To start with a bit of personal history: I was the drum major of my high school marching band. To prepare to wear the big hat and carry the baton, I went to a summer drum major camp at a big university in the west; I was told that I had to “learn some struts.”
So I did. You know, I could kick my legs straight ahead, lean way back and bound ahead of the band from the goal line and I could whip the baton around from my waist to above my head. So I know a good strut when I see one.
Which brings me to Pete Hegseth, leader of the most powerful military force ever assembled on earth. I tell you, the man can strut.
When I think of Hegseth, I picture the video of him stalking back and forth across a stage last fall in front of hundreds of generals and admirals who had been summoned to hear his philosophy of military preparedness – which includes a ban on talk about climate change and (in his words) “dudes in dresses” and overweight generals. And as he said all that, Hegseth literally strutted in front of the brass.
That tough talk makes it surprising to note how fragile Hegseth actually is. The other day he apparently flipped out when news outlets published what he considered to be unflattering photographs of him. So he promptly banned photographers from his press briefings. Who knew that this flinty, square-jawed fellow might be so easily upset?
It’s odd. A fixation on one’s personal appearance is more the stuff of someone in show business than in government service. But it’s not just Hegseth, a former second-string Fox News anchor. There’s a lot of that sort of thing going around.
Of course, politics has always been theatrical at some level. Remember Patrick Henry, he of the famous 1775 “give me liberty or give me death” speech, or Calvin Coolidge, who posed while he was fly-fishing in the Black Hills to establish that the president was an ordinary guy.
But there’s an emerging sense that many politicians – even, maybe, most of them in the Trump era – have come to see their jobs as being more about symbolic gestures than substantive change.
This is most obvious in Congress, where ideological purity and public visibility have become the currency of success. Blame the Supreme Court, partly: By declaring partisan gerrymandering acceptable under our Constitution, the Court has locked in 90 percent of congressional districts as noncompetitive between the two major parties. Last week the authoritative Cook Political Report rated only 17 House races out of 435 as “toss ups” this year, and just 19 more as “leaning” one way or the other.
Representatives’ best chance of re-election, then, comes from satisfying only the fraction of voters who participate in primaries – and they tend to demand ideological purity. It’s politics as spectacle, featuring demonstrations of rigid adherence to an ideology in order to thrill the partisans.
So for many politicians, keeping a problem alive usually yields more success than solving it.
This go-for-the-show approach is amplified by social media, which now is the main information source for a majority of U.S. voters. So getting a hit in the media has come to matter more than achieving a useful outcome in governing. It is an unsettling reality of American politics, and one that won’t change until voters shut down the shows of the worst producers of such cynical political theater.
So we have vessels blown up in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and federal troops in the streets of our cities, all showcasing the Trump administration’s fight against drugs and immigrants from other countries. We have an unconstitutional push to put the federal government in charge of elections, supposedly to stop non-citizen voting, which is actually a nonexistent problem. And you have to wonder: What is this war in Iran really about? Is it about making the world safer? Or might it be about showcasing how tough Donald Trump and his crew are?
But the TV host-turned-Secretary of War needs to be careful. He is talented at reading a teleprompter convincingly on the Pentagon stage. Yes, the man can strut. But Pete Hegseth has to know that this show has only one actor in a lead role, and you never really know how this star will want things to play out.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
