In the Arena

by Pete Hegseth

  4. More Family, Less Government (Schools). School choice in public schools has expanded educational options for some in America, and that choice should be greatly expanded. Same with school vouchers. But if government schools (public schools) continue to fail to reinforce American principles, then citizens ought be further empowered to educate their kids—their future “good citizens”—at home. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt were all homeschooled—why not make it much easier for kids today? Legislation should be pursued that protects the fundamental right to homeschool, streamlines and simplifies the process to homeschool, channels some tax dollars to follow the kids rather than default to local school districts, financially empowers parents to educate their kids, and ensures that school districts are not able to erect barriers to homeschooling.

  5. Make Elections Competitive Again. The Left seeks to level the election playing field by limiting money in politics, to no avail. Money is speech, and should not be restricted. However, money in politics is concentrated in too few geographic locations due to the proliferation of noncompetitive congressional districts. Using various means, states should be shoehorned away from gerrymandered congressional districts and instead be pushed to establish political boundaries based on geographical reality, not political or racial prejudice. I have no idea whether conservatives or liberals would benefit from this development; but I do know that dozens—if not hundreds—of congressional seats would instantly become competitive, diluting the influence of a limited set of seats and forcing a much wider debate among the electorate. Moreover, in order to foster a shared civic experience, Election Day should be made a national holiday and early and mail-in voting should be minimized.

  EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

  1. Dramatically Simplify the Tax Code. The tax code should be radically simplified and consolidated. A flat and fair tax rate should be set, with any deductions and incentives benefiting only the attributes of good citizenship—honest work, service to country (see No. 3 above), and industrious families. Loopholes, especially for those of financial means, should be slammed shut—ensuring that those at the top of the economic ladder actually pay their rate, making lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists less powerful, and making the tax code more accessible for all. Moreover, corporate tax rates should be substantially reduced and regulations significantly simplified, incentivizing businesses to stay in (or return to) America and clearing barriers to entry for new smaller businesses. The federal government and states should aggressively seek out, reduce, and eliminate burdensome licensure requirements and exclusionary licensure fees. Save for jobs that legitimately impact immediate physical or public safety, the government should get out of the business of dictating the background, training, and experience of many common occupations and instead allow the market to dictate who succeeds and who fails.

  2. Invest in Twenty-First-Century Infrastructure. Good roads, bridges, and freeways will always be critical to the success of commerce in America, and spending to maintain this conventional infrastructure should remain a priority. But even more important to commerce today is the virtual superhighway—accessible, cheap, and high-speed Internet access. Few businesses today can thrive without an Internet presence; moreover, the Internet empowers anyone with access to pursue his or her interests, passions, and happiness. When it comes to high-speed Internet access, fiscal hawks should spare no expense because the Internet is the infrastructure of the twenty-first century. America should be the most wired, connected, and high-speed country in the world—especially in inner cities and rural areas, where those on the lower end of the economic ladder often congregate. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System; we need an Interstate Internet System in America—free from regulation and taxation.

  3. Equip Women to Choose. Women should be equipped and empowered either to feel comfortable staying at home with children—the most important job in the world—or to stay in the workforce and also be great mothers. If mothers choose to stay at home with children, the tax code should support that choice by providing deductions or credits for the rearing of children as well as homeschooling (if they so choose). If mothers choose to stay in the workforce, accommodations should be made to ensure that that decision is honored. Options like the ability to work from home and/or part-time, more paid maternity and family leave allocations, more robust worker protections for pregnant employees, and child-care support for those gainfully employed should be advanced. These options can mostly apply to men as well.

  4. Higher Education Empowerment. Many of the best jobs in the twenty-first century have everything to do with technical skills and nothing to do with a liberal arts education, yet we have a system weighted heavily toward a four-year undergraduate education. While four-year degrees remain a factor in more opportunity and higher wages, many students are defaulting to a four-year degree when a more focused—and far less expensive—technical or community college degree would better prepare them in specialized skills badly needed in the modern economy. Policies should be pursued to ensure students have a better sense of what their education will prepare them for, and the type of career it will afford them. Rather than defaulting to the undergraduate degree, we should do a better job of making sure students understand the technical and technological options available.

  5. Civil Service Overhaul. America needs civil service reform across the federal government. Bad employees should be able to be expeditiously fired and good employees empowered. The closest thing to immutable job security is a job in the federal government, which creates a corrosive and unaccountable culture. The concept of “public employee unions” is an affront to good governance, as they no longer exist to protect worker protections but instead to ensure it is nearly impossible to remove poor-performing employees. The crony and corrosive influence of public employee unions should be fought at every turn. My former organization’s efforts to reform extremely burdensome employee protections at the Department of Veterans Affairs is an example of how government can be made more accountable and more responsive.

