… The Buttigieg backlash, just like this spring’s first flush of Buttigieg mania, has a dorm-room atmosphere about it; it is most intense within his own cohort of young, mostly white, college-educated liberals, who are torn between a mounting discomfort with their own privilege and an instinctive comfort with their own class. Buttigieg is his demographic’s most natural avatar in the 2020 race, and that is precisely his problem. …
He is doing all the right stuff for 10 years ago, but it’s all wrong now. His college plan is more ambitious than Biden’s or anything Obama advocated, but those gradations don’t matter anymore; either you want to root out every last driver of inequality or you are, as Teen Vogue called him, “ ‘Petey’ Bourgeois.” CONT.
Charles Homans, New York Times Magazine