Free Republic

In a significant way, "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg is the embodiment of his father Joseph — and, by extension, Antonio Gramsci. Buttigieg Senior was a professor of critical theory and the relationship between culture and politics at Notre Dame University from 1980 until his retirement in 2017.  (The man, a smoker who wouldn't quit, died of lung cancer in 2019.)  Academically, Joseph Buttigieg spent his entire professional life editing the journals of Antonio Gramsci.  According to a N.D. alumni newsletter, Professor Buttigieg's work on Gramsci has been spread far and wide, with his work having been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. ...

Pete Buttigieg has some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio, “Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on Amazon when I checked on Monday. That put him just a few dozen places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the other candidates who have campaign books out now. In a recent Iowa poll he surged to third place. His campaign just announced that it’s raised an impressive $7 million since January. And I can’t tell you how many Democrats in places as diverse as Nebraska, Indiana, New...

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin. Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories, though...