  AMERICAN LEADERSHIP

  1. Substantially Increase Defense Spending. The world is getting more complex, more uncertain, and more dangerous. The threats and countermeasures of the future will be asymmetric and digital, but also nuclear and kinetic—think aggressively weaponizing space, fielding more underwater drones, and guarding against a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack. America must be nimble enough to prepare for all potential threats, but also robust enough to ensure we have every capability—the sheer weight—necessary to confront our adversaries. This means investing heavily in future weapons systems, modernization of existing systems, hardening our electric grid, and substantially enhancing both digital and human intelligence. It also means maintaining—and expanding—the personnel baseline (the number of troops!) needed to support expansive national security efforts. In order to ensure that increases in spending are channeled effectively, serious reforms must be pursued in how the Defense Department procures future weapons systems and how the Pentagon personnel system is structured. We need to spend more on defense, but need to be smart about it.

  2. A Tougher (Not Kinder) Military. While many of these trends are long-standing, Obama’s military has accelerated a safety-obsessed Pentagon, a politically correct and socially engineered military culture, and a litany of rules of engagement (RoE) that endanger our trigger pullers. Risk mitigation and soldier safety have become the military’s holy grail, rather than fostering a warrior ethos; politically correct social promotion—especially through obsessively advancing women in combat and “gender neutral” roles—has replaced the focus on warfighting capability; and White House and Pentagon lawyers have obsessively imposed RoE that tie the hands of our commanders and warriors, and empower our enemies to exploit our delicacy. Radicals who exploit women, children, and civilians to shield themselves should be unapologetically killed—full stop. The next commander in chief needs to ruthlessly reinstill a warrior culture in o
ur military that is prepared to kill bad guys, not check politically correct boxes.

  3. Authorize the Long War with Violent Islamism. America today may not want to be at war with Islamism, but Islamism is at war with us. We should declare war on Violent Islamism in a manner that recognizes the current manifestation of the threat (Islamic State, Al Qaeda, etc.) and sees no time frame, borders, or limitations. This is not to make a case for endless war, but instead the realization that this generational threat is not going away, and our Congress would be well served to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that comprehends this reality. Only a sustained American commitment will put the scourge of Islamism on the retreat, and the weight of congressional authorization would help ensure more institutional legitimacy in this generational cause. (And, for the record, a larger Guantanamo Bay detention facility is a perfect place to hold and interrogate the Islamists we capture on the battlefield.)

  4. Establish a League of Democracies. As laid out in the previous chapter, international institutions like the United Nations and International Criminal Court (ICC) no longer serve the interests of the United States and the West. Instead, as Roosevelt predicted, smaller and hostile states now use these institutions to box in, castigate, and shame America on the world stage. Rather than submit to this self-inflicted persecution, America should end our financial support of the UN and ICC and instead use our geopolitical weight to establish an alternative “League of Democracies” (or similar name). Admission to the League would be voluntary, but also contingent on a real commitment to both freedom principles and defense spending. The League would be empowered to act unilaterally or collectively in defense of individual or shared values and interests. Collectivist states like China and Russia would no longer have veto power over American action, ensuring our diplomatic and military sovereignty is preserved.

  5. An Active Beacon of Freedom. The American story—from world wars to Iraq to Guantanamo Bay—is one of Americans giving their lives, and doing difficult things, so others can live free and peacefully. We have not been perfect, but we have been ruggedly principled. We should not be afraid to propagandize—unapologetically—the role America has played in ensuring the world is a freer place. Moreover, America must continue to support freedom and democracy promotion around the world. Political dissidents—fighting theocratic, collectivist, and authoritarian regimes—still have only one real champion in the world: the United States of America. We must continue to seek formal and informal avenues to support freedom fighters and empower their cause, wherever the cause exists, including demands for political liberalization of regimes that benefit from economic liberalization and global markets (for example, the China Model).

  AN EXHORTATION

  The Great Devotions

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

  —TEDDY ROOSEVELT, 1910

  Come on now all you young men, all over the world. You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the war. You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in Life’s fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are. “The earth is yours and the fullness thereof.” Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities. Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown. Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1930

  This book humbly seeks to project, onto our era, the timeless truths and insights of Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 “Citizenship in a Republic” speech. But both his speech and this book mean very little if they don’t compel people to enter the arena. Ultimately conviction—just like Facebook ranting—is worthless without action. It’s one thing to remember a speech or read a book, and an entirely different thing to put down that book and step boldly into the real-world arena; to step forward and selflessly advance the American experiment in human freedom and flourishing. Not the latest fad, or your interpretation of social justice; but to advance the core of what makes America special—constitutionally protected freedom, citizenship, equal opportunity, and the duty to preserve all three. As Roosevelt powerfully exhorted, the exceptional principles of America’s founding were entrusted to us—the “good citizens” of our generation—to preserve and perpetuate.

