We deserve Pete Hegseth

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First let me hit you with some realities:

Now, if you are holding hearings for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues. Or you might come up with other serious questions: How do drones change war-fighting? How will artificial intelligence alter the nature of combat? How do we shift from a defense policy built around counterterrorism to a policy built around nation-state warfare? If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness.

But did this happen at the Pete Hegseth hearings in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this week? If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearings, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.

We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing — by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.

Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military. I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft. During the hearings Hegseth repeatedly said he was going to defend the meritocracy. In what kind of meritocracy is being a Fox TV host preparation for being secretary of defense? Maybe in the one Caligula fancied when he contemplated making his horse a consul.

Hegseth is in no danger of rising to the level of mediocrity, but next to some of his Democratic questioners, he looked like Carl von Clausewitz. Democrats played their own culture war games. Especially early in the hearings their main obsession was women in combat. (Like everybody in my social class, I support women in combat, but I don’t think it’s as important an issue as failure to deter World War III).

Sen. Elizabeth Warren submitted over 30 pages of written question to Hegseth before the hearing. They had to do with things like drinking, accusations of sexual assault, threats to LGBTQ rights and veterans benefits. I have enormous respect for Warren, but she didn’t show much interest in topics like how to deter and fight a war — which are kind of central to the purview of this committee.

Sen. Tim Kaine tried to play the moral disqualification game, dwelling on Hegseth’s various adulteries. Having failed to defeat Donald Trump with this strategy, I admire Democrats’ capacity for persistent losing.

The hearings got better as they went along and more junior senators got to speak. Sen. Mazie Hirono was excellent, asking substantive questions: If the president ordered you, would you order troops to shoot protesters in the legs? Would you follow an order to use the military for mass deportations? Sen. Tammy Duckworth was outstanding, too, asking about the big responsibilities of the job: Does Hegseth know anything about the ongoing international negotiations? Does he know which countries are in the ASEAN bloc? (The answers are no and no.)

The lesson for Democrats over the next four years is clear: Don’t fly into moral outrage every day. Focus on Trumpian incompetence.

But, as you can kind of tell, I finished watching the hearings sick to my stomach. I also came away thinking that we need to come up with a better way to think about expertise. Hegseth’s core populist conviction — repeated ad nauseam — is that the grunts on the ground know what they are doing and the pencil-necked geeks in air-conditioned offices just write nonsense regulations that get in the way. The man wasted years at Princeton and Harvard when he could have learned everything he knows by watching that Col. Jessup speech at the end of “A Few Good Men.”

We don’t want to live in a populist paradise in which expertise is suspect and ignorance a sign of virtue. Nor do we want to live in an elitist world in which technocrats try to rule the world. As the political scientist James C. Scott showed, technocrats are too abstracted from reality to even see what is going on.

We need to settle upon a place where experts are respected and inform decision-making, but civilians make the ultimate calls. In a healthy democracy, people revere great learning on substantive issues; they understand the world is too complex to be captured in bite-size slogans; but they also appreciate the wisdom that comes from concrete experience and know that most hard calls have to be made in light of the deeply held values that have made America what it is.

All of this has been corrupted by the war for short attention spans. In the 19th century we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Today it would be the Lincoln-Douglas TikTok wars followed by “Three Takeaways From the Lincoln-Douglas Debates” followed by a panel of pundits (like me) analyzing whether Stephen Douglas helped himself with swing voters in DuPage County.

Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of systems? Maybe, but maybe not.