as men whose partners are the principal earners. Neither of the extreme scenarios is good for male mental health.

The exception is men who knowingly partner with a high-earning woman. These men do not appear to suffer from higher psychological distress when their partners earn more. People do not pick their partners at random, so if the woman was the higher earner before marriage, then the potential income gap was already clear to the man – perhaps even a reason to partner with them. [...]

For generations, in many cultures, there has been an expectation that men will be the primary income provider in the family, and masculinity is highly linked to fulfilling this expectation. Faced with a change in this outcome by being outearned by their partners, means men are likely to experience high levels of psychological distress.

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The Atlantic: Why the Strongest Argument Against Impeachment Fails

Last week, National Review’s Jim Geraghty offered an argument against removing Donald Trump that even those of us who believe him to be guilty of bribery should ponder. If you see danger in Trumpism or think Trump is an authoritarian menace, he argued, then you have the most to lose if his presidency ends with impeachment and removal, making Trump “a martyr in the eyes of his supporters” rather than a defeated loser––and leaving a sizable faction convinced that but for removal, he would have won reelection. [...]

For the record: Multiple members of the Trump administration and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, participated in an effort to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the Biden family. When confronted, Trump not only declared his phone call with Ukraine’s leader “perfect,” but he defiantly gave a statement publicly calling on another country to investigate Joe Biden. Trump told television cameras, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” [...]

If the House nevertheless votes down impeachment, or if the Senate declines to convict, what seems more likely? That Trump will stop pressuring foreign regimes to undermine his challenger in the next presidential election, or that, having faced no consequences, he will redouble his efforts to get that foreign help?

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UnHerd: Is the British jobs miracle fake news?

Let’s start with the facts. Employment levels didn’t just recover after the deepest recession in living memory: they’ve gone on to exceed the high point before the crash when we were supposedly at full employment. As the report sets out, there are three million more people in work now than in 2008 and the employment rate is three percentage points higher. [...]

One might also add the growing ease with which employers can offshore production, not to mention the onward march of automation. Indeed, this is an era in which pundits breathlessly predict wholesale replacement of the human workforce with robots. They may be proved right — eventually; but thank goodness for authors like Bell and Gardiner, who attend to things that are happening on a relevant timescale. [...]

As the report itself makes clear, the employment surge is concentrated among lower income groups, who also saw stronger earnings growth than the rest of the population. So while the authors make a strong case for the income shock hypothesis, they under-emphasise the role of welfare-to-work policies. [...]

Instead of organising UK economic policy around access to a limitless supply of cheap labour, the priorities need to be reordered around investment in people and the communities they live in. Therefore we should be open to global talent, but not use immigration as a tool for suppressing wages; rather than weakening workers’ rights, we should strengthen their preparation for the world of work; and instead of funding transport links that facilitate outsourcing, we should concentrate on local infrastructure that boosts the competitiveness of domestic supply chains and thus the market power of British workers.

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