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One of the more ludicrous obscenities foisted on the world by Donald Trump is Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war.” “With his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair,” writes Suzy Hansen writes in our June 11 issue, Hegseth “is a parody come to life”:
A jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like “You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.” As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting “No means yes!” and “Kill all Muslims!”
But this is not parody, just as the ridiculous, brazen horrors of the war Hegseth oversees are not the stuff of movies and TV: “like the violence in the administration’s videos, Hegseth is real, and he is American, which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.” The assorted cretins who make up the Trump administration did not emerge in a vacuum; as Hansen argues, they are “heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west…the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.”
With democracy shriveling up in the US and a hapless Democratic Party struggling to muster opposition to an unpopular war, Hansen writes that it is imperative for a political party in this country to renounce “the strain in American life that produced a man like Pete Hegseth” and for “Americans to accept that they are not special but, in accordance with the most basic of religious principles, equal with the rest of the world before God.”
Below, alongside Hansen’s essay, are five articles from our archives about some familiar American types.
Pete Hegseth is the product of an essentially American ethos—which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.
“William Barr is the single most important figure on Trump’s transition team, but the transition in question is not the democratic transfer of power. It is the transition from republican democracy to authoritarianism.”
—November 5, 2020
“Mitch McConnell had become a right-wing political warrior who embraced the tactics and the philosophy of Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker, who first poisoned the politics of Capitol Hill. The end—Republican political triumphs—justified the means, which in this instance were unbridled legislative obstructionism.”
—November 10, 2016
“George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.
But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed.… [President Obama] said that past official crimes would not be investigated—certainly not for prosecution, and not even by an impartial ‘truth commission’ just trying to establish a record.”
—October 8, 2009
“It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up.”
—October 5, 2006
“Flattering his master, faithfully carrying out his policies, and remaining conspicuously loyal, Kissinger soon became indispensable to Nixon. Whatever differences there may have been between them were over methods, not objectives. Both had freed themselves from a preoccupation with ideology, both reveled in the exercise of power, and both relished a politics of confrontation.”
—September 19, 1974
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