by Pete Hegseth
This third root cause—the end of right and wrong, good and bad—ripples through every aspect of modern American society, underwriting the Left’s grip on the levers of influence. In higher education, as I experienced at both Princeton University and Harvard’s public policy school, every moral and civic question is up for grabs and deconstructed. Nothing is sacred, nobody is “right,” and there is no home team. Everything is morally relative. In government-run grade schools, God has been removed and American history is taught politically correctly and selectively, if at all. Across our society, grounded religious tradition is replaced by a rudderless but militant secularism. America’s youth are taught, as my younger brother was, their Native American “spirit names,” but not the names of their American founders. Earth Day is a huge deal, D-Day not so much.
In our media, alternative families are celebrated as the new norm, veterans are damaged goods in need of pity, and celebrating America is limited to politically correct formulations of racial diversity, environmental consciousness, and gender empowerment. In wartime, American actions are impugned, to the benefit of our enemies—like when the New York Times splashed the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq on their front page for thirty-two straight days. For contrast, the attack on America’s consulate in Benghazi in 2012—which killed our ambassador and three other brave Americans—received one front-page story from the so-called paper of record. Our politics are no better, mostly a lagging indicator of a society divorced from the heavy lifting of citizenship. And on the foreign stage, America is no longer considered exceptional—instead merely one among a community of coequal nations. When right and wrong are subjective, who is America to wage war in defense of our own interests? Or, for that matter, other free peoples’?
Teddy warned, “let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that . . . cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one.” A graduate of Harvard College who attended Columbia Law School for a time, Teddy Roosevelt was not against higher education. And neither am I. Yet Teddy understood that more “higher learning” and book knowledge does not necessarily equate to greater insight or understanding of human nature—or of the way the world is, not the way we want it to be. Instead, as he told his French audience in 1910, and I’ve observed in America’s so-called elite institutions, more learning—more belief in one’s personal perfection—often leads instead to personal arrogance and ideological intolerance. This is especially true when knowledge is divorced from any sort of larger moral framework. For Christians that framework is the Bible; for Muslims, the Quran; Jews, the Torah; atheists, any number of constructs. But for all Americans—regardless of religion—it should be the shared sense of civic duty and core tenets that bond together diverse peoples to a single American experiment, under God. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
Teddy, himself a believing Christian, understood this larger context, saying, “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.” And, I might add—more dangerous to the trajectory of the world. To a man, America’s founders echoed the same sentiment, recognizing that free peoples cannot govern themselves without individual citizens tending to their own actions and moral character. This is why, in real time, the rhetoric and reality of the Barack Obama presidency have been so damaging to the fabric of America. At every turn, with every well-crafted speech, and with a smile—he has subtly advanced a fundamentally different formulation of the West, and America. Obama’s faith, religious or secular, is invested in something different than America’s original social contract.
Barack Obama’s rhetoric exudes a shift from duties and obligations to rights and “wants,” a belief in the eventual perfection of man, and a blurring of the lines of right and wrong, good and bad. In a postmodern world, his formulation is seductive and goes down easily in carefully crafted sound bites. But the manifestation leads to self-absorbed, shortsighted, and myopic citizens who believe, incrementally, that the good, safe, peaceful life of modern America is the inevitable life. And with big fights of a free society no longer necessary, a drifting citizenry—still saddled with debt, working for low wages, and stripped of pride in America—is left searching for the point of all the hard work, and tough warfare, that created modern America.
CLASS WARFARE
At that point, the modern Left—and Barack Obama specifically—have a vulnerable electorate right where they want them. Why is life still so hard? people ask. The Left’s answer is ready, and powerful: It’s not your fault. It’s somebody else’s fault! Enter class warfare, the fourth and final root cause of a fledgling citizenry—and the nail in the coffin for a republic according to Roosevelt. Class warfare, expressed forcefully on the campaign and from the presidential bully pulpit, is a defining characteristic of Barack Obama’s rhetoric. If his transformation of America doesn’t transform the lives of individuals for the better, then it’s not his fault—it’s the fault of a failed American system of governance, economics, and culture. Class warfare can be very effective on the campaign trail, but the result—as Teddy Roosevelt saw—is devastating to a citizenry.
The Left today preaches diversity, tolerance, and equality in all ways—and then uses those principles as a bludgeon. Of course, as conservatives we should embrace—and do embrace—diversity, tolerance, and equality as means to a better end; the Left, however, treats them as fundamental ends. For the Left, we are good because we are diverse; we are at our best when we tolerate everything; and everything is better when we are all equal. Teddy Roosevelt’s conception of citizenship in 1910 would beg to differ. Instead, when we are diverse, yet united in purpose, we are good; when we tolerate divergent views even when we disagree with them, we are good; and when we give people real “equality of opportunity,” we are good. The latter conception unites; the former divides . . . but makes for good politics.
