Buttigieg’s most impressive effort was his attempt to personify that campaign ethos, even if he did so imperfectly. One could see his commitment to these principles in his temperament. One example: Buttigieg, when he engaged with people who disagreed with him, was able to acknowledge why they held views different from his on opposing same-sex marriage. He stressed that how you vote doesn’t determine whether you’re a good or a bad person. That was once fairly widely assumed; in our current political climate, where contempt and antipathy toward others is fashionable, it’s something that needs to be said, and said again.

Even in hyperintense debates, as candidates were yelling at and over one another, Buttigieg managed to stay calm, cool, and dignified. (That didn’t mean he wasn’t able or willing to throw some sharp elbows, including at his fellow midwesterner, Senator Amy Klobuchar. And he also got off the most withering line of the campaign, referring to Vice President Mike Pence as a “cheerleader for the porn-star presidency.”)

Buttigieg seemed to understand intuitively what the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln understood, which is that the role of political leaders is to filter and refine public passions, rather than to stoke them; to be alert to the threat posed by angry populism; and to keep at bay institutional arsonists. In that sense, Pete Buttigieg is a person of quite a conservative disposition.

Buttigieg also grasps the deep purposes of politics. As he put it in his speech announcing his withdrawal from the campaign:

My faith teaches that the world is not divided into good people and bad people; [it teaches] that all of us are capable of good and bad things. Today, more than ever, politics matters, because leaders can call out either what is best in us or what is worst in us, can draw us either to our better or to our worst selves. Politics at its worst is ugly, but at its best politics can lift us up. It is not just policy making; it is moral. It is soul craft.

To be sure, the majority of moral formation and soul craft happens in areas outside politics, but nonetheless, an indisputable moral function is inherent in politics. To paraphrase James Madison in “Federalist No. 51,” the end of politics is justice. (Aristotle argued very much the same thing.)

Read: Where will Pete Buttigieg’s voters go?

Politics, then, is one arena, and a rather important one, that helps shape a nation’s norms, beliefs, and moral sensibilities. It signals to the rest of society what kind of behavior is honorable and dishonorable, admirable or ignoble, worthy of emulation or condemnation. It is here, in the realm of our civic and political culture, where the blast radius of the Trump presidency is most obvious, and where Donald Trump is doing some of his worst and most-lasting damage.