Searching Under the Street Lamp

Reading news stories about the confirmation of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, I was struck by the irrelevance of most of the debate, focused largely on the claim that he drank to much, was unfaithful to his wife, treated women badly. All of that, not surprising in a soldier, may be true but is almost entirely irrelevant to whether he would do a good job as defense secretary. The alcohol charges reminded me of a possibly apocryphal Lincoln quote:

"I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals"

The Guardian had a story listing five different issues for Hegseth’s confirmation. Only with the fifth did they get to the most relevant issue, the claim that he had been forced to step down by two nonprofits due to allegations of financial mismanagement (in addition to claims of sexual misconduct and drinking). Somewhere there has probably been a news story going into more details of what the allegations were and the evidence for and against them but I have not seen it.

The reason Trump wants Hegseth as defense secretary is to reverse progressive policies. The reason some Democratic senators don’t want him is that they don’t want those policies reversed. A sensible debate over confirming him would focus on two questions, whether he was competent to run the department and whether the policies he opposes should be preserved. The first would produce boring articles on the details of his past performance, the second difficult to verify claims about the performance of women in combat and similar issues.

Stories about getting drunk and sleeping around are more entertaining, easier for the public, which reads news mainly for entertainment, to engage with, easier for the random member of the public to evaluate. Few of us are competent to judge, on third hand evidence, whether an executive was fired because he was incompetent or because he lost out in organizational politics. Practically all of us have strong opinions on adultery and sexual assault.

This is not the first example of the pattern, not even the first involving a candidate for secretary of defense.

In 1989, Tower was President George H. W. Bush's choice to become Secretary of Defense. In a stunning move, particularly since Tower was himself a former Senate colleague, the Senate rejected his nomination. The largest factors were concern about possible conflicts of interest and Tower's personal life, in particular allegations of alcohol abuse and womanizing. (Wiki)

A more prominent example is the conflict over Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Most of the attention went to Christine Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were both high school students. The claim, whether true or false, had little relevance to whether Kavanaugh belonged on the court; his behavior as a drunk teenager was evidence of neither his competence as a judge nor his legal views, for both of which better evidence was available in his past opinions. It was, however, a much more entertaining story and easier for both sides to get angry, either at Kavanaugh or at Ford, over.

The fact that there was no way to know if the story was true was no problem for partisans on either side.¹

A more bizarre case was the controversy over whether Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pet cats. So far as I know the only evidence produced was a picture of an immigrant not from Haiti cooking what appeared to be a cat, pet status unknown. It was much easier, at a time when immigration was a hot political issue, to get people excited over pet cats than over the effect of illegal immigrants on wages, housing, and prices or evidence of what fraction supported themselves by crime or welfare, what fraction by working, questions more relevant to whether the country gained or lost by letting them in.

Elon Musk, during a talk at Trump’s inauguration, twice made a weird gesture that looked a little like a Nazi salute. The result was to set left and right arguing about exactly what a Nazi salute was and how close his gesture was to one. If his objective was to appeal to American Nazis or announce his allegiance to their ideology he could surely have done a better imitation, accompanied by suitable words. My own guess is that he was trolling, leveraging the tendency of the American left to interpret conservatives as Nazis either to make them look silly, for his own amusement — Musk is a very weird guy — or, on the four dimensional chess theory, to distract the attention of his critics from something more important he was doing.

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1. I have a Bayesian calculation in an old post concluding that, although the accusation might be true, the fact that Ford made it is weak evidence that it is.