The class-based blame game is the approach of the modern American Left, and Teddy Roosevelt saw it coming: “The citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic.” Obama has mastered this rhetorical and policy device and America has suffered accordingly. Whether it’s America’s wealthiest citizens, the cops who police our streets, our campus “safe spaces,” or the war on women, Obama pits rich against poor, old against young, black against white, and male against female in a way that has exacerbated the differences of individual Americans, undermining the social contract our founders set out to establish. His straw men are many, and well worn. Starting with his 2004 speech at the Democratic convention in Boston, Barack Obama pledged not to see red states or blue states, but instead our United States; in reality he has done the exact opposite—emphasizing America’s class, racial, and gender differences. In effect, he has reversed America’s de facto national motto. Today, we are Ex uno, multis. Out of one, many. Teddy Roosevelt foreshadows, quite clearly, that these developments mean “the end of the republic [is] at hand.” I fear he could eventually be proved right.
• • •
While there are other critical factors at play, this combination of four root causes—rights overtaking duties, the destructive pursuit of utopia, pervasive moral relativism, and class warfare—erodes the basic tenets of what made our imperfect country the last, best hope for free peoples and free markets. The “fundamental transformation” of America is under way, but it didn’t just begin within the past seven years. While Barack Obama has hastened America’s transformation, the ingredients were set in motion long ago—in academia, media, culture, and politics. American traditionalists have attempted to fight back, but in many ways our counterattacks have been mostly counterproductive—only accelerating the pace
of the Left’s cultural seduction.
Reflexively defensive, traditional advocates for America and her exceptional ingredients have walked into the Left’s trap, and we have been easily framed by politically correct zealots as “anti-everything”—anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-caring, anti-environment, and anti-progress. These labels are unfair, but they are powerful from the podium. They also push the debate into a sphere weighted toward social conservatism, where frustrated traditionalists dig in their heels: Transgendered rights . . . what? White privilege . . . really? Earned amnesty . . . never! Climate change . . . prove it! Taken alongside shifting cultural sands, and hastened by the four root causes listed above, the ideological terrain slants in favor of the Left’s narrative. American traditionalists, relying on beliefs they have long held, are made to look like they don’t care, whereas the Left does. They’re made to look cruel, the Left compassionate. They’re made to look backward, the Left progressive. They’re made out to be cranky old white men, the Left young and multicultural. They’re made out to be tired; the Left looks fresh and futuristic. And as the terrain slants more and more against American traditionalists, they fight back harder with the same tactics—only exacerbating the contrast the Left hopes to exploit.
This is not just an observation, but something I’ve learned personally. When I showed up at Princeton University as a freshman in the summer of 1999, I was largely nonideological and laser-focused on trying to make the varsity basketball team. I wasn’t very political, and considered myself a Republican only because my dad was one. I was a Christian, but more out of diligent habit than deep conviction. I came from a strong family and a safe and supportive community. I believed America was a great country, that faith was critically important (even if I lived it poorly), and that family was the foundation of success in life—regardless of race, class, or gender. My parents were squarely middle class, yet I was a child of privilege because I had a family that loved me, a God who forgave my sins, and a country that had given everything to me.
But none of that seemed to matter at Princeton, and from the first week I arrived on campus, I was confronted with a very alternate belief system. My preparatory summer session was largely sorted by race and socioeconomic class. Our first week, the school promoted and cosponsored an event called “The Joys and Toys of Gay Sex.” Liberal professors outnumbered their moderately conservative counterparts 30:1 in the politics and history departments. The chapel had a Christian edifice that only preached a gospel of moral relativism. And after 9/11, “mutual understanding” peace protests were more prevalent than condemnations of Islamic terrorism.
I felt compelled to respond, and respond we did. As the publisher of the Princeton Tory—the freewheeling campus conservative publication—we confronted the biggest issues head-on. Bombastic cover stories (and headlines) splashed the front page of every issue, confronting topics like homosexuality (“Coming out of the Closet”), abortion (“Abortion at Princeton”), feminism (“Killing Feminism”), atheism (“God and Politics”), and Islamists (“Dig in and Fight”). We pulled no punches, and made the full-throated case for traditional values. In most ways I’m proud of the stances we took and the arguments we made. I was not in the business of making friends, but wanted to hold the line—and represent a viewpoint I believed was sorely lacking on campus. As a social conservative warrior, I waged an aggressive, if lonely, “culture war” on campus.
But, in retrospect and with the distance of time and experience, I fear we did as much harm to our overall cause as we did good. We fought the good fight—in the arena—but did not cogently or convincingly address the root causes of the Left’s cultural seduction. We dwelled on a handful of counterproductive cultural battles—like unfairly demonizing homosexuality—while failing to address actual reasons for American civic decline. Rather than a socially conservative focus, we should have challenged what Teddy addressed in his speech—an upside-down civic culture that unilaterally disarms our citizenry’s ability to muster the duties, virtues, and responsibilities necessary to restore American citizenship, freedom, and prosperity. We did a lot of good things, but we also missed the mark—and they used it against us. I’m quite certain the Left will try to use it against me for the rest of my life.
There is an excuse for our bombastic, if principled, behavior: we were undergraduates, letting arguments fly, in what used to be an open campus discussion. But we cannot afford to make the same mistakes in the larger public square today. If we don’t refocus our efforts on the civic realm of the next generation, we will keep losing ground to the Left. What once infected only our elite institutions today infects a broader swath of our country. The Left’s cultural seduction has sallied forth far beyond the Ivory Tower and permeated America’s cultural consciousness. In many ways, this reality is the reason for this book. Teddy Roosevelt understood the fights worth having, and the principles worth fighting for—like work, citizenship, family, and character. Unapologetic believers in America must undertake a similar education—pointing our immediate and finite firepower at problems we can actually address, rather than flailing away at cultural trends we cannot reverse (save for abortion, an issue we should never relent on). Until we do this, we will never address the root causes driving America’s decline.
The 2016 presidential election has already featured soaring and testy rhetoric . . . and even more teleprompters. But America would do well to remember Cicero’s advice—that without grounding in education and real-life experience, “oratory is but an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage.” Again, Obama is a great example of this. As good as he was with a teleprompter in 2008, he has shown himself to be quite inarticulate without the aid of the technology. His awkward pauses and constant “ums” and “ahs” without digital assistance reveal his real speechmaking skills—and would make ancient Greek orators shudder. They are also an apt personification of the Left’s cultural seduction. Their ideas sound good, but those ideas are merely a smoke screen for failed and recycled ideas of human nature and class warfare. Ideas that rot America’s core and undercut her ability to be a beacon of freedom in a hotly contested world.
PART II
The Good Patriot | Our War and America in the World
FOUR
Citizen of the World: The World the Left Wrought
I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. . . . If a man can view his own country and all other countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him.
It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”
—TEDDY ROOSEVELT, 1910
The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. . . . Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
—SENATOR BARACK OBAMA, BERLIN, GERMANY, JULY 24, 2008
September 17, 2001, was the first day of class my junior year at Princeton University. I still remember casually stepping over the Monday edition of the Daily Princetonian at our doorstep that morning, but then pausing to pick it up. I didn’t always read our campus newspaper, but given the times we were in, I was curious. Standing outside our Gothic dorm room, I thumbed through the paper, eventually landing on the editorial section, where a headline and op-ed caught my ey
e: “A Time for Restraint,” by Dan Wachtell, a Princeton student I had never met. As I read his piece, fully engrossed and never looking up, I wandered back into the room—my blood pressure rising in real time. Shoving the paper in my roommate’s face, I grumbled: “Read this horseshit! Who the hell is Dan Wachtell? We need to respond today.” He agreed.
Forty-five miles from the comfy confines of our Ivy League campus, smoke was still billowing from two massive holes in lower Manhattan. Six days earlier—using airliners as human-filled missiles—violent Islamists had attacked America in broad daylight. More than three thousand Americans were dead in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, the illusion of our security rocked. On the morning of September 11, war was declared on America, and less than a week later a range of emotions—shock, pain, grief, anger, and anxiousness among them—were still very raw inside most American souls. But, as we read that morning, clearly not all American souls.
Having been at Princeton for two years already, I was certainly familiar with the liberal arguments of rank-and-file students like Dan Wachtell. I’d heard their arguments in class, read them in print, and attended countless campus events reinforcing their views. By the time I read Wachtell’s article, I had a good sense of the modern Left’s worldview. But following such a brutal and cowardly attack on fellow Americans—innocent civilians, no less—I anticipated that the campus Left would, at the very least, soften their approach. But I was wrong. Worse, Dan Wachtell was not a progressive leader or outspoken College Democrat on campus. He had written two editorial pieces earlier, both largely nonpolitical in nature. But there he was, a normal guy, making a full-throated and unambiguously “blame America” case six days after the worst terrorist attack in American history.