Ranting replaces leadership in America

How Pete Hegseth channels his boss, as well as 17th-century Christians

If public figures set standards, we’ll soon be a nation of ranters. (Photo by Tycho Atsma for Substack)

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History, literature and the movies are filled with famous rants.

Consider Anthony Weiner, a fiery congressman before he became a pornographer and a punchline, flipping out on the House floor during the 2009 debate on Obamacare, shouting that the Republican party was “a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” Even then, some people were worried about his obviously limited capacity for self-control.

Or think of Shakespeare, who offered actors many opportunities for fine rants. There’s King Lear, driven to madness by betrayal, baying into the storm, “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! … Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!” There’s Shylock, corrupted by a lifetime of anti-Semitic abuse, memorably insisting in Merchant of Venice that the collateral of a pound of flesh is, in fact, a matter of justice. “The villainy you teach me, I shall execute,” he seethes.

And there’s Peter Finch’s Oscar-winning portrayal of TV anchor Howard Beale in the 1976 movie Network. Drenched by rain, he fiercely faces the camera and exhorts viewers to throw open their windows and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” And so they do. Who hasn’t felt like shouting to the skies at some point?

To this genre, let us now add this week’s star turn by Pete Hegseth, the weekend Fox News host elevated by President Trump to lead the most powerful military in history. Onstage in the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense used what was billed as a briefing about the American bombing of Iran as a chance to rant about journalism, a discipline he never practiced and clearly regards as subordinate to propaganda.

Hegseth and his boss were furious that news organizations paid any attention to a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report suggesting that the bombing had set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities by months. It was downright unpatriotic, Hegseth and Trump contended, to report that fact and note that it seemed to contradict Trump’s eager claim — delivered to the nation before the stealth bombers had returned to their bases — that the mission had caused “total obliteration” of the Iran nuclear program.

When doubts about the veracity of that surfaced, Hegseth accused reporters of intentionally distorting facts, though he didn’t rebut what the DIA report said. The journalists did that, Hegseth insisted, just to make Trump look bad, “because you cheer against Trump so hard — it’s in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump.” He praised the attack as both historic and personally orchestrated by the commander-in-chief. “President Trump directed the most secret and most complex military operation in history,” he said firmly, repeatedly praising the president, who gave the OK for the mission from his New Jersey golf club.

Perhaps Hegseth forgot about the D-Day landings at Normandy, which involved the movement of 160,000 troops, clever deception via radar and radio broadcasts, and intricate planning. It might have slipped his memory that on Christmas night, 1776, George Washington stealthily moved 6,400 troops across the icy Delaware River for a bold attack that gave hope to the American Revolution. Maybe, too, he wasn’t paying attention when Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the Iran attack was “fifteen years in the making,” which would date its origin to the administration of President Barack Obama.

No, Hegseth had to be fully aware of both history and reality when he stood before the Pentagon press and joined the ranks of the ranters. But he seemingly decided that it was more important to bring theatrics to his role than to offer leadership with nuance and depth. And you have to think that he needed to show his boss, once again, that he’s on the team.

We teach children to avoid exaggeration, to behave with equanimity and to tell the truth. Yet that seems to no longer be what we expect of our leaders. So with erect stance, crisp delivery and an American flag pocket square tucked in place, Pete Hegseth delivered his rant. It’s part of the way governing is done in America these days.

To understand such ranting, we might look back to England in the middle of the 17^th century. It was a chaotic time: King Charles I had been executed, a civil war pitted royalists against parliamentarians and the established church was roiled by dissent. One of the noteworthy dissenting factions was a loosely-organized group of mostly ordinary people who came to be known as Ranters.

They didn’t take on the title by choice; their opponents gave the Ranters their name as an insult. The term might have derived from the notion of the people being rent away from the proper worship of God — “rent” turning to “rant” since language was more porous in spelling and pronunciation in those days. Or it might have come from the establishment’s ridicule of their beliefs: Etymologists say that our English word “rant” originates in the Dutch randten, which means “to talk foolishly.”

The Ranters were an antinomian sect. That is, they insisted that humans should not feel bound by such religious teachings as the Ten Commandments, nor in fact by any particular moral code. Rather, people ought to be free to shape their behavior by an internal code, they believed, because eternal security — a place in heaven, that is — depended only upon professed faith, not good works. The Ranters’ beliefs had originated a century before, with the German Protestant reformer Johannes Agricola, who said, “If you sin, be happy; it should have no consequence.”

Or, as one of the leading proponents of the Ranter philosophy, Abiezer Coppe, wrote happily, “I can if it be my will, kiss and hug ladies, and love my neighbour’s wife as myself, without sin.”

While you might imagine such a notion would attract both attention and not a few adherants, it also drew widespread condemnation at a time when a more strict Christian faith held sway in western societies. Yet some of what Ranters believed is represented today in a number of churches that consider themselves neo-Calvinist. Strict Calvinism teaches that God chooses who will be saved and who will not, regardless of an individual’s merit — a notion that would have been reassuring, surely, to Johannes Agricola.

And, perhaps, to Pete Hegseth. He has said that he and his third wife, who together have seven children in a blended family, chose where they live based upon a school where they wanted their kids educated, a private school near Nashville that is affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. About 120 churches are a part of that denomination, including the Hegseths’ church in Tennessee. They trace their theology to the Calvinist tradition that inspired the Ranters.

CREC churches teach that Christian men have authority in three spheres — the church, the government and the family — and that they are to maintain order in all three through various forms of discipline. The righteous indignity that Hegseth summons in attacking the reporters who cover the U.S. military can be seen as just such discipline; it is of a piece with the tough image he has sought to project since Trump tapped him for the role.

It’s a different person, certainly, from the Hegseth who had to tamp down allegations of excessive drinking and womanizing in order to win Senate confirmation for his job. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, for example, Hegseth denied any wrongdoing involving the financial settlement he made after a 2017 allegation of sexual assault, which arose while he was going through a divorce from his second wife and after having a child with his current wife.

So it's not hard to imagine that the earlier version of Hegseth might have taken comfort from Abiezer Coppe’s view that the behavior he exhibited would matter not a whit to the Almighty. Not that people can’t change and turn their lives into better models of themselves, of course; we all hope to have done that throughout our lives, and to set ourselves on a constantly better course. But Hegseth has shown how much easier it is to be a ranter than righteous.

You could make the argument, in fact, that ranting is one of the skills most associated with Trumpism, since the President has often revealed himself to be practically unparallelled in bluster, bombast and rant.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this week that Trump should be impeached for launching the bombers without congressional approval, Trump attacked her in a lengthy post on X (née Twitter) that questioned her “Test Scores” (suggesting that she wasn’t very smart), then wandered in the same sentence into a multi-pronged attack on other members of “The Squad” before turning to bragging about his own cognitive test results from years ago, then returned to AOC and the “disgusting” district she represents while advising her not to challenge “our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” – and more. Reasonable discourse it certainly was not; rant it was.

When Iran and Israel exchanged strikes after the American bombing run, the president stood in front of the White House and angrily asserted that the countries “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” perhaps the first time a president has used “the F word” on camera. Some journalism organizations wouldn’t publish the word, since it violated their decency standards. It was just a typical Trump rant.

And who can forget the commander-in-chief’s Memorial Day Weekend performances? They included a commencement address at West Point that diverged into a rambling diatribe about the 1950s developer William Levitt and his “trophy wife” and yacht; then the next day, at what was to be a solemn memorial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, the President instead wandered into declaring that God had made sure he would be president during the World Cup and the Olympics.

Journalists reported all that, which is one of those things that only draws the President’s ire and brings more rants. Some voters clearly like it, just as they like Trump’s seeming ability to do whatever he wishes and evade penalty for any misbehavior. That has been Pete Hegseth’s experience, too.

You might be inclined to conclude that those 17^th-century dissenters were right — that whatever pleases you is just fine. In an earlier era, the President and his Secretary of Defense might have been Ranters. Today, they’re just ranters. It’s an American embarrassment.

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH