The Great Legal Tug-of-War: From Somerset to Dred Scott

Decades ago, I read Don Fehrenbacher's book on the Dred Scott case.  I was intrigued and it opened up a huge field of interest for me in the Court and antebellum history.  When I recently stumbled across another Fehrenbacher book that purported to discuss the relationship between federal and state responsibility for slavery, and given the number of authors arguing that the Constitution of 1789 provided the underpinning for slavery, I had to find a copy. Ironically, Miller's classic Arguing about Slavery and Waldstreicher's Slavery's Constitution don't mention Somerset or Warwick or the extensive debate surrounding those and several other episodes that would lead up to Taney's catastrophic decision in Dred Scott. Just what was the federal role in promoting slavery? 

We often remember the Civil War as a clash of bayonets and bugles, but the real street fight started decades earlier in the courtroom. This was a high-stakes legal tug-of-war over the very soul of the American legal system: were enslaved people "persons" under the law, or were they "property" that could be owned anywhere? This wasn't just a moral debate; it was a strategic battle between two incompatible visions of the country. On one side was the "Freedom National" philosophy, which argued that liberty was the default state of the human race. On the other was the "Slavery National" doctrine, which aimed to make human ownership a federally protected right that didn't stop at state lines.

To understand how the U.S. eventually tore itself apart, we have to look at two competing legal doctrines. The Somerset doctrine treated slavery as a "local" quirk—something that only existed if a specific state law said it did. In contrast, the Southern/Taney doctrine eventually claimed that the Constitution protected a master’s "property" regardless of geography. This conflict didn't start in Washington, however; it began with a single, "odious" ruling in an English courtroom.

In 1772, a legal "Mansfieldian moment" rocked the British Empire. James Somerset, an enslaved man brought to England, escaped his master. When he was recaptured and held in chains on a ship bound for Jamaica, his case went before Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Mansfield didn’t just decide Somerset’s fate; he forced a truth-telling about the future of the Empire. His ruling established a "Common Law Default" that changed the game for abolitionists, i.e., under natural law and common law, freedom is the standard state of being.  Slavery is an artificial creation that is so "odious" (repulsive) that it can only exist if a local government passes a specific, written statute—known as "positive law"—to support it.

By labeling slavery "odious," Mansfield stripped it of its status as a natural right. He turned slavery into a fragile, local exception to the rule of freedom. This meant that if an enslaved person crossed a border into a place without a specific "positive law" for slavery, their status as "property" simply dissolved. They were free. Decades later, American anti-slavery activists like Joshua Giddings would weaponize this logic, arguing that because the U.S. Constitution had no federal "positive law" for slavery, the nation was, by default, a "Freedom National" zone.

When the U.S. Army under Andrew Jackson impressed an enslaved man named Warwick along with a cart, horse, and timber to build fortifications for the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, Warwick was shot through the left eye and arm, leaving him permanently disabled. In 1826, his owner, New Orleans planter Marigny D’Auterive, petitioned Congress for $1,094 in financial reimbursement, demanding payment not only for his damaged cart and wood but also for Warwick’s medical expenses and lost labor. The claim touched off a fierce 1828 congressional debate that forced lawmakers to confront whether the national government was constitutionally bound to recognize state-level property rights in human beings. While Southern representatives argued that the Fifth Amendment obligated the federal government to compensate owners whenever state law defined an enslaved person as property, Northern lawmakers countered that slavery was purely a municipal creation of state law and that federal funds could not be used to recognize "property in man." Congress ultimately struck out the claim for Warwick's injuries while approving reimbursement solely for the lost timber and cart, establishing an early precedent where the federal government refused to explicitly endorse a constitutional right to compensation for damaged human "property."

Joshua Giddings, a fiery Whig from Ohio, realized that the anti-slavery movement needed to stop making moral pleas and start winning budget fights. Using the Somerset doctrine, he argued that if slavery was merely a "local" institution, the federal government had no business spending a single dime to support it.

Giddings’s strategy was put to the test during the Creole case (1842). When enslaved people aboard the ship Creole revolted in international waters and sailed to the British Bahamas, they were declared free under British law. Southern politicians were furious and demanded the U.S. government get them compensation. Giddings stood his ground: he argued that once the Creole left Virginia’s waters, Virginia's "local" slave laws vanished. On the high seas, "Freedom National" was the rule.

He doubled down during the Antonio Pacheco case (1848–1849). Pacheco, a slaveholder, wanted federal tax dollars because his slave was "damaged" (killed) while impressed into military service. Giddings led the charge to deny the claim.

Giddings’s argument was brilliant in its technicality. He pointed out that since the Constitution never uses the word "slave," the federal government has no authority to recognize "property in man." He framed the Constitution as a "cordon of freedom"—a legal boundary where slavery could exist inside states, but was invisible to federal law. To pay Pacheco would be to "nationalize" slavery. This tactical use of the Framers' own language brings us to the carefully managed tension of the 1787 Convention.

The delegates at the 1787 Federal Convention were locked in a strategic cage match. They needed the South to join the Union, but delegates like Gouverneur Morris were disgusted by the "curse of heaven" that was slavery. Meanwhile, men like John Rutledge of South Carolina practiced "cool calculation," warning that the South would bolt if their interests weren't protected.

As historian Sean Wilentz notes, the Framers made a deliberate, strategic choice: "they would tolerate slavery where it already existed, but they would not validate it in national law." [1] This is why James Madison famously insisted it would be "wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men." They chose to define slaves as "persons held to service," not "chattel property." This wasn't just emotional shame; it was a legal firewall designed to prevent slavery from becoming a national standard.

To secure the Union, they struck a "Dirty Compromise": New England delegates traded their support for a twenty-year extension of the Slave Trade (until 1808) in exchange for the South dropping a requirement that navigation laws need a two-thirds supermajority.

This "technical linguistic sense" was a vital tool. By refusing to label humans as property, the Framers left the door open for later leaders like Abraham Lincoln to argue that the federal government could legally "cordon off" slavery and put it on the path to extinction. However, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was determined to blow that door shut.

In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney attempted to settle the tug-of-war once and for all by protecting Southern interests through a radical doctrine called "Proslavery Constitutionalism." In the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, Taney didn't just rule against one man’s freedom; he attempted to nationalize the very "property" label the Framers had tried to keep local.

Taney effectively "inverted" the Somerset principle through a three-pronged attack. He claimed the Fifth Amendment protected slaveholder property rights above all else. If a slave was "property," the government couldn't take that property away without "due process." He argued that a slaveholder didn't lose their rights just by crossing a border into a free territory. Property, he said, was property everywhere.  He claimed the right to "property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution," turning the Framers' careful silence into a loud, national endorsement.

This ruling rendered the Somerset doctrine null and void in federal lands. It fueled Northern fears of a "Slave Power" plot to override state-level abolition. Taney tried to "fix" the 1787 paradox by forcing "Slavery National" on a country that had functioned on the assumption of "Slavery Local."

The transformation of the Somerset doctrine from an English precedent into an American cause for war represents the ultimate breakdown of the legal system. The Civil War wasn’t just a battle over the existence of slavery; it was an irreconcilable struggle over whether the U.S. Constitution recognized "property in man" or only "persons" held to labor.

The ultimate "Unintended Consequence" of this history is that the Supreme Court’s attempt to settle the "property" question through the Dred Scott case actually destroyed the possibility of any legal solution. When the law could no longer bridge the gap between human personhood and human property, the system collapsed. The "terrible paradox" created in 1787—a nation half-slave and half-free—could no longer be debated in courtrooms. 

 The shift from a “Slavery Local” to a “Slavery National” doctrine eliminated all legal middle ground in the United States. Using the same legal history, Giddings argued that freedom was natural and universal, while Taney reinterpreted it to argue that the national constitution required the protection of human property. This was the full circle of the Property Paradox. There were no federal laws, so Giddings argued for freedom. Taney created a new positive law of property in the Constitution that was national. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress did not have the constitutional power to ban slavery in the territories. That meant that anyone could own slaves in the territories and the idea of “Free Soil” was thrown out in those areas. Northerners were very afraid of a " Slave Power " plot . They saw it as a Southern plot to use the federal courts to eventually overturn state level abolition laws as well . Ultimately, the legal realities created by Mansfield’s bench and Taney’s court could not be reconciled, and the conflict could not be resolved through judicial reasoning or legislative compromise. These competing constitutional narratives would unravel, and the legal paradox would not be resolved until the advent of the Civil War.
 
