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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: An unqualified Defense Secretary is on the verge of confirmation [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-15
Benjamin Wittes/Lawfare:
The Cult of Unqualified Authenticity
I’ll come to these latter—ahem—qualifications momentarily, but let’s pause a moment over the larger proposition, because it seems to me an essential one to understanding this current political moment.
You can see in it so many of the central tenets of Trump’s approach to governance: the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.
It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual [Pete Hegseth] who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a “warrior ethos” America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.
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