To understand Pete Hegseth, go beyond superficial judgments about his carefully curated image. Beneath the tattooed and testosterone-obsessed public persona there lurks altruism. He aspires to be America’s tutor. Understand this: The secretary of war wants to improve us.
A live-streamed execution by firing squad might seem a problematic instrument for the nation’s moral regeneration. Nidal Hasan’s execution is scheduled for Dec. 3 at Fort Hood in Texas, where in 2009 the former Army psychiatrist killed 13 and wounded 32.
Might this live-streaming desensitize the audience and coarsen society? Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, thought capital punishment “lessens the horror of taking away human life,” thereby fostering murders. Today, it neither encourages nor deters. Death sentences are handed down so capriciously and administered so glacially (Hasan’s is scheduled for 17 years after his crime), its deterrent effect, if any, is vanishingly small.
Capital punishment’s clear effect is to cloak the death-dispensing state with dark majesty, and a claim to infallibility. Hence the sudden enthusiasm, in the early days of Germany’s Third Reich, for executions by handheld axes. This “swift, direct action,” writes Peter Fritzsche in “Hitler’s First Hundred Days,” quoting German prosecutors, emphasized the “superiority of the state.” Nowadays, public firing squads could accomplish this.
But the majesty of Tennessee’s government has not been burnished by its bungling of the not-quite-lethal injection of Christa Pike. She now must be nursed back to sufficient health for the state to consider taking another crack at killing her. Her experience would have made unsatisfactory television.
For centuries, executions were public entertainments. Hegseth says, earnestly if ungrammatically, that Hasan’s killing should be public “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Who are the people whose understanding Hegseth deems unsatisfactory? Surely not terrorists of Hasan’s ilk, for whom “these types of things” (mass murder) are a religious vocation — a calling. Perhaps Hegseth thinks the other 340 million Americans need to be instructed not to commit massacres.
Hegseth’s interest in strengthening cultural norms might prompt him to share his expertise with parents. Does he think children should have the formative experience of watching the live-streamed execution? The wee creatures are soft wax, impressionable, and perhaps counterterrorism indoctrination cannot start too early.
If Hasan’s live-streamed execution is supposed to be statecraft as soulcraft, perhaps the government should sell the television rights to this spectacle. It could be a Netflix special. Or a pay-per-view moneymaker for the government. Public instruction by death in prime time could also be a deficit-reduction measure, financed voluntarily by Americans snacking on bowls of popcorn while viewing.
There is precedent. In 1936, America’s next-to-last public execution (the hanging of a Kentucky Black man convicted of raping a White woman) was enjoyed by perhaps 20,000 spectators, some of whom might have attended the previous evening’s “necktie” parties that were reportedly part of Owensboro’s festivities.
For centuries, executions were public entertainments. Now, even Americans who want capital punishment do not want to see it. It has become particularly grotesque because the punishment often is more than a decade distant from the crime.
Hegseth’s announcement of Hasan’s execution-as-moral-tutorial approximately coincided with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s delivering in Athens a speech celebrating Western civilization. This civilization’s history of punishments is a horrifying yet encouraging story of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
This language is from a 1958 Supreme Court opinion concerning the Eighth Amendment’s proscription of “cruel and unusual punishments.” Leave for another day the debate pitting originalists against others about how, if at all, this “evolving” should influence construing the amendment. But unquestionably standards of decency, and not just about punishment, do evolve.
Regarding standards of all sorts, however, “evolving” is not a synonym for “improving.” Sometimes they regress. Rubio, speaking near the Acropolis, one of Western civilization’s ornaments, serves a president who sits where Lincoln sat.
Put aside the question of whether the soldiers who will be in the Fort Hood firing squad anticipated such an assignment when they enlisted. But credit Hegseth with usefulness. His idea of live-streaming the infliction of death comes as the nation approaches midterm elections widely considered a referendum on the Republicans’ national administration. Hegseth has clarified what should be the preeminent issue: Fill the government with barbarians, you get barbaric government.
Revulsion is not an argument. But regarding Hegseth and the administration he vividly exemplifies, it is a virtue.
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