Washington Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's masterclass on "de-proceduralization," her Wendell Berry influence, and language that actually means something

Will hoosier Pete Buttigieg follow her courage and candor?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I think I have a new favorite politician. Which is to say that there is now a politician out there that I like. Well, maybe love. Because I’m admittedly straight-up crushing over here.

“You get the answer to the question you ask,” Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) said at a recent University of Chicago Institute of Politics panel discussion about “The Future of the Democratic Party…” “And people have been asking the wrong question repeatedly. They ask the question that delivers the kind of answers they want to hear that doesn’t indict them in any way. Or their responsibility, or agency in a system.”

Indeed, Perez spent the rest of the evening asking the right questions. She stole the show. At times, it was like moderator David Axelrod—a former President Obama staffer in both the campaign and governance who, to be fair, has long seemed like the kind of Democrat (and it’s worth remembering that a few of these people do exist) who doesn’t adhere so hook-and-sinker into cultish language and style that seems to change in his party about every 5 seconds¹—and fellow panelists (Cleveland mayor Justin Bibb and former President Biden’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg)—all but disappeared off the stage. And we were better off for it because the substance Perez was contributing was so refreshing.

There were so many gold mines; where to start? How about with:

“The original sin in politics is condescension. It’s saying, ‘First of all, if you’re nice to me, and you check all the boxes, you can apply and maybe I’ll give you help.’ ‘Like, I don’t want to apply for your stupid grant that I won’t get. I want to have a strong regional economy. I don’t want to get retrained into serving cocktails on a golf course. I want to be able to harvest timber in the woods that my family’s been doing for generations, and be a steward and have a relationship with the woods’…People are just tired of being told what’s wrong with them, and what’s wrong with their neighbors…I don’t think, like, driving a Tesla is the emblem of environmentalism. I think driving your Toyota Corolla with 500,000k on it, that’s real environmentalism. When you can make a clutch last for 400,000 miles, like that’s it.”

She also said:

“My family, my community, we don’t want cheap crap. That’s not the point of this. We want what is worth having. We want to be able to work one job, we want to be able to own land, we want a level playing field for small businesses…A lot of times it feels like the national agenda is so, it’s like this industrial complex of consultants that want to sell the same TV add in Ohio as in Washington state…A lot of the discussion is never talking to us², or even about us…Maybe we know shit you don’t know.”

I will do my best in this post to actually say something myself, but I could do a lot worse than just quoting the entire transcript, while leaving out the parts that weren’t her. On the USAID saga:

“One of my counties just went down to a 4-day school week because of budget shortfalls. And the school that my son would probably go to, he’s too young right now, but he would go to, they’re talking about doing the same thing. We don’t have air conditioning in our schools. Like, and so, when they see that USAID is spending 3 million dollars or whatever on putting together a comic book, that feels pretty unrelated to our experience and to what we’ve been asking for.”

The longer I listened to Perez, the more I suspected she had been influenced by Kentucky writer and activist Wendell Berry, and a quick Google search confirmed that my instinct was correct.

Berry, of course, spent a lifetime advocating for various causes that might have been considered “environmental,” but he often sparred with those “movements,” and with his words he insisted upon using “the earth” rather than “the environment.” Why? Well, because “the earth” actually fucking means something! “The environment,” on the other hand, is an abstraction, and abstractions are difficult to protect or improve. And if we’re not, you know, actually trying to protect or improve something with our politics and our advocacy, maybe we’re just using words to endlessly prop up “bad people,” to dehumanize desired subjects.

But aren’t there environmental factors that aren’t “the earth”? Sure, and those have real names, too. (“Climate” isn’t one of them, but “weather” is.) The ozone layer, the sun, the moon, Mars, clouds, those are real things, too. Pollution is real, too, and wherever possible, the more specific the better. Because the thing about using concrete language in politics is that is usually attaches responsibility to someone (often ourselves, but if we are going to villainize someone it seems helpful to know without a shadow of a doubt what they did that was so mean).

Perez makes that point, too:

“At a national level, maybe even global, it’s like we have moved away from a system of representative government where there’s accountability and a place-based politics and moving further and further toward hegemony where power exists nowhere and everywhere and in whoever claims it the loudest, as opposed to be me showing up and fighting desperately for my woods, for my schools, for my³ businesses. Without that local focus, without a fierce loyalty to place, representative government fails, and it becomes captured by these very abstract ideas of like environmentalism writ large as opposed to local loyalty to our woods and our rivers and the place where I want to get buried. When you turn environmentalism into a commodity that you can buy at Target, you lose the whole thing…The volume of bureaucratic bullshit that we have to navigate to run a small business in this country, and then you tell me that, like, they’ve achieved some kind of ‘equity’ by translating lawyer gobbly-gook into 8 languages. Well, if you still have to hire a lawyer to run a small business in this country, that’s not it…And you’ve boxed a lot of people out of the dignity of independence.”

One of the many highlights of the whole discussion was when—right after Perez went off (again) on the absurdities of our addiction to red tape and bureaucracy—Axelrod then says, “So talk to me about why, umm (pause), what is it about the Democratic party that drew you to the Democratic party.” Like he was clearly uncomfortable with something about 1) how powerful her voice was in the discussion and 2) how unlike Democrats she sounds when she talks.

Anyway, she had plenty to say as an answer:

“It starts with respect. You respect people, and you respect that they want to do a good job. And you get out of their way in a lot of cases. It’s a rebalancing of clipboards to work boots…I used to work in a bike shop, and I was on a college campus, and I will never forget teaching a physics major how to use a wrench. You know, when you divorce theory from practice, that is how you end up with the Cybertruck.”

She then gets over-laughter from presumably a crowd of Democrats because, well, she’d gone at Tesla a couple times by then, and even though what she’s criticizing was actually their party (‘we must go electric with cars to make ourselves feel better!’) that was before, you know, they were betrayed by Musk when he first bought Twitter to stop some of the more-absurd forms of censorship and then went in with President Donny. SO NOW WE CAN AT LEAST AGREE THAT MUSK BAD EVEN THOUGH WE’RE THE ONES WHO INSISTED ON HIS PRODUCT AND THE FIRST BUYERS OF THE THINGS. AT LEAST WE CAN NOW SELL THEM AND DONATE THE PROCEEDS TO RESPECTABLE LEFTY THINGS LIKE NPR!).

Perez keeps going:

“Specialization is not the key here, it’s the symptom of a problem…One of the bills I’ve got, it’s The Banana Bill. It creates a positive right to serve fresh fruits. Someone at a daycare in my district told me they were not legally allowed to peel a banana in their daycare. Their licensure told them they would need like 10 more sinks before they could legally peel a banana. They can open a bag of chips, but they can’t peel a banana. That’s crazy. Think about national health. Think about the impact of the cost of childcare…Jen Pahlka has talked about it in a really interesting way. It’s not about deregulation, it’s about de-proceduralization. You are asking people to do the wrong job because you don’t have confidence in their intelligence or their care. You do not legislate care or diligence. You trust, and you build more reflective legislative cycles that come back and say, ‘How was this implemented’? …You don’t fix the cost of daycare just by subsidizing daycare. You can also do it by saying, ‘Now you can own a home so you have more room in your budget to pay for high-quality care.’ There’s a lot of ways to address these problems, and it’s going to take a lot more confidence in the American people.’”

The first audience member question, umm, echoed Axelrod’s fear about Perez’s allegience but with what seemed less like an attempt to understand and more like an accusation: “You’ve given us a lot of interesting perspectives, but at some point you sound more like a moderate Republican in ideology and verbage, can you clearly distinguish what makes you a Democrat, and do you think your policies and presentation reflect the core ethos of the party?”

It sure is a good indication, by the way, of how much contemporary Democrats—no matter what they say out loud or in their memos and op-eds—identify with the status quo when they get squirmy because you’re criticizing excessive (and dehumanizing!) paperwork. Like, now there needs to be an assessment now of “whose side” you’re on!

Well, to Perez’s credit, she did not bow but rather dug in. And she dug in on using language that means something:

“There’s also this thing with verbage and words, like being able to lift open the hood on the idea and say, like, does this have merit? Does this hold water? Who are you talking to? Why are you talking this way? And I remember when I just started running, and actually somebody just reminded me, I declared my candidacy for this office 3 years ago, so this is not something that I have like a real depth of the right verbiage, but I was trying to practice a stump speech, and I had written it out myself, and I was telling it to my husband. He was like, ‘What are you trying to say?’ And I told him, and he was like, ‘Okay, well just say that. Like just say it straight. Like just represent your own culture and your own community without trying to sound like someone else. Don’t make your views acceptable because you’re hedging them in vocabulary, but just say what you’re thinking, and say it repeatedly and honestly.’”

She also defended her place among Democrats:

“Looking at a lot of the Blue Dog seats, where we’re holding strong, you know, votes that we were attacked over. Turns out, yeah, people really didn’t like the formulation of Biden’s debt forgiveness. Only 3% of my community, my district, held Federally-issued student loans. So don’t tell me that you’re doing me a favor, and that if you message it differently that I would see it was really a great deal for me, and that I’m just stupid. Listen to us. Give us a program that works. Get shop class back in junior high. Create real avenues for having a small business in the trades. Give us 529 college savings reform.”

It was infectious, her voice in the discussion. Maybe not for Bibb, who oddly seemed very concerned about being on “the right side of history” whatever that means, but Buttigieg seemed to be getting some of it, and finding some of his own voice in the process. Admittedly, it was actually a clip of his that I saw on social media that brought me to the YouTube discussion in the first place:

“One way to illustrate it, I think folks have been saying that I think tries to get at this problem but also completely demonstrates an inability to to see what’s in front of us. It’s this idea that ‘Well, it only we had a Rogan of the left. That’s what we need, we need a Joe Rogan, but for the left. And if we had that, that’s the kind of thing that we’d be reaching some of the people we’re not reaching.’ The problem is, people aren’t listening to Rogan because they view it as ‘being of the right.’ They don’t think of it as political at all. They’re not looking for politics. They’re looking for what protein powder to use and an interesting podcast, and the politics find them…I’m known for going on Fox, and I think that’s a good thing for Democrats to do, and I wish more Democrats would do it…If your spouse or partner comes to you, upset with you, and you proceed to say, ‘You’re wrong to be upset. Here’s why you’re wrong to be upset. You should be much happier than you are.’ You know what’s going to happen next."

Now I grew up in Northern Indiana, about 45 minutes from South Bend, where Buttigieg was recently the mayor from 2012-2020. The son of a Notre Dame professor who spent 7 months in Afghanistan in 2014 as a naval reservist won his elections in a Midwest town of just over 100,000 with 55% of the vote to about 20% from his next challenger the first time and more like 80-20 the second time around. South Bend hasn’t always seemed like a thriving metropolis, but there is enough smoke about his terms to make me think those were good years for the town. The second term, it’s worth noting, overlapped with Trump’s first term, and Perez is a politician who carried a district that Trump won all 3 times.

It seemed a bit pre-mature when Buttigieg ran for president in 2020, but I was listening at the time nonetheless. Buttigieg showed that a gay politician could appeal in other places in the Midwest as well, as he won the Iowa Caucuses. And yet, I have to admit that I was mostly disappointed with his run at that time because honestly, he sounded almost too “composed” on a stage, a bit forced. Someone who’d definitely come of age as a politician during the Obama years, but who was less inspiring as a speaker. A bit too…bureaucratic? He sounded Ivy League (which he is) and like he had spent his whole life practicing to be a politician. I suppose I prefer someone, then, like Perez who masters a craft⁴ first, a domain that isn’t politics, and then tries to apply the lessons they learned somewhere else in the political realm.

Which is why it was so lovely to see Buttigieg talking more and more like a person as he listened to Perez. Now I’m sure he still has political aspirations⁵, and maybe he’s taking his cues from the 2024 national election that his political party needs a tonal shift, but actually learning something from their shellacking would be a welcome development anyway:

“We believe in the values that we care about for a reason. And this is not about abandoning those values. It’s about making sure we’re in touch with the first principles that animate them. What do we mean when we talk about ‘diversity’? Is it about caring for people’s experiences and making sure no one gets mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia? Which I have also experienced, and it is how…Trump Republicans are made. If that comes to your workplace, with the best of intentions,⁶ but doesn’t get at what actually matters here, what’s actually at stake, I think, and this might sound counter-intuitive, if we were more serious about the actual values, and not caught up in vocabularies and not trying to cater to everybody only in their particular slice of combinations of identities versus the shared project, actually if we thought about it a little bit differently, things like diversity would actually be an example of how we reach out beyond our traditional coalition. What I mean by that is, the opposite of diversity is uniformity.⁷ And if there’s one thing I really respect about principled conservatives, even if I don’t always agree with them, is that they have a horror of anything that has a whiff of being pressed into conformity. By government or by society. So I would like to appeal to, whether it’s because of a conservative or libertarian or progressive instinct, or I would say just an American belief, is that part of the point of living in a country like this is that you don’t have to conform to what other people demand of you. That we’re not only on board with that, we’re champions of that.”

Amen! Let’s start by fighting the endless obfuscation of language, and the countless shitty processes (“de-proceduralization”) that hide behind it.

1. “You can’t be the party of the working class and disdain it at the same time” was at least one thing Axelrod contributed to the discussion that is worth remembering.

2. Emphasis is mine.

3. Emphasis of all three of these consecutive “my’s” is mine.

4. It sounded from the discussion like some of her own convictions about politics come from her and her husband’s attempt to run a local auto shop.

5. That’s a key difference, by the way, between my impression from Perez, who I’m pretty sure it in the spot she’s in out of a desire to serve her community. It shows, and we can smell it from miles away.

6. Note: despite this constant disclaimer, I’m not so sure the “intentions” of these kind of things are all that great. They are often not-so-subtle attempts at garnering feigned conformity and consensus, and thus people are put in a position where if they choose to say what they really think in those environments than they are the bad guys and maybe now on the HR watchlist. It’s gross, and usually puts forward a very reductionist vision of culture and history that you’re supposed to just sort of mindlessly nod and accept because there is no time built in for real discussion, and conflict is, you know, complicated and messy, and everyone knows ain’t nobody got time for that.

7. I have been pointing out this contradiction for a very, very long time.