by Pete Hegseth
—BARACK OBAMA, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, JUNE 2008
Speechmaking has always interested me. As a kid, I remember watching my father confidently address his high school basketball team. The sermons our Baptist minister delivered when I was growing up (and he still delivers them today) were always poignant and powerful. When I was a teenager, Billy Graham’s crusades were like nothing I’d ever seen. So, as an undergraduate at Princeton University, I sought the academic study of rhetoric—devouring courses like “Behind the Bully Pulpit” and “Political Rhetoric.” My senior thesis was titled “Modern Presidential Rhetoric and the Cold War Context” (it’s not worth reading), and my research led me to Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic”—spawning, in many ways, this book. I have always been drawn to leaders who can turn a phrase.
A quick study of the literature on rhetoric reveals a central question: how effective is rhetoric if it is not grounded in life experience? The ancient Greeks wrestled with both sides. Plato looked down on the orator and criticized rhetoric: “It doesn’t involve expertise; all you need is a mind which is good at guessing, some courage, and a natural talent.” Aristotle, Plato’s protégé, took a more utilitarian view: “it is necessary to be also acquainted with the elements of the question . . . in each case, to see the available means of persuasion.”
But it is the Roman citizen and godfather of oratory, Cicero, who remains the gold standard of ancient analysis. As a gifted orator and political statesman, Cicero used his persuasive rhetoric in defense of the Roman Republic, even at the cost of his own life—he was brutally murdered in 43 BC for his oratory and writings. Stated Cicero, “I hold that eloquence is dependent upon the trained skill of highly educated men . . . and made to depend on a sort of natural talent and on practice.” Cicero believed talent and practice, mixed with experience and education, created the best orator; otherwise “oratory is but an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage.”
Cicero was right. He just didn’t see the teleprompter coming.
But Teddy Roosevelt did. He understood the same thing Cicero did, but with a better grasp of the devastating modern consequences of misused rhetoric. A student of Western philosophy, young Teddy read the ancient Greeks. He understood the timeless debates about nature, duties, and oratory—and took them into account. Like America’s founding generation, Teddy understood that speechmaking was a very powerful tool, capable of swaying the hearts and minds of average citizens. In the hands of a Cicero—a “defender of the Republic”—rhetoric was a powerful tool for good. But, as Teddy Roosevelt warned, in the hands of a “phrase-monger,” oratory is a “noxious element in the body politic” and will “do wrong to the republic.”
Enter Greek columns, two teleprompters, and a presidential candidate with “the gift of oratory.” I remember watching Senator Barack Obama deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. Watching on television from a friend’s apartment in Denver, I was awestruck by his ability. He was at the top of his rhetorical game. An entire nation was captivated. As it was during the entire campaign, Barack Obama’s rhetoric was lofty—even by the standards of Greek gods. He extolled the American electorate with aspirational visions of hope, change, and healing. After eight years of George W. Bush and difficult wars, Americans wanted something different and projected that desire on a young, inexperienced, but very articulate candidate who promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
The substance of his lofty rhetoric—fundamental transformation—raises a key question. Have you ever looked at your husband or wife, your boyfriend or girlfriend—or anyone you loved—and said: “I love you so much. You are so beautiful, wonderful, and talented. But there’s just this one thing, I need to fundamentally transform you.” It sounds absurd, right? Best-case scenario, they look at you sideways with a sad look, tears in their eyes. Worst-case scenario, they stand up, slap you in the face, and tell you to go to hell!
But what if you said it charmingly, with a smooth smile? And while you said it, you made big promises and cast grand visions about what your relationship would look like after the transition? What if you told them they would be more perfect, and so would you? That everything would be easier, fairer, and more equitable for both of you. That nobody would judge them, and everyone would love you both. And that if there were still problems in the relationship after the transformation, it would be somebody else’s fault.
On a personal level, it sounds absurd. But behind a podium, armed with a Harvard degree and a silver tongue, the words sound like a vision for a new future. So, rather than look at him sideways or slap him in the face, Americans enthusiastically embraced Barack Obama. They embraced his rhetoric, in the manner Teddy Roosevelt warned against. Most voters projected their view of “hope” and “change” onto the Obama candidacy, a basic desire for a better life (and/or to make history). What they didn’t know at the time, because his speeches were delivered so eloquently, was that their vote for Obama was a vote for a radical—if very seductive—vision for “transforming” America’s future. His words were soothing to America’s ears, but as Teddy Roosevelt warned, they were “divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand.” Obama’s rhetoric sold a vision for America divorced from what made us great in the first place.
I’m not saying Barack Obama is a terrible person. By all accounts he’s a kind man, a loving husband, and a good father. He’s arrogant and I disagree with him on almost everything, but I respect his ability to navigate our political system. That said, he does want to “fundamentally transform” America. Not because he’s a Muslim sleeper agent or secretly seeks America’s utter destruction, but because he has a fundamentally different view of our country than most Americans—and our founders. One of his first actions upon entering the White House was to send back to Great Britain a bust of Winston Churchill that was gifted to the United States during his predecessor’s term—setting the tone for his administration. Many insightful books have been written, and films produced, that convincingly confirm Obama’s anti-Western and anticolonial worldview and demonstrate how his upbringing, education, and associations forged a man with radical leftist views who does not believe America is an exceptional nation. They are all correct.
But Obama is not the problem. He is merely a symptom of much larger problems—two problems, really. The first problem is a citizenry easily seduced by his rhetoric. Even the most dangerous views can be beaten back by an informed and invested citizenry; but if citizens of a republic are asleep at the wheel, they can be “carried away by mere oratory” (which, for the record, happens on both sides of the aisle!). The second problem, however, is even deeper. I call it the Left’s cultural seduction of America’s citizens. The Left has managed to engineer an incremental, but fundamental, reexamination of America’s core tenets—and, by extension, the core tenets of Western civilization and citizenship. From human nature to political and economic freedom to American virtues, the Left’s misunderstanding—then distortion—of what made America great and free is the root cause of America’s cultural, civic, and ultimately political erosion. Barack Obama and his rhetoric just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
When I served in Afghanistan, I was a senior counterinsurgency instructor. My job was to train American, allied, and Afghan troops and leaders on our strategy in various parts of the country. We taught military leaders to look for root causes—the real reasons—for the insurgency in their area. It was far from a perfect science, and some root causes ran much deeper than anything a local military authority could address. But the general thrust was to ensure that military, diplomatic, or economic efforts were not wasted on superficial “symptoms” of the insurgency. If Afghan or NATO units could address root causes in an area—like killing bad guys, providing swift dispute resolution, or irrigating crops—it could help dry up population support for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
If Obama is just a symptom of a larger problem, then wha
t are the root causes of America’s leftward lurch? What is the real reason for the Left’s seduction of America’s citizens and culture? Steeped in history and freed from true partisan allegiance, Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” leads the way—getting to the heart of what is missing in American citizenship today. His speech, and my experience, reveal four core root causes.
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Roosevelt opens his speech by describing to his “Old World” French audience America’s ongoing “New World” transition. From “stump-dotted clearings” to “fertile farm land,” from “log cabins” to larger towns—America in 1910 was slowly moving from “pioneer days” to an “industrial civilization.” But his imagery had little to do with material progress on American soil, and everything to do with the impact that progress has on the land’s people. Teddy recognizes the inevitable progress of the young American nation, and in doing so, tips his cap to a sophisticated European audience that—for better or for worse—provides a preview of America’s future. Teddy then delivers an overarching prophecy to a progressing America: Material progress does not equal moral or civic progress. If anything, “progress” exacerbates the best and worst attributes of citizenship.
RIGHTS, NOT DUTIES
Specifically, Teddy warns against a “self-centered” citizenry that is “far more conscious of its rights than of its duties.” That is Roosevelt’s first root cause for what undermines the bedrock of any great republic—her citizenry. When individuals are raised, educated, socialized, or governed to expect rather than earn, it creates a social disease that is incredibly difficult to cure. When duties or obligations of the individual become either the mandate of the state or an immutable “right” to that individual, the foundations of citizenship—and thereby the American experiment—are fundamentally threatened.
I’m not referring only to the expansive modern welfare and entitlement state. Many observers of the “self-centered” trend point only to the economic manifestation, but this point is not just about the 47 percent of Americans who Mitt Romney famously said were “dependent upon government.” Economic dependency, as bad as it is, is not the worst manifestation of rights usurping duties. Economic policies—like “workfare” or wage subsidies, for example—can be enacted to shift citizens off government payrolls and into self-sufficiency. During his two terms in office, Barack Obama moved millions of Americans onto some form of government assistance, but the next president could roll that back. Not easily, but it could be done.
The more dangerous manifestation is societal—not economic. Replacing duties with rights produces a much different type of citizen, and eventually a much different kind of society—a “fundamentally transformed” one. Morally, the state regulates and “incentivizes” a wider variety of direct and indirect actions, replacing responsible individuals, robust families, friendly neighbors, tight-knit communities, and conservative churches in the process. Quietly, the government usurps sound individual decision making as well as the collective moral centers of gravity. Big government slowly gobbles up civil society. Civically, the average citizen gets more cynical about, and detached from, the process—less proactively engaged, less proud of his or her country, and more concerned with fleeting “feelings” than steadfast “duties.” In short, replacing duties with entitlements leads to a society that is less free, less driven, less responsible, and less civic-minded. Less American.
America’s founders understood the proper role of rights and made that understanding central to their founding premise. The “unalienable rights” of American citizens—per the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the Constitution, and codified in the Bill of Rights—are endowed on us not by the government, but by a Creator. The government is instituted to “secure these rights,” not create an ever-expanding list of new rights that it must also manage and secure.
The rights our founders laid out, and Teddy Roosevelt spoke of often, were grounded in core principles and liberties (“negative rights,” in political science speak). “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are opportunities afforded each American, and the government exists to protect these basic principles. The same holds for basic rights like the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. With these rights, the duty—the choice—lies with the individual to act on them, and the government exists to ensure the individual has an equal opportunity to exercise those rights (with powers not enumerated reserved for the people and the states). These negative rights are not the ones Teddy Roosevelt was worried about.
His warning was grounded in the type of “rights” his fifth cousin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, introduced thirty years later through his New Deal legislative packages. While FDR was not the first president to introduce “positive rights” to the political debate, he was the first to fully institutionalize them. Alongside rights of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship,” FDR introduced a new right—“freedom from want”—that shifted America’s collective perception of rights. Positive rights like the right to economic security, health care, or housing create a duty on others—usually the government—to act. As such, the duty to ensure—not just secure—these rights and responsibilities shifts from the individual to the government. Phrased differently, positive rights are entitlements.
Following the Great Depression, what started as an earnest attempt by FDR to care for the downtrodden in a time of need eventually morphed and metastasized into an expansive set of government programs, regulations, and mandates that have elevated the “rights” of consumers, taxpayers, and the less fortunate above the “duties” of all citizens. Where the government steps in, citizens and communities are crowded out. Again, our temptation is to indict only the most obvious manifestation of this trend—the modern welfare state. But as bad as economic dependency is, the deeper cultural rot is worse: a citizenry blinded by a selfish attachment to new government-bestowed rights and allergic to duties and obligations to family, neighbors, faith, and, ultimately, country.
Citizens who don’t work never actually earn. Citizens (and corporations!) who rely on government—and therefore never fail—never actually achieve. Citizens who have no faith or allegiance greater than themselves never understand the shared sacrifice that led men to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for their freedom. Citizens who lack the “great solid qualities” Teddy Roosevelt outlined are not citizens, they are subjects, answering to a system that perpetuates a larger government, smaller citizens, and broken families. Teddy knew this, saying, “Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.” What good is a “right” if, once obtained, you give away your founding premise—your citizenship—in the process?
MAN, PERFECTED
This brings me to the second root cause. Completing his thought about replacing duties with rights, Teddy ends the sentence by saying that material progress can breed a citizenry “blind to its own shortcomings.” Teddy goes on to state multiple times throughout the speech that a man of progress—a man of “refinement”—may also believe himself to be a more perfected person; thereby blinded to the fallen human nature within each of us. But Teddy Roosevelt, a student of Western civilization, the American founding, and his own shortcomings, understands that human nature is not perfectible. There are limits to progress, starting with the human soul.
Like generations before, I’ve experienced this on the battlefield, and in the shortfalls of my own life. Human beings are capable of wonderful things, but also terrible cruelty. Humans build beautiful museums, but also dig mass graves. We build shrines to great democrats, but also dictators. We’ll fight civil wars to set men free, but also to enslave them. Men and women are not angels, not even close. Not in 1776, not in 1910, and not in 2016. No amount of regulations, policies, agree
ments, forums, or social experiments will remove the deceptive, devious, and destructive tendencies of our sinful nature. We may be able to hide, hinder, or temporarily suppress the inner demons of human nature—but they never go away. We can build systems and structures that mask our raw human tendencies, but we will never heal them. The line between civilization and savagery will always be thin.
Ultimately, Christian, Muslim, or Jew—religious or not—the recognition of our own sins, failures, and fallen nature reminds us to take a humble, constrained, and realistic view of the world we live in. Our shortcomings should remind us of the thin threshold between society and its breakdown. Citizens with a healthy sense of their own imperfections are less likely to believe in the perfection of man, and thereby less likely to devise government structures dependent on perfected citizens. From communism to socialism—to every form of utopian statism in between—leaders who ignore human nature will always tinker with power structures that, in theory, end in hypothetical utopia. Except, as history teaches, visions of utopia never end well in practice—promising heaven, but delivering hell. This fundamental detachment from human nature today, seductively posited by modern progressives, is the second root cause of America’s cultural seduction.
NO RIGHT OR WRONG
When moral duty and civic obligation are no longer valued, a third root cause emerges that is a manifestation of the second. If you believe man to be perfectible through societal progress, that means the big questions of our day—right and wrong, good and evil—become subjective, and largely moot. Good and bad—absent any religious or civic core—become old-fashioned and passé formulations perpetuated by conservatives, or “enemies of progress.” If everyone is right according to his or her own moral compass, then the founding premise of America is wrong and the trajectory of history inevitable. In that case the ideas and institutions of the West—and America—are obsolete.
