Merit or Mediocrity: Pete Hegseth and more Rightwing Hypocrisy
The fascist Right in the US has a warped interpretation of who is deserving, who is qualified, who is right for a given job, a perverted view of the notion of meritocracy. The Right has long decried the concept of equitable treatment, positively loathing any initiative which (in reality or in their perception) favors a member of a historically marginalized group over others (typically, white people, and specifically white men). It’s unfair, they claim. Only the best candidates should be rewarded and organizations (and by extension society) suffer when less qualified people are given positions of authority. Of course, their indignance at such injustice rarely extends to those of their own kind. They have no apparent compunction when it comes to putting another white man in power, however mediocre or outright unqualified.
In his confirmation hearings, noted alcoholic and rapist Pete Hegseth regularly cited meritocracy as the metric by which he believes people should be given positions of power and authority. He insisted on the importance of basing such decisions on merit, how qualified people are for positions. The display was a sick and embarrassing joke, because of course Hegseth was not nominated to be Secretary of Defense based on merit or qualifications. He’s done nothing to merit such a position and is ridiculously unqualified.
Hegseth is a living caricature of white male mediocrity. There’s nothing exceptional about him. He’s gotten a lot of lucky breaks, but never really excelled at anything. In fact, it seems that any time he’s been in a position of authority, he’s fucked it up. He’s just another bland mediocre man who’s latched onto white supremacy, Christian nationalism, pathetic male chauvinism, and a clownish style of patriotism, because he has no significant personal attributes to give him any sense of self-worth. Like all his kind, because he is aware of how completely unspecial he is personally, he champions superficial cultural identity traits as evidence of his superiority. Being that he’s not only mediocre, but a drunk, a rapist, and an asshole, how else could he justify the products of privilege he’s enjoyed? How else could he pretend to deserve any of what’s been handed to him?
The Right regularly proves that their bullshit bleating about merit and qualification and awarding people based on their abilities is just that. The only real metric they appear concerned with is whether one is a white male with favorable political views and loyalties. They have, after all, pushed the presidency of, and demonstrated slavish loyalty, to a preposterously unqualified sack of human shit, twice. And of course, many of these men, clogging the halls of power and/or polluting the media with their meritocratic rhetoric are painfully mediocre, on their best days. Very few of the people in positions of power in this country are at all qualified.
The truth is that nearly all these men did not attain their positions based on merit or qualifications. They are not the best and brightest. Often they are simply the wealthiest, the best connected, the most ambitious and manipulative. They are exactly the wrong sort of people to be in positions of power, they certainly don’t deserve it, and they may very well know it. That would explain their obsession with pushing the narrative of meritocracy and fairness, because they know their merits are lacking and they’d never get to where they are in a fair environment. But of course their egos can’t bear that. So they have to posture and pretend that they are superior, and that anyone not like them is lacking, and could have only gotten to their positions thanks to unfair advantages.