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It seems like every issue or two, the New Yorker has a profile on some Trumper and I hate them all. I guess this is what the readership of that magazine wants, but they can be summed up as “I just don’t understand why these people are so awful, let’s talk to them and the people around them and I can explain it to you,” which I find pretty unhelpful political commentary. But I think it sums up a lot of intelligent, well-educated liberals who watch MSNBC a lot and thus actually learn nothing about American politics. I prefer the political commentary in an even more irrelevant journal, the New York Review of Books, which may in fact speak to no one except people like me and thus makes no difference at all in anything. But at least their writers cut through the bullshit and lay out some interesting points to the 27 readers.
I lived in Turkey for many years and watched as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became more repressive. When I asked a Turkish academic why a segment of society had continued, for two decades, to vote for an increasingly authoritarian leader, he told me that for those people, to renounce him would be to renounce their own souls. He said this with some sympathy. Erdoğan’s policies early in his reign had helped religious and poor people to feel proud, to believe they had a place in Turkish society. I returned to the United States six years ago, but the idea of renunciation stuck with me—this notion that to renounce a leader or a movement or an ideology can be to renounce oneself. I’ve been thinking about it lately while watching the illegal American-Israeli war against Iran and the conduct of the American “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth.
It is a condition of the Trump era, and particularly of this war, that we regularly, every day, every hour, see things online so ridiculous or obscene that they merge with images we’ve encountered in novels, Hollywood films, and TV satires. Heightening the disorientation, the Trump administration has spliced together real-life footage of bombings and scenes from action movies to make maniacal snuff films, something even the social critic Christopher Lasch could not have imagined. The videos provoke a cognitive confusion, a reflexive desire to dismiss what must not be real.
Hegseth in particular, with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly as it should be,” he said in his first press briefing about February’s attack on Iran. And on the same occasion: “We have only just begun to hunt.” He loves to use the word “hunt” and to recite weapon names. He also frequently invokes God and Jesus, especially when talking about killing; in a Christian prayer service at the Pentagon, he called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy…. We ask [this] with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” He compares Trump to Jesus and journalists to the Pharisees. He has fired or forced into retirement subordinates with significant expertise—as many as twenty-four top military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the army. He has openly targeted black officers and women officers. He has also, according to numerous reports, routinely abused alcohol, and in 2020 he paid off a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her. Congress knew that when it confirmed him as secretary of defense.
Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: 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!” He is what the world thinks some Americans are, the bleakest caricature. But 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.
This is a person produced by a culture, a society, and a history. He speaks with a deliberate viciousness, a desecration of humanity that recalls centuries of slavery and the American Indian Wars. He is 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. He practices that nasty Christianity. “Break the teeth of the ungodly,” he said at the Pentagon prayer service; Bull Connor comes to mind. So many of Trump’s men—Gregory Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, Tom Homan—resemble the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.
These men are ignorant of many things, but certainly of foreign societies. In 2014 I took a trip to Iran with two friends, during which we had a cheerful young tour guide who also functioned as a minder of sorts. Together we road-tripped around the country, from Shiraz to Yazd to Isfahan to Qom to Tehran, and saw mosques, palaces, museums, and archaeological sites—we even passed the Natanz Nuclear Facility on the highway; it was right there, visible from the car.We attended a dinner party in a Tehran apartment and went to an artists’ space where young people gathered. In Isfahan the local people let us go up a minaret of the famous Shah Mosque and view that exquisitely designed city from the latticed wooden carriage at the top, a delight so extreme I felt like a child. For over a decade I spoke of those ten days in Iran as the best trip of my life. What I know about the dangerous American ignorance in men like Hegseth and Trump is that it prevents them, on some elemental level, from understanding that Iran is a real country full of real people.
What has allowed this worldview to persist? The systemic oppression of another people always deforms the oppressors in turn, and although slavery ended and civil rights were won, America has continued to pioneer new varieties of oppressor degradation: Little Boy and Fat Man, destroying to save in Vietnam, CIA-backed military coups, Abu Ghraib, ICE warehouses, Gaza. Hegseth is a repository of the cold war, the end of history, and the so-called war on terror. Anyone his age understands the particular environment in which his ideology took shape. A tour through his life and his actions in the last few years reveals forms of degradation that are fundamental to the Trump administration but not unique to it. If we are to have a renunciation of who or what is terrorizing the world, it will not only be a renunciation of these men.
This is, of course, why most hardcore Trump voters would never abandon him, even if they secretly knew he was wrong. It would mean they are wrong. And most people can’t handle that. But to be clear, liberals also have some of these problems. Since this piece is about Hegseth, it’s also relevant how many liberals can’t get their heads around the fact that the U.S. has been an utterly malevolent force on the world and pretend it is something else:
Even now, Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—the leaders of the so-called opposition—stop short of condemning the war on Iran outright, focusing their criticism on the Trump administration’s failure to obtain congressional approval for it or the chaos it has sown. Meanwhile, some of the mainstream media has gone so far as to suggest that the real question about the war is how to get the job done. “Israel Keeps Killing Key Iranian Leaders. Will It Work?” asked one New York Times headline that came across my iPhone as a push notification. The liberal establishment and the mainstream media have taken this line even though some analysts suggest that this is the most unpopular war in the history of the United States. Trump has a rapidly diminishing approval rating, polls show that most people hate Hegseth, and it is widely acknowledged that under Trump, the US is becoming a failed democracy. And yet the opposition has not grasped the fact that any endorsement of mass violence by an autocrat is also an endorsement of its own demise. Many Americans cannot let go of the hope that their country, with its righteous destiny and its unrivaled military, might yet triumph—because dominance is so central to their idea of themselves and because the alternative, humiliation, is too painful to bear.
….
After the Iraq War and the “war on terror,” the liberal establishment never properly grappled with its support of those who wanted to fuck the world. It hid behind banalities about America’s resilient institutions and exalted position in the international order. Today the leaders of other countries speak of the need to guide the United States out of its war with Iran as one would help a senile old person cross a street. “The question for friends of America is simple,” the Omani foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, wrote in The Economist. “What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement?” Such language reflects not only the insanity of the Trump administration but also the reality that the Democratic Party has given the rest of the globe little reason to hope that it will confront the primacy of Hegseth’s violent worldview in American life.
Instead Americans have allowed ridiculous, savage men, the dumb puppets of Les Guignols, to retain the sheen of respectability. “You have to see it,” Trump intoned on March 27. “It’s very cool. Missiles launched, missiles launched, missiles launching. They’re launching…. Then at seven seconds, fire, fire, fire. The most unbelievable thing. Fire, boom, fire, boom.”
I’m reminded how often there is a Cold War liberalism in LGM comments, especially in regards to China. We do not have a righteous destiny and such myth is a pure cancer on the rest of the world.
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