  If you’re not going to enter the arena now, then when will you? If not in 2016—with America’s cultural and civic decay in plain sight at home and American leadership falling apart across the world—then when? Whether you’re Winston Churchill’s twenty-five-year-old or a seventy-five-year-old retiree, America needs you—and those questions should ring in your ears today, not tomorrow. There is a job you can do, a family you can lead, a cause you can champion, a group you can join, a team you can coach, a candidate you can support, a business you can start, a child you can raise, a tough assignment you can volunteer for. Something!

  But many of us won’t take that next step, because the arena is a tough place. It is a contested space, full of problems, possibilities, and—ultimately—people. The arena is an intensely personal place—full of nice people and nasty people alike. Working with people for larger principles—rather than manipulating people for self-interest—is not an easy thing to do. There will be disagreements and confrontations, winners and losers; I can guarantee there will be friction. And while we might be civil about it, others—especially the militant Left, but also some supposed friends—will not be. You will be falsely attacked, shamelessly and personally. Nothing worth doing in life is easy, and critics will be everywhere, friends fleeting, and failure likely. Resistance will meet you at every turn—in your job, your community, on the Internet, and with your friends and family; but most powerfully, resistance will come from within. Inner resistance comes in different forms. It comes in the form of piled-up excuses, complications that never resolve themselves, and creeping cowardice that lives within all of us. It’s never the right time to step up and there is always a reason not to fight; too often our inner “no” wins out over the difficult “yes.” Doing nothing is easy; taking a stand is tough.

  This inner resistance is what has made the “Man in the Arena” quote such a powerful reminder in my brief life. It’s why I printed out the quote, put it in that frame, and stuffed it in my green duffle bag of life, and it’s why I hope you’ll do the same. My life has seen many twists and turns, up and downs—I’ve succeeded and I’ve failed. I get attacked, in one form or another, nearly every day. Nothing is perfect, and nobody is remotely perfect; I would be utterly lost without the grace and redemption of Jesus Christ. I suspect you’ve experienced much of the same. Each twist, each scar, and each unexpected complication in life can lead to a callous inner resistance, a reason not to stick your neck out again; not to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and continue to fight. Incredible people—friends and family—make all the difference at those times, no doubt; but without principles, without believing in something greater than yourself, life gets very shallow, sedentary, and sad.
Mustering the courage to enter the arena—critics, complications, and cowardice all—is the only way to both live a life of meaning and ensure you pass the same possibility to the next generation of Americans.

  That is what makes the arena, despite the critics and setbacks, the most rewarding place you can be. You will face criticism, but you will also meet the most amazing, purposeful, and passionate people in your life. You will be challenged, you will be inspired, and you will find resolve you didn’t know you had. The “great enthusiasms, the great devotions” spent for “a worthy cause” will infuse your life with a purpose that self-centered, small, and silly pursuits will never fulfill. In 1895, Winston Churchill found himself amid a firefight in Cuba and remarked, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” I concur, both on the battlefield—and in the arena of life. The more you fight in the civic arena, the more you realize—unlike the battlefield—that most of the time you are shot at “without result.” Your opposition will bluster, they will bluff, they will flat-out lie, and they will beat their chest—but if you stand your ground, standing in the right, you can prevail.

  Our society loves to say “all things in moderation,” which is a nice sentiment, but not conducive to the arena. I’m certain both Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would soundly reject it—which is partly why we see them as great men. Moderation—the mushy middle of the comfort zone—is what keeps so many people from doing what is necessary to make real change, or make their dreams really come true. What if America’s founders had said, let’s take the moderate path and strike a deal with our British masters. What if Lincoln had said, the moderate choice is to compromise on a fifty-fifty split on slavery. Or what if Reagan had said, “Tear down a portion of that wall!” Going big for worthy causes, both nationally and in your local community, is the lifeblood of humanity. Moderation makes cowards—and bores—of even the best man. Dust, sweat, blood, valiance, daring . . . these are not words of moderation, these are words of action. America needs men and women of fortitude, toughness, and purpose. We need good citizens and good patriots. So, permit me to ask again: