Cathy Young writes:

The image of Hegseth that emerges from The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.

The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a “free” country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.

In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.

Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” Although Hegseth acknowledges that the history of the Crusades is “complicated” and that it includes nasty episodes, such as horrific violence toward Jews, he sees in them a model for civilizational conservation against an existential threat. He even justifies them based on a bizarre alternative history in which they served the cause of peace: “After centuries of fighting … Christianity in Europe was saved, Jerusalem was liberated, and Christians did not seek further war with Muslims.” In fact, Jerusalem was captured by Christian forces in the First Crusade in 1099 but recaptured by Muslims in 1187; seven subsequent Crusades over the next century were unsuccessful, and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule—first by North African sultanates, then by the Ottoman Empire—until the 20th century.

Hegseth’s caveat that he is using the Crusades analogically and not calling for actual violence is at least somewhat belied by his suggestion that a future phase of this conflict may involve literal war. He writes in his 2020 book: “[O]ur fight is not with guns. Yet.” One may also ask if Hegseth believes that the time for guns has now come? [Continue reading…]