The party of evil
By Yesterday I was flummoxed by the curious fact that two (or three depending on how you’re counting his alcoholism) completely independent and totally sufficient by themselves reasons to sink Pete Hegseth’s nomination somehow seemed to cancel each other out, so that none of them counted.
Those reasons are:
(1) He seems to be at the very best a scummy lowlife in his dealings with women, and an outright rapist at worst, with the odds of the worst being the case being quite high by any reasonable calculation.
(2) He’s obviously an alcoholic.
(3) He’s preposterously unqualified for the job of Secretary of Defense.
What naive me was puzzling and puzzling over, like the Grinch atop Mt. Crumpet hearing the singing of the Whos in Whoville, was, why weren’t these two or three completely sufficient on their own reasons for opposing the nomination enough, even if someone didn’t treat them as additive, because for some reason the voter (senator or citizen) didn’t really care about one or more of them? I mean suppose you don’t care about the scumminess because bitches be lying, which is why It Is Known that MeToo Went Too Far, plus hey I’ve known a lot of high functioning drunks.. Don’t you still care that Hegseth is laughably unqualified, as in less qualified than I am to write Ariana Grande’s definitive biography? And if not why not?
J.V. Last has an answer, which with the caveat that I disagree with the very end of his analysis, is the best thing I’ve read about Trumpism, aka the contemporary Republican party:
***
Here is the thing about Pete Hegseth:
Imagine that his character was sterling. That he was a fine, upstanding man, admired by all who know him. That he had dedicated his life to service and been judged to be as good a human being as Mister Rogers or Dolly Parton.
And now imagine that his politics were perfectly in line with your politics. Whatever you believe, he believed. As a matter of ideology and temperament, Hegseth is your soulmate.
Even if both of those things were true, Hegseth would still be a historically, hilariously, unfit nominee for secretary of defense.
The job of SecDef is almost impossible to conceive in its immensity. You manage a workforce of 2.87 million employees and a budget of $842 billion. You are responsible for the longest and most complex logistics operation ever devised by man. You are tasked with handling today’s national security challenges and looking over the horizon to plan for challenges that will appear years after you have left the job. You must have a fluent understanding of large organizations and bureaucracies. You must be a subject-matter expert in either war fighting, technology, or international affairs—but it helps if you have mastery over more than one of those disciplines.
Here are the backgrounds of the last nine SecDefs:
Lloyd Austin: Vice chief of staff of the Army, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, commander of CENTCOM.
Mark Esper: Deputy assistant SecDef, senior leader at Raytheon, secretary of the Army.
Jim Mattis: Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, commander of CENTCOM.
Ash Carter: Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, Kennedy School of Government, under SecDef for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
Chuck Hagel: Founder of a technology company, chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, U.S. senator for twelve years.
Leon Panetta: Member of Congress for sixteen years, White House chief of staff, director of CIA.
Robert Gates: Deputy national security advisor, director of CIA.
Donald Rumsfeld: Member of Congress for six years, head of White House Office of Economic Opportunity, ambassador to NATO, White House chief of staff.
William Cohen: U.S. senator for eighteen years (preceded by six years in the House of Representatives), including serving on the Senate’s Intelligence, Armed Services, and Government Affairs Committees.
Then there’s Hegseth, whose CV reads:
- Served in the Army National Guard.
- Briefly led a small, failing nonprofit.
- Helped host a weekend show on Fox News.
Looking at all of this, you’re probably asking yourself, “How is this guy getting a confirmation hearing at all? Especially with his personal vices?”
But that’s the key. Hegseth isn’t getting a hearing in spite of his vices. He’s getting this hearing because of them.
Yesterday Rebecca Traister reported on how Senate Democrats are thinking about Hegseth’s hearing:
Some Democrats retain the wan hope that they can persuade a Republican or two to actually defeat Hegseth’s nomination, and they worry that coming in ablaze will impede those efforts. Winning, said several staffers from offices less inclined to light Hegseth up, would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also oppose him on. Instead of giving Fox News the woke-mob martyrdom its audience craves, they say they can highlight his financial mismanagement and lack of relevant experience.
What an extraordinary observation. Democrats believe that bringing up Hegseth’s many personal and moral failings would help his confirmation prospects.
Because Republican senators would then feel as though they had to confirm him.
Because Republican voters would rally around him in solidarity.
Because of his vices.
A minute ago I asked you to imagine a Pete Hegseth who was a wonderful human being. Well, that Pete Hegseth would probably get rejected by the Republican Senate. Because Republican voters wouldn’t feel any particular attachment to him. Which would liberate Republican senators to politely scuttle his nomination on the grounds that he was manifestly unqualified for the job. At which point Republican voters would shrug and move on. The GOP base would not feel any more loyalty to the alternate-universe Good Guy Hegseth than they do to Marco Rubio or Scott Bessent.
2. Moats
In business, a moat is anything that prevents competitors from assailing your position.
For instance, Apple’s moat is hardware quality. No other device manufacturer can compete with Apple on the fit and finish of its hardware. And because Apple makes its own hardware, no other tech company can truly compete with it on software.
Amazon’s moat is cloud computing. Amazon has created an astonishing logistics operation but Walmart is in the same business and Shopify holds the potential to be a rival retail aggregator. What Amazon has that no one else does is Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing division so big and dominant that it has the ability to underwrite losses of almost any scale. Which allows the rest of Amazon to push into other business sectors and weather early losses as they grow.1
Tesla’s moat is its stock price. It does not matter how many cars TSLA sells or how many times it fails to deliver products on schedule or at projected cost. So long as TSLA’s stock price remains stratospheric, no other automotive company can threaten it.2
In the Trumpified world of Republican politics, vice has become a moat. If a figure is a bad enough person, it inspires fanatical loyalty in Republican voters and helps protect them from challenges.
Tim wrote about “vice signaling” four years ago and it has stuck with me ever since.
Jesus telling the Pharisees that acts were more important than words somehow became Cheeto Jesus telling the Twitterati that acts and words were both bad—LOSERS!—and the righteous man was really the one who had no compunction about his cruelty.
Saying you wanted to save the world was out. Actually trying to save the world was double-out. The only thing people admired anymore was the balls on the guy who wanted to watch the world burn.
The term [vice signaling], popularized by Jane Coaston, refers to people who now gleefully portray themselves publicly as amoral or immoral in order to demonstrate some sort of strength or sophistication. . . .
How did we get here? Because of the corrupting influence of Trumpism.
If we were talking about President Mitt Romney, there is no way—none, at all—that Brit Hume would be working overtime to vice signal. He would be rightly praising the president’s model behavior and discretion. We know this to be true. Instead we have a Republican president who is—just objectively—a man of utterly irredeemable personal character. And so, in order to justify their continued enabling of him, people such as Hume begin to not just ignore virtue, but bow toward vice.
Since then vice signaling has grown from a peculiar social pathology linked to Donald Trump to a broader mode of ethics in which Republican voters embrace personal vices in their champions.
Why?
I can see the Conservative Inc. answer:
Liberal elites have cried wolf so many times over the years that Republican voters no longer believe any allegations of bad behavior.
But I don’t think that’s true. Republican voters get really exercised over the idea of vice in their enemies. Look at their interest in the “Biden crime family” and Hunter Biden. Republican voters are so obsessed with the concept of vice that they make up crimes they then attribute to their enemies: That’s what QAnon and frazzledrip are all about. There is an entire galaxy of conspiracy theories in which Republican voters obsess over the imaginary wrong-doings of people they hate, such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.3
My theory is this:
Republicans embrace vice not because they believe that the accused Republican figures are innocent, but because they believe they are guilty. And so these voters exist in the hope that their champion will go on to hurt their enemies on their behalf.
After all: If a guy is willing to rape a woman, surely he can be counted on to visit destruction on Democrats, or woke generals, or whoever.
I don’t know. Maybe you have a better theory.
***
I think Last’s basic analysis here is genuinely brilliant and incredibly important. (I’m not competent to judge whether his business analogies are sound, but those are analogies and not really central to his point in any event.)
I do think his theory is wrong, and here’s why. That theory is more or less something like, “It’s not that Trumpers are a bunch of sociopaths, who like Donald Trump and his minions because Trump & Co. are evil. And it’s not that they’re so deluded by whataboutism that they don’t realize that Trump. Hegseth, etc. are genuinely bad people. It’s that they put such a premium on their primary and indeed only political goal — hurting their enemies — that they’re willing to employ the tyranny of evil men to achieve that goal.
The problem with this theory isn’t that it’s wrong: it’s that it’s self-contradictory. Trumpers are, collectively, a bunch of evil sociopaths, at least as political creatures (they may be perfectly nice and “good” people in their non-political lives, just as many a Nazi was a doting and attentive parent, horrified by cruelty to animals, etc.), precisely because their primary political program — again, really their only program — is to wreak vengeance on their enemies.
I’m not a Christian, but I know enough about the religion to recognize that it can be pretty much shortened to the following petition to God: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. That’s it! That’s the whole goddamned thing! Everything else, as some rabbi once said, is commentary.
Donald Trump is an evil man, and the people who put him into the most powerful political office in the world put him there because they realize that an evil man is more likely to wreak vengeance on the people you hate. Letting yourself be consumed by that desire is itself extremely bad for the soul, aka evil.
“If you go seeking vengeance, dig two graves.”
Mexican proverb.