Vice Is a Moat
If Pete Hegseth is confirmed, it won’t be in spite of his personal failings. It’ll be because of them.
1. Secretary Pete
Here is the thing about Pete Hegseth:
Imagine that his character was sterling. That he was a fine, upstanding man, admired by all who know him. That he had dedicated his life to service and been judged to be as good a human being as Mister Rogers or Dolly Parton.
And now imagine that his politics were perfectly in line with your politics. Whatever you believe, he believed. As a matter of ideology and temperament, Hegseth is your soulmate.
Even if both of those things were true, Hegseth would still be a historically, hilariously, unfit nominee for secretary of defense.
The job of SecDef is almost impossible to conceive in its immensity. You manage a workforce of 2.87 million employees and a budget of $842 billion. You are responsible for the longest and most complex logistics operation ever devised by man. You are tasked with handling today’s national security challenges and looking over the horizon to plan for challenges that will appear years after you have left the job. You must have a fluent understanding of large organizations and bureaucracies. You must be a subject-matter expert in either war fighting, technology, or international affairs—but it helps if you have mastery over more than one of those disciplines.
Here are the backgrounds of the last nine SecDefs:
Lloyd Austin: Vice chief of staff of the Army, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, commander of CENTCOM.
Mark Esper: Deputy assistant SecDef, senior leader at Raytheon, secretary of the Army.
Jim Mattis: Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, commander of CENTCOM.
Ash Carter: Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, Kennedy School of Government, under SecDef for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
Chuck Hagel: Founder of a technology company, chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, U.S. senator for twelve years.
Leon Panetta: Member of Congress for sixteen years, White House chief of staff, director of CIA.
Robert Gates: Deputy national security advisor, director of CIA.
Donald Rumsfeld: Member of Congress for six years, head of White House Office of Economic Opportunity, ambassador to NATO, White House chief of staff.
William Cohen: U.S. senator for eighteen years (preceded by six years in the House of Representatives), including serving on the Senate’s Intelligence, Armed Services, and Government Affairs Committees.
Then there’s Hegseth, whose CV reads:
Served in the Army National Guard.
Briefly led a small, failing nonprofit.
Helped host a weekend show on Fox News.
Looking at all of this, you’re probably asking yourself, “How is this guy getting a confirmation hearing at all? Especially with his personal vices?”
But that’s the key. Hegseth isn’t getting a hearing in spite of his vices. He’s getting this hearing because of them.
Yesterday Rebecca Traister reported on how Senate Democrats are thinking about Hegseth’s hearing:
Some Democrats retain the wan hope that they can persuade a Republican or two to actually defeat Hegseth’s nomination, and they worry that coming in ablaze will impede those efforts. Winning, said several staffers from offices less inclined to light Hegseth up, would mean not leaning in on the rape allegations and instead creating space to oppose him on grounds that Republicans can also oppose him on. Instead of giving Fox News the woke-mob martyrdom its audience craves, they say they can highlight his financial mismanagement and lack of relevant experience.
What an extraordinary observation. Democrats believe that bringing up Hegseth’s many personal and moral failings would help his confirmation prospects.
Because Republican senators would then feel as though they had to confirm him.
Because Republican voters would rally around him in solidarity.
Because of his vices.
A minute ago I asked you to imagine a Pete Hegseth who was a wonderful human being. Well, that Pete Hegseth would probably get rejected by the Republican Senate. Because Republican voters wouldn’t feel any particular attachment to him. Which would liberate Republican senators to politely scuttle his nomination on the grounds that he was manifestly unqualified for the job. At which point Republican voters would shrug and move on. The GOP base would not feel any more loyalty to the alternate-universe Good Guy Hegseth than they do to Marco Rubio or Scott Bessent.
2. Moats
In business, a moat is anything that prevents competitors from assailing your position.
For instance, Apple’s moat is hardware quality. No other device manufacturer can compete with Apple on the fit and finish of its hardware. And because Apple makes its own hardware, no other tech company can truly compete with it on software.
Amazon’s moat is cloud computing. Amazon has created an astonishing logistics operation but Walmart is in the same business and Shopify holds the potential to be a rival retail aggregator. What Amazon has that no one else does is Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing division so big and dominant that it has the ability to underwrite losses of almost any scale. Which allows the rest of Amazon to push into other business sectors and weather early losses as they grow.1
Tesla’s moat is its stock price. It does not matter how many cars TSLA sells or how many times it fails to deliver products on schedule or at projected cost. So long as TSLA’s stock price remains stratospheric, no other automotive company can threaten it.2
In the Trumpified world of Republican politics, vice has become a moat. If a figure is a bad enough person, it inspires fanatical loyalty in Republican voters and helps protect them from challenges.
Tim wrote about “vice signaling” four years ago and it has stuck with me ever since.
Jesus telling the Pharisees that acts were more important than words somehow became Cheeto Jesus telling the Twitterati that acts and words were both bad—LOSERS!—and the righteous man was really the one who had no compunction about his cruelty.
Saying you wanted to save the world was out. Actually trying to save the world was double-out. The only thing people admired anymore was the balls on the guy who wanted to watch the world burn.
The term [vice signaling], popularized by Jane Coaston, refers to people who now gleefully portray themselves publicly as amoral or immoral in order to demonstrate some sort of strength or sophistication. . . .
How did we get here? Because of the corrupting influence of Trumpism.
If we were talking about President Mitt Romney, there is no way—none, at all—that Brit Hume would be working overtime to vice signal. He would be rightly praising the president's model behavior and discretion. We know this to be true. Instead we have a Republican president who is—just objectively—a man of utterly irredeemable personal character. And so, in order to justify their continued enabling of him, people such as Hume begin to not just ignore virtue, but bow toward vice.
Since then vice signaling has grown from a peculiar social pathology linked to Donald Trump to a broader mode of ethics in which Republican voters embrace personal vices in their champions.
Why?
I can see the Conservative Inc. answer:
Liberal elites have cried wolf so many times over the years that Republican voters no longer believe any allegations of bad behavior.
But I don’t think that’s true. Republican voters get really exercised over the idea of vice in their enemies. Look at their interest in the “Biden crime family” and Hunter Biden. Republican voters are so obsessed with the concept of vice that they make up crimes they then attribute to their enemies: That’s what QAnon and frazzledrip are all about. There is an entire galaxy of conspiracy theories in which Republican voters obsess over the imaginary wrong-doings of people they hate, such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.3
My theory is this:
Republicans embrace vice not because they believe that the accused Republican figures are innocent, but because they believe they are guilty. And so these voters exist in the hope that their champion will go on to hurt their enemies on their behalf.
After all: If a guy is willing to rape a woman, surely he can be counted on to visit destruction on Democrats, or woke generals, or whoever.
I don’t know. Maybe you have a better theory. I’d like you to discuss this phenomenon in the comments.
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3. Royals
There’s a brilliant piece in the New Atlantis by Charles C. Mann. It’s paywalled, but worth your support.
At the rehearsal dinner I began thinking about Thomas Jefferson’s ink. My wife and I were at a fancy destination wedding on a faraway island in the Pacific Northwest. Around us were musicians, catered food, a full bar, and chandeliers, all set against a superb ocean sunset. Not for the first time, I was thinking about how amazing it is that relatively ordinary middle-class Americans could afford such events — on special occasions, at least.
My wife and I were at a tableful of smart, well-educated twenty-somethings — friends of the bride and groom. The wedding, with all its hope and aspiration, had put them in mind of the future. As young people should, they wanted to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well.
But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.
This is not a statement about Kids These Days so much as about Most People These Days. Too many of us know next to nothing about the systems that undergird our lives. Which is what put me in mind of Thomas Jefferson and his ink.
Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.
Jefferson was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours. This is true literally, in that modern forms of steel and other metal alloys hadn’t been invented. But it is most true in the staggering fact that everyone at the rehearsal dinner was born and raised in luxury unimaginable in Jefferson’s time.
The young people at my table were anxious about money: starter-job salaries, high rents, student loans. But they never worried about freezing in their home. They could go to the sink and get a glass of clean water without fear of getting sick. Most of all, they were alive. In 1800, when Jefferson was elected president, more than one out of four children died before the age of five. Today, it is a shocking tragedy if a child dies. To Jefferson, these circumstances would have represented wealth and power beyond the dreams of avarice. The young people at my table had debts, but they were the debts of kings.
Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people, including everyone at the rehearsal dinner. In Jefferson’s time, not even the president of the United States had what we have. But few of us are aware of that, or of what it means.
Read the whole thing. This is the first in a series by Mann about how our modern world works. I cannot recommend it—and the New Atlantis—enough.
Amazon Web Services does as much revenue annually as all of Tesla’s divisions, combined.
Fun fact: Tesla sold 1.789 million vehicles in 2024. It has a market cap of $1.26 trillion. Toyota sold 10 million vehicles in 2024 and has a market cap of $292 billion. Yay capitalism!
It is worth saying that at present, Democrats are entirely different from Republicans on the subject of vice. They do not always succeed in chasing bad actors out of their party, but they do not rally to Democrats who exhibit personal failings. Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams did not have Democratic voters circle the wagons around them.
The closest you could get would be the Democratic protection of Bill Clinton in 1998. But that’s a generation ago.
This country has a massive vice problem. It's not that everyone is some sort of sexual deviant. The vice problem comes from the fact that our society is organized to honor one of the seven deadly sins: greed.
JVL, I finally get what you're saying. Republicans now view virtuous people as tame conformists who will not have the strength to make the changes that must be made. On the other hand, sinful people are both willing to break the rules of morality and to break with old structures and policies that are deeply entrenched.
There is a partial truth to this that makes it seductive.