In the Arena

by Pete Hegseth

  Roosevelt’s emphasis on the “solid qualities” of character mirror a hard-learned shift in my own life. Growing up in an earnest and observant Christian household, I made sure to zealously avoid all forms of sin—especially sex, alcohol, and cursing. I thought that as long as I avoided those vices I met the technical, biblical definition of a good person—and therefore was a good person. Even by that standard, I fell short, but I was still often insufferable (and hypocritical) about it. For those who knew only the pious caricature I had carefully crafted, this manufactured façade of goodness made a period of faith and life reevaluation in my midtwenties, following war and divorce, that much more puzzling. Today, while I am a believing Christian—saved only by the grace of Jesus Christ—I barely trust someone who doesn’t enjoy a few drinks and won’t drop a well-placed F-bomb. Not because I think drinking and swearing are good things—but because I think moral lines are better served elsewhere. War, like other struggles in life, will teach you that. Give me a cursing, drinking, and mistake-making sinner willing to fight for America over a self-important, insular, and irrelevant saint any day of the week. Some can do both, and God bless them. But many—including me for years—end up misplacing their moral energy toward smaller, self-righteous, and socially conservative causes rather than mustering the courage to fight the larger battles for goodness and truth. The arena is not about scoring moral points, but instead about fighting—imperfectly, passionately, and with principle—for our shared cause of human freedom.

  There is another reason Roosevelt emphasizes civic and martial values: because, without them, “occasional crises which call for the heroic virtues” will fall on deaf ears. Most of citizenship is about the day-to-day pursuit of freedom and flourishing, but inevitable crises will arise—horrors like 9/11 and the attack in San Bernardino—that require an unwavering and courageous citizenry. At those moments, progressive holy grails like self-esteem, fairness, and gender neutrality are of no use. These moments require leaders and heroes who will sustain their commitment to a difficult cause; ordinary citizens willing to dare in pursuit of extraordinary things.

  Heroic virtues are forged, not found—republics must instill them each day, or they will find them lacking when the hour of truth arrives. After a decade of overseas wars and domestic dysfunction, Americans of all political persuasions must be reequipped to be resolute in purpose, tough in battle, and vicious against enemies of freedom. This demands a shared and proud civic narrative, leading to a reservoir of vigilance, that must be bolstered by a reeducation—in classrooms, churches, communities, and kitchen tables—undertaken with intentionality, self-awareness, and evenhandedness. Reeducation is not a word I use lightly, as it has a terrible historic connotation. By reeducation, I mean rehabilitation of the civic, martial, and heroic virtues—duty, honor, patriotism, courage, guts, “manliness”—needed to muster a robust, sustained, and victorious defense of freedom on all fronts, foreign and domestic. To fight for victory, as Roosevelt said, “whatever the cost.” Families must be intentional about instilling it, communities must be intentional about affirming it, and—if done properly—our educational system should be intentional about reinforcing it.

  Beyond the ability to muster heroic virtues, a lack of character in the citizenry is an invitation to both bad ideas and misplaced priorities. Plain and simple, said Roosevelt, “If a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic.” Without character, no cause—working, fighting, childrearing, or otherwise—will long be a good cause, and eventually, due to human nature and failed institutions, good causes can soon become the wrong causes.

  Roosevelt goes even further, saying of citizens, “if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.” Save for unassimilated Muslims who seek to join the Islamic State, I’m not talking about the type of evil that stands atop a Humvee clutching an AK-47 and a Quran. It’s rarely sheer and unabashed evil that undermines citizenship—most enemies of freedom don’t fly airliners into skyscrapers or blow themselves up in concert halls. Instead, it is far more likely that average citizens become susceptible to more subtle cultural erosions. Poisoned and seduced by “blame America first” progressivism, the view of average citizens can shift from duties to rights, utopia can sound attainable, the lines between right and wrong can be blurred, and class warfare can start to look really attractive. Too many Americans have become anticitizens, and good citizenship—informed by character—is the only real antidote to these seductions.

  Seduced or not, people still want to fight for something. As social animals born with a conscience, we inherently feel the need to be a part of a group or show support to a cause. Inevitably, a citizenry slight of civic and martial virtue (the “solid qualities”) is overwhelmingly attracted to noncontroversial causes—causes without moral valuations and without evil human faces. Two prominent examples, among many others, are breast cancer awareness and climate change zealotry.

  While the cause is worthy, it takes no special moral or civic virtue to join a cause that fights a physiological disease that is, by definition, amoral. Cancer causes harm, anguish, pain, and death—but cancer victims are chosen in a ruthlessly random manner. There is no evil person or evil cause seeking to kill humans with cancer—the evil is an arbitrary scourge that has no ideology and no rhyme or reason. Yes, we should fight cancer! Yes, we should seek to eradicate it! Yes, we should have organizations dedicated to a cure! But—except for the sheer courage of those who battle cancer themselves and the families and friends who support them—it takes minimal courage to put on a pink ribbon or participate in a walk (and then post it to Facebook so everyone can congratulate you). There is no pro-cancer lobby—hence the solidarity fight is inherently riskless. I’ve witnessed family members fight breast cancer, and other forms of cancer, with toughness, courage, and sheer determination—their fight is hard, but joining the anticancer cause is not. The fact that the National Football League spends a month wearing pink, and only one week wearing camouflage—for Veterans Day—is emblematic of how far this ethos has permeated American culture.

  Much of the same can be said of citizens who choose to champion climate change—propagating doomsday rhetoric about rising tides and weather patterns. Postmodern climate crusaders cling to meteorological prophesies like skinny-jean Spartans, spewing warrior-like rhetoric against a faceless, nameless, and soulless enemy. Climate change is the perfect enemy for postmodern leftists because, unlike cancer, there is no good or bad. With cancer, progress is at least discernable and measurable, but, for climate change evangelists, no matter if the weather is hotter or colder, calmer or stormier, dryer or wetter, it is all evidence that our climate is changing for the worse. They’re always right, and never wrong. And if they had to put a face to the enemy? It is all of us. It is modernity. The enemy is the modern world that brought about the computers, jets, and cars that every climate change activist relies upon to condemn . . . the modern world. Like most of the students I went to school with at Harvard University’s public policy school, the modern Left believes what Obama often says: “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”

  Breast cancer awareness activists (all) and climate change adherents (most) are wonderful and dedicated people. The problem is that many of those same activists are simultaneously incapable of confronting human evil that has a face and is therefore scarier and messier. From human sex trafficking to the subjugation of Middle Eastern women to the horrors of abortion, good citizens of solid character are required to confront the human evils of our day. The solace of uncontroversial causes absorbs the sole focus of too many potential good citizens—who must also have the ability and character to fight human evil, to fight for the contentious ca
uses. I’m not saying people should stop fighting for good and personal causes like eradicating cancer, only that they should also fight for civic and selfless causes. Think less focus on bike helmets and more on preventing the Iranian bomb; less focus on endangered species and more on stopping the slaughter of Christians; less focus on weather and more awareness of Wahhabi Islam. Not helping the matter is the full-scale proliferation of political correctness, and pressure to meet every socially acceptable litmus test that comes with it. Tough fights that ruffle feathers and draw distinctions are deemed divisive, dirty, and dangerous—and therefore frowned upon, even attacked. All the more reason for those who seek the arena and understand the stakes of the American experiment to ensure character is “reeducated” as a central tenet of citizenship.

  Earlier I said that good citizens are the only antidote to bad and big government; Roosevelt made a similar observation about character, saying, “Without [the everyday qualities and virtues] no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.” In one manner or another, our freedoms are never truly secure if our citizenry has rejected the core virtues that constitute character. Absent grounding in the homely, civic, and martial values of the good citizen, the misguided pursuit of other values—with different emphasis—emerges. In many cases, good principles that had always been means to a better end now represent ends in and of themselves. While useful guideposts for any republic, treating principles like diversity, equality, mutual understanding, and tolerance as the lifeblood of civic society—as modern progressives do—has unintended and negative consequences. The obsessive pursuit of diversity devolves into divisive racial balkanization (think #BlackLivesMatter), equal opportunity is replaced with equal outcomes (think socialist Bernie Sanders), mutual understanding without a moral compass becomes blind “coexistence” with dangerous ideas (think the Council on American-Islamic Relations), and rudderless tolerance is exploited by those who actually practice intolerance.

  This last point is exemplified on modern American campuses. Politically correct rhetoric (that is, progressive, postmodern, or anti-conservative) is applauded, whereas “intolerant” rhetoric (that is, conservative, religious, or antiprogressive) is vilified and instead, silenced. Speech codes and safe zones, which mandate what can and cannot be said on campus, are enforced to ensure only certain forms of speech are tolerated—imposing a stifling intolerance for dissenting speech, intolerance that is unconstitutional anywhere else in America. I saw it firsthand at both Princeton and Harvard, but it’s even worse today. I would probably be expelled today for the things we wrote in our conservative campus publication. This mood is no longer emanating just from professors and administrators, but students as well, leading one professor to pen an op-ed in 2015 titled: “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” The professor wrote, “The problem [is] a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice” where the feelings of students are paramount and are shielded from offense, discomfort, and challenge. Those who disrupt their coddled ideological cocoon are punished, not protected. This tyranny of so-called tolerance was something Roosevelt warned against, saying,

  In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.

  This tyranny of tolerance is used not just to silence conservatives on campus, but also as a bludgeon by those who seek to advance their own form of “fanaticism.” Just as they have in France and throughout Europe, Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—exploit American “tolerance” in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated. Simply put, their sheer insistence, the specter of agitation and violence (even if remote), and resulting perceived “earnestness of belief,” as Roosevelt observed, lead many average citizens to retreat on demands for assimilation to American life and principles, a reality we have seen powerfully in my home state of Minnesota among a large Somali Muslim refugee population. For fear of public reprisal, including cries of “intolerance” from Muslims against anyone who questions their religious demands, most of Minnesota’s leaders simply cave to the forceful demands of a stubbornly insular Muslim community. Worse, many are apologists for nonassimilation, including Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, who angrily said, “if you don’t like our Somali refugees [and their demands], get out of Minnesota!” From schools to language to policing, Somali Muslims in Minneapolis frequently leverage the undying “tolerance” of Minnesotans to avoid assimilation and maintain a separate form of civil society. A good number of Somali Muslims are great people who contribute to the fabric of Minnesota, but a multitude of others simply do not—and have no desire to assimilate in the future. This is a serious problem, not just of assimilation, but also of national security—as dozens of young Muslims have left Minneapolis to join Islamic armies in Somali, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

  Worse, the problem is not limited just to insular and homogeneous communities; it also affects suburban communities of mixed race, religion, and class. Recently at a prominent public school in suburban Minnesota, after an aggressive and forceful Muslim father pushed school administrators, his children were given special accommodation to have a designated prayer space and prayer time during school hours. I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with this accommodation if other religious students—Christian, Jew, or otherwise—were afforded the same accommodation on school grounds and during school hours, except they are not. God was completely and wrongly stripped from our public schools years ago—from the Ten Commandments, to school prayer, to in some places the pledge of allegiance (we long since forgot that it’s freedom of religion, not freedom from religion). But at this public high school, because the school’s soft administrators want to look “tolerant” of a minority faith, they make a special exception, an accommodation that would never be granted Christian students.

  Moreover, the same insistent Muslim father refused to look female school administrators in the eye during meetings, believing females unworthy of even his gaze. But rather than confront his sexist behavior—an action that would never be otherwise tolerated—school administrators capitulated, choosing the path of short-term least resistance. In other Minnesota public schools—rural, suburban, and urban—small Muslim populations are making demands for footbaths, prayer spaces, and forms of male-female segregation. In each instance, creeping Islamism—a movement dedicated to the supremacy and imposition of Islam both nonviolently and violently—advances, and American equality retreats. Where and when does it end? Not until, and unless, good citizens stand up. Unapologetic fellow American citizens—good citizens, Christian, Muslim, or any other creed—must call out instances like this and demand equal treatment for all citizens in order to maintain the distinctly American ethos that has served since our founding. They must demand, as we always have, full assimilation—of schooling, language, and most important, ideas. Critics will call it bigotry, as did the Muslim family at the public school, but good citizens in the arena know it has nothing to do with bigotry, and everything to do with preserving the principles and lifeblood of our fragile republic. It has only to do with America.

  Make no mistake about it, sheer guts, courage, and principle are needed to confront forms of anti-American intolerance—whether it’s closed-minded college campuses or intolerant Muslim ideologies. Taking on threats to our freedom and way of life—subtle or otherwise—is a sticky business. The arena can be a difficult and lonely place, where mistakes are made, crit
ics are many, and any combination of “dust and sweat and blood” is likely. In large ways and small ways, the arena is available to each of us, in our everyday lives, schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces; and only citizens who encompass the attributes of good citizenship will muster the ability to enter the arena—to fight for the basic principles that have made America free, prosperous, and great for the past 240 years. Do you have it in you? If not, why not?

  • • •

  As you consider those questions, don’t get hung up on the specific examples—pink ribbons, climate change, campus codes, or Islamist intolerance. In channeling Roosevelt, the first key to good citizenship is not the specific cause you pursue, but instead your ability to “hold your own.” Roosevelt’s point is that being a good citizen is not something that happens in a vacuum, or simply because of the cause you champion. Before fighting for the public good, the first step in being a good citizen is, as Roosevelt said, “self-mastery.” Before championing the causes of others, or seeking fights on foreign battlefields, the first task of a good citizen is to simply understand what it takes to be a good citizen, and then to do it. It’s not enough to know what the right thing is, and it is not enough to do something—a good citizen must both have the character to know what is right and the courage to do it. This includes knowing both yourself and our country—understanding our history, our form of government, our economic system, and the moral fabric of our civic society.

  Most people miss these points, assuming that good citizenship is defined by activism, discourse, protesting, or even voting. Those activities can, of course, be important; but in terms of citizenship, they are secondary. Roosevelt poignantly goes even further, saying, “contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.” Activists without jobs, discourse without comprehension, protesting without character, and voting without knowledge are all civic actions that actually undermine citizenship. Citizens who do “great things for humanity in the abstract” but cannot “hold their own” or “keep his wife [or husband] in comfort or educate his children” are no citizens at all. Someone who protests, activates, debates, or votes without first addressing the baseline virtues of good citizenship ultimately contributes very little to our republic, and actually detracts from it. In this way, a single mother raising good kids of character who works hard and holds her own is a much more meaningful citizen than a middle-age activist for [insert cause here] who can’t hold down a job, depends on government benefits, and would never think of physically fighting for the freedom he enjoys.