Pete Hegseth is a Man Without Qualities

James McBride Dabbs was a family friend of my mother’s parents, a liberal white southerner during the Jim Crow period. I’ve been trying to read his book, Who Speaks for the South?, published in 1964, but I keep getting stuck in his introduction. The southerner, Dabbs writes, is “at home in the world,” as a condition “valuable” in itself, as is. The southern spirit accepts the world, loves the world. The Yankee spirit, best embodied by both Puritans and entrepreneurs, which he calls “extreme idealists,” do not love the world. Their attitude towards the world is instrumental. The world as is is an instrument of change for the world of possibilities.

I want to get past this, because I think Dabbs is probably going to a good place with this line of reasoning, but it’s just so hard to square Dabb’s image of the south with the pictures in my mind of angry white parents spitting and screaming insults at brave Black children on their first days at newly integrated schools. Those were not the faces of people at home in the world.

I will eventually finish reading, but I’m retired now, without deadlines, and I have the freedom to take that up some other time.

So I’m reading Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities instead. This is going to be a slow read. When delicate ideas are expressed in bold sentences, I don’t want to leave passages behind. I want to read and re-read them until I’m sure I’ve got it all. It’ll probably take me a year to finish.

Anyway this Austrian writer is traversing similar territory. In a chapter called, “IF THERE IS A SENSE OF REALITY, THERE MUST ALSO BE A SENSE OF POSSIBILITY,” the speaker reflects on the balance between reality and imagination, between what is and what might be.

So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit amore delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood.

When we lose that balance between what is real and what is possible, we lose our grip, we act out, we let our imagination overtake the world. We become flighty. We become, like Ulrich in this novel, “a man without qualities,” grasping at one image of the self after another, never quite himself, never quite real.

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities.

Think of Pete Hegseth: He played at being a soldier. Then he played at being a TV personality. Now he’s playing at being General Patton, prancing across the stage, celebrating square jaws, play-acting leadership over the 800+ career military men and women sitting before him, quietly, stoically, with their vastly superior competencies rooted and honed in the real world.

There are two opposing images of the warrior. One is an image of the soldier as a servant to the citizen. The other image is that of the citizen as the servant of the soldier. A soldier who deliberately murders unarmed civilians in cold blood might be held accountable if he or she is a servant of a democratic government. At least one might hope so, because, even in war, the soldier is supposed to represent democratic aspirations. But Trump pardoned soldiers who murdered civilians, and Hegseth returned the medals to the perpetrators of the Wounded Knee Massacre, and argues that “rules of engagement” are anathema to the warrior ethic.

There will always be brutality in war; someone will always overstep the boundaries civilization sets for the soldier. And there will always be people who courageously resist the temptation to overstep, clinging to their humanity even in the face of battle. But as aspirations, both images are mutually exclusive. We will either punish brutality or we will punish humanity. We will make one a virtue; the other will be a sin.

Like many people, I am disturbed by the images of ICE agents body-slamming peaceful protesters, throwing them on the ground without provocation, sometimes causing real harm. But this is not new. We’ve watched the gradual militarization of policing rise over the decades, and, perhaps it is only one in a series of baby-steps in our country’s long-distance race toward nostalgic Spartan fascism. But we don’t need to resign ourselves to that version of “realism.” We must find a way to love the world while also working to improve it. We can have our dreams and our “qualities” too.