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The front-runner of the month always gets kicked around, but what has been interesting about the criticism Buttigieg faces is the way it always seems to be about the totality of Mayor Pete, in all his best-and-brightest-ness — how, in the absence of much of a record to scrutinize, he has been cast as a human indictment of the system that would deliver a precocious mayor without much of a record to the top tier of a presidential primary. “College was always for a kid like Peter,” the political commentator Krystal Ball said — “he and the other special flowers who get tracked onto the smart-kid path, which so often just happens to coincide with being white and being affluent.”

But that would describe many of Buttigieg’s critics, too. 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.

Buttigieg has occasionally reached for Obama’s mantle, but what he more readily calls to mind is a type of young person who flooded eagerly into politics in the early Obama years: the emotive, irony-deficient millennial, shaped by generational traumas (the financial crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan) but not embittered or radicalized by them, excited by abstractions like hope and change. To see Buttigieg on the stump, evoking the spirit of that moment, is to realize with a shock just how far away it feels now. In the intervening decade, his demographic has undergone a pair of profound shifts. One is the emergence of a vigorous left-wing policy vision informed by the perceived failures of the Obama presidency: its misplaced trust in compromise, its deference to Wall Street, its faith in the system. The other is a radical leap in how the same cohort thinks about race, social justice and immigration.