 The Founding Paradox, in the end, left a fragile legacy. In practice, the Constitution was a protector of slavery, but in theory, it was not. This “terrible paradox” provided the Constitution with the legal foundation to abolish slavery in the future. Some who fought for slavery, like John C. Calhoun and Roger Brooke Taney, had to say that the Constitution did recognize property in people, which was a direct and desperate change to what the framers had written. In the long run, the failure of the 1787 Convention to nationalize the legitimacy of human chattel provided future leaders with the power they needed. Abraham Lincoln made a good point in his Cooper Institute address when he said that the framers purposely called slaves "persons" to exclude the idea of property in man. Frederick Douglass was once opposed to the “covenant with death,” but later he realized that the document still leans toward freedom because it excludes this important part.** The framers moved from a standard of state-defined chattel to a standard of federal personhood, leaving behind a framework that could outlive the destruction of its most “exceptional parts.” In 1865, the political forces of freedom were finally able to keep the promise of the language of the Constitution about people.

* https://constitutioncenter.org/education/classroom-resource-library/classroom/12.3-primary-source-abraham-lincoln-cooper-union-address-1860 

**Delivered in Rochester, New York, Douglass explicitly rejected the proslavery interpretation of the text: 
"Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT." 

Sources:  

Finkelman, Paul, States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, and the Crisis of the Union, 45 Akron Law Review 449-478 (2012) 

Finkelman, P. (2014). Slavery and the founders: Race and liberty in the age of Jefferson. Routledge. 

[1] Wilentz, S. (2019). No property in man: Slavery and antislavery at the nation's founding.  Harvard. p. xi

 

 

 

Keeping the BOTS out. How figuring out who is human became lucrative.

 Jill Lepore’s *New Yorker* piece “Are You a Human?” is about the weird long history of proving our identity, from ancient tattoos to national IDs, to sci-fi clichés to corporate biometrics. But right in the heart of this historical trip is a fascinating look at CAPTCHA -- a tool that transformed an annoying security check into a huge, sneaky engine for crowdsourcing human effort.

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) was created to combat the growing bot problem on the internet in the late 1990s by Luis von Ahn and a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon. The goal was simple at first: stop automated programs from spamming forums, fixing elections, or carrying out cyberterrorism by making users decipher squiggly, distorted letters that computers couldn’t read.

The twist came when the researchers realized that all those millions of wasted seconds could be put to double duty. In 2007, von Ahn developed reCAPTCHA, which was acquired by Google two years later. And each time you had to decipher a weird snippet of text or spot a garbled word to get to a Web site, you weren't just proving that you were made of meat--you were secretly acting as a free digitizer for the Google Books Project. Your answers were fed directly into optical character recognition algorithms, transcribing scanned physical books that automated software could not parse.

When text decoding went out of fashion, the tests shifted to recognition of images. And clicking on crosswalks, traffic lights, and bicycles wasn’t just about security either, it was a giant, free training pipeline to teach machine-vision algorithms and autonomous vehicles how to see the physical world. In the process, internet users unknowingly offered up huge amounts of free labor to train the artificial intelligence systems that would eventually compete against them. As von Ahn himself would later reflect, it built a system that effectively vacuumed up human attention on a massive scale, ironically making machines so good that they could outsmart the tests themselves.

Classic CAPTCHAs are mostly obsolete now. At least in Lepore's view; I seem to run into them all the time and I hate them.  Supposedly bots have caught up, forcing companies to track mouse movements and behavioral data in the background, or turn to invasive biometric devices like Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb. But the age of CAPTCHA was the apogee of tech trickery: a security checkpoint that quietly transformed the whole web-browsing public into a legion of unwitting data labelers.

The Ghost in the Pentagon: Norman Dixon and the Persistence of the Military Donkey

 Years ago I read a book entitled The Donkeys a 1961 polemic by British author, historian, and politician Alan Clark, that offered a scathing critique of the British high command's leadership during the first two years of World War I. Foreign Policy magazine just published an article , “The Book That Predicted Pete Hegseth’s Failures,” [1] which naturally grabbed my attention. The article relates the bizarre behavior (testosterone, anyone?) of Pete Hegseth whom I’ve written about before. [2]  I searched for peer-reviewed articles on the pathology of Hegseth, but could find none other than the analysis of Hegseth’s own books in the New York Review of Books, [4] in addition to several other general articles about his character.  [see Resources below.  The Guardian article is particularly scathing.]

Hegseth is not stupid; neither were the Donkeys. Dixon’s book [3] was published fifty years ago makes that point.   At first glance, exhuming the corpses of the Victorian era to perform a post-mortem on our own dying strategy might seem a redundant academic exercise. Dixon’s volume is, after all, deeply rooted in the antiquated mores of the British public school system and the somewhat archaic Freudian clichés of the mid-1970s. Yet, as the American defense landscape shifts under the weight of Trump and Hegseth’s leadership, Dixon’s inquiry into why lions are seemingly led by donkeys has ceased to be a historical curiosity and has instead become a prophetic warning. The book reached back to the mid-nineteenth century to explain the failures of the British military, yet today it reads as a pre-emptive autopsy of the contemporary American defense establishment.

The origins of Dixon’s inquiry were deeply personal. Having spent a decade in the Royal Engineers, including a stint in bomb disposal during the Second World War, Dixon was fascinated by the recurring patterns of senseless goings-on that characterized military disasters. He was not satisfied with the bloody fool theory of history, which suggests that catastrophic failure is merely the result of low intelligence. Instead, he sought to identify the specific psychological traits that attract certain individuals to the military—traits that the institution then exacerbates by design. We find a modern manifestation of these ancient patterns in the rise of figures like Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed secretary of war whose appointment echoes the central casting logic of the past. Dixon’s work allows us to move beyond simple critiques of intellect and toward a deeper interrogation of how personality defects are institutionalized and rewarded by an organization that values the ritual of war over the objective of victory.

Dixon’s book serves as a bridge between the tragic mud flats of Passchendaele and the modern Pentagon. It suggests that the stultifyingly bad features of military organizations tend to produce a leveling down of human capability, creating an environment where the mediocre flourish and the gifted are cramped. There are exceptions of course, Colin Powell being a shining example. As we examine the contemporary fixation on outward appearances and the purging of intellectual dissent, we are forced to realize that the ghost Dixon identified—the donkey in the high-collared tunic—is still very much in the machine. To understand the current American trajectory, we must understand the specific psychological framework Dixon uses to explain why the most powerful militaries in history so frequently stumble over their own rigid feet. How much of that stumbling should be attributed to Trump and his own self-aggrandizing and desire to surround himself with obsequious sycophants I suspect figures into the current situation.

The strategic importance of Dixon’s theory lies in his decision to shift the blame for military failure from low intelligence to personality defects. By evaluating high achievers like Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces for most of the First World War, Dixon proved that incompetence is not a matter of cognitive lack but of a particular mindset that is profoundly ill-suited for the fog of war. McNamara is another pertinent example. This shift allows for a deeper interrogation of institutional leadership, moving the conversation away from IQ and toward the socialization of  character. The pillars of this mindset are what Dixon euphemistically termed bull and a pervasive anti-effeminacy. Bull involves a ritualistic obsession with outward appearances, a preoccupation with the dominance-submission relationships of the military hierarchy, and extreme orderliness. In a peacetime environment, these traits foster discipline; in wartime, they become catastrophic distractions that block the reception of vital information. A current example would be the obvious failure to realize the importance and inevitable closure of the Strait of Hormuz in spite of recommendations to the contrary.

This pattern is perfectly reflected in Hegseth’s focus on hair length, the rooting out of beards, and the mandated testosterone testing for warfighters. These are not merely eccentricities; they are manifestations of a sex-role identification that Dixon identified as a cornerstone of the incompetent mind. This anti-effeminacy extends beyond simple prejudice against women in combat roles; it historically manifested as a disdain for taking cover or wearing protective gear, viewing such survival instincts as unmanly. Crucially, Dixon noted that this trait even extended to the rejection of protective convoys for merchant shipping during wartime—a technical reality that mirrors the modern failure to prepare for the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. When leadership prioritizes the image of the lethal warrior — we will bomb them into oblivion, for example — over strategic depth, they create an organization that is psychologically predisposed to reject the very innovations required for survival.

This authoritarian rigidity creates a prickly skin in leadership. Incompetent leaders are characterized by an inability to suffer criticism and a predilection for subordinates whose loyalty far outweighs their competence. We see this today in the melting down of officials when faced with responsibility for failure and the chiding of the press as unpatriotic for objective reporting. When the outward signifiers of masculinity and ritualistic obedience become the primary metrics for success, the military ceases to be an instrument of war and becomes a theater of performance. This creates a systemic bias against the best and brightest, favoring those who fit the specific, traditional mold of the clean-shaven warrior while leaving the nation vulnerable to enemies who do not share these psychological hang-ups.

The value of looking at military history as a continuous line of psychological repetition is that it reveals common denominators of failure that transcend era and technology. Two of Dixon’s primary case studies, Lord Raglan in the Crimea and General Buller in the Boer War, provide the template for the central casting leader. Both men possessed immense physical bravery, yet both were defined by a total lack of moral courage. Raglan, an aristocratic introvert, was appointed not for his command experience—he had none, not even of a company—but because he had been Wellington’s secretary and possessed the requisite aristocratic connections. He was so detached from his troops that he rarely walked among them, and his inability to process noise was so profound that he referred to the enemy as the French out of an incurable habit rooted in his past.

In the Boer War, General Redvers Buller presented the image of the grimly resolute commander—big-boned and square-jawed. However, behind this appearance was a man who was irresolute, indecisive, and without faith in his own plans. Both Raglan and Buller shared an emotional antipathy toward intelligence and the press. Raglan shunned spies as ungentlemanly, while Buller, faced with the disaster of Spion Kop, went into a state of paralytic inactivity, avoiding the very information he needed to save his men. These men were allowed to keep their posts despite mounting corpses because their social status and central casting appearances convinced the hierarchy that they looked the part. The institution prioritized social cohesion and aesthetic reliability over lethal efficacy.

The so what of these failures is that they prove how the military hierarchy protects its own at the expense of the rank and file. Both Raglan and Buller were masters at making scapegoats of their subordinates. When the Light Brigade was destroyed by confused orders, the blame was diverted to the dead Captain Nolan. When Buller’s irresolution led to the slaughter at Spion Kop, he focused on the shortcomings of others while enjoying his champagne and ample food. This refusal to admit failure prevents the organization from learning, leading to a repetition of the same frontal assaults and underestimations of the enemy. The ultimate expression of this rigid mindset was the meat-grinder of the Western Front, where the rejection of innovation became a matter of institutional pride.

Innovation is the natural enemy of the authoritarian military mind. Dixon notes that the authoritarian is biologically and psychologically predisposed to reject technical advances that threaten established ritual. In the First World War, General Haig’s insistence on the value of the horsed cavalry in the age of the machine gun was not just a tactical error but a psychological defense. This rejection of technology was mirrored in the Siege of Kut under General Townshend. Townshend was an egomaniac who identified with the great captains of history while ignoring the movement and economy of force they championed. He chose to bottle his army up in Kut for no strategic reason other than a personal desire for the glory of a siege, which he had experienced previously at Chitral.

Townshend’s pathology reached its zenith after the surrender. While he was transported in the greatest comfort to Constantinople, his 13,000 men began a 1,200-mile march across the freezing heights of Asia Minor. Townshend lived a life of luxury as a captive on the fashionable island of Halki, high on a cliff in a comfortable villa, while his troops were marched to their deaths. In the Turkish hospitals, those too ill to march were given injections of a brandy-colored fluid—a lethal mercy to stop them from fouling their beds. Townshend, the lovely man and self-styled father-figure, never lifted a finger to ameliorate their plight. He was more concerned with his own promotion to lieutenant-general than the mega-deaths occurring under his command.

The historical rejections of the tank find their modern parallels in the disdain for drone warfare and the irrational desire for Trump-class battleships or steam-powered catapults. These are symptoms of a mindset that views war as a sport played by traditional rules. More than four years after the Ukraine war showed the need for drone-centric forces, the United States lags behind a war-beset European country in output because the current administration spurned Ukraine’s offer of drone assistance. The authoritarian mind views the drone as unsoldierly, preferring the ritual of the massive hull and the catapult. This produces a systematic scapegoating of the best and brightest in favor of those who fit the parade-ground mold, ensuring the organization remains a device for receiving information it is psychologically incapable of processing.

In a media-driven age, the danger of prioritizing sex-role identification over strategic depth has never been greater. Pete Hegseth, though only reaching the rank of major in the National Guard, has successfully carried a junior officer’s mindset into the highest levels of military administration. He ticks every box in Dixon’s framework for military incompetence. The summoning of every senior U.S. military commander from around the globe to listen to a harangue on fatness, hair length, and beards is the quintessential expression of bull. It prioritizes the outward signs of a warrior over the intellectual and technical realities of modern conflict. This is the ultimate triumph of the parade ground over the battleground, a theater of the absurd where doing a pull-up for the cameras is substituted for strategic dexterity.

Hegseth’s specific actions—the purging of the professional press corps, the rewriting of casualty totals on a whim, and the fact that his Pentagon has not held a press briefing for nearly three months during wartime—are classic symptoms of the authoritarian desire to shun publicity and avoid criticism. These behaviors are indicative of a rigidity that underestimates the enemