Vice Is a Moat
If Pete Hegseth is confirmed, it won’t be in spite of his personal failings. It’ll be because of them.
Jonathan V. Last
Jan 14, 2025
Pete Hegseth, a former TV host and retired major in the Army National Guard whom Donald Trump intends to nominate for secretary of defense, arriving for his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on January 14, 2025 flanked by supporters, including Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) (front left) and former Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) (front right). (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
1. Secretary Pete
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.
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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.
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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’d like you to discuss this phenomenon in the comments.
Vice Is a Moat - by Jonathan V. Last - The Bulwark |
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