To understand Pete Hegseth, the U.S. secretary of defense — or war — one must look past surface impressions such as his polished appearance. One must grasp what lies beneath the public persona of tattoos and a preoccupation with testosterone. Hegseth wants to display masculinity and to edify Americans.
His decision to broadcast live the execution by firing squad of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, a death row inmate, falls in that vein. The execution is scheduled for Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, the Army base in Texas. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was sentenced to death for killing 13 fellow service members and wounding 32 others in 2009.
Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician who signed the Declaration of Independence, argued that capital punishment "lessens the horror of taking away human life" and therefore encourages murder. Today it can be said that the death penalty neither encourages nor deters killing. Death sentences are handed down inconsistently and carried out slowly. In Hasan's case, the execution comes 17 years after the crime. Whatever deterrent effect exists must be regarded as minimal.
The evident effect of capital punishment is to clothe the state that administers death in a dark majesty and an aura of infallibility. According to Peter Fritzsche's book "Hitler's First Hundred Days," prosecutors in the early years of the Third Reich praised executions by hand axe as swift and direct measures that underscored the superiority of the state. Today, it can be said that public shootings serve that role.
Tennessee found itself in an awkward position after attempting to execute death row inmate Christa Pike. A botched lethal injection turned the execution into a controversy. The state was left in the paradoxical position of having to restore her health so that it could consider executing her again.
Hegseth, using ungrammatical language, argues for Hasan's public execution. People "need to understand that heinous crimes carry serious consequences," he said. But who are the people he wants to understand this? Surely not terrorists like Hasan. For them, indiscriminate slaughter is a kind of religious calling. Hegseth apparently believes that 340 million Americans must be taught not to commit massacres. Keenly interested in reinforcing cultural norms, he seems to believe that children should form their characters through the experience of watching an execution live. It appears he regards no age as too young to begin instruction about terrorism.
If the live broadcast of Hasan's execution is "powerful edification and statecraft," the government should sell the rights to the footage. It could be made into a Netflix special or a pay-per-view program generating revenue for the government. This program, enlightening the public through death, could even be a way to reduce the budget deficit, because Americans watching with popcorn would pay for it voluntarily.
The United States has a precedent for this. In 1936, roughly 20,000 spectators watched the hanging of a Black man in Kentucky who had been convicted of raping a white woman. For centuries, executions were public entertainment. But now even Americans who support capital punishment do not want to watch. The death penalty has become a strange institution in which executions routinely come more than a decade after the crime.
Hegseth announced his intention to use Hasan's execution for moral instruction at almost the same moment that Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech in Athens praising Western civilization. The history of punishment in Western civilization contains material both appalling and inspiring. Rubio, speaking near the Acropolis, serves a president who sits in the very place where Abraham Lincoln sat.
Set aside for a moment the question of whether the soldiers of the unit that will carry out the shooting at Fort Hood anticipated such a duty when they enlisted. It must be acknowledged that Hegseth has done something meaningful. His notion of broadcasting the moment of death live came ahead of midterm elections that amount to a referendum on a Republican administration. He has made clear what matters most to Americans: fill a government with barbarians and you get a barbarous government. The barbarism of Hegseth and the Donald Trump administration will teach the public a great deal.