If anything I think my story might help illustrate why categories aren’t as important as we think. I’m a church-going, gay, millennial, Red State may… - Pete Buttigieg

Then I would jump on a streetcar, along tram lines since torn out, and let it carry me into the West Side, to step off in a neighborhood and wander into a bakery full of East European delights or a tavern where people were swilling Drewrys beer and speaking the language of the old country.

To dial up was like watching a rocket launch: first the top light was on, then the second . . . then came the sound of the modem talking to whatever it was talking to . . . sounding like an Atari game’s parody of birdsong or of a clarinet solo, pinging and ponging as more and more of the little lights came on, blinking and then steady, orange and then green . . . the sound building to a crescendo that recalled the noise of TV static, as machines confided who-knows-what secret binary handshakes between them while I listened. Then came a key change. Then the pitch of the static pulse tweaked, now higher, now lower, and then, gloriously, the final light went to green and I was online, in orbit: cyberspace.

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life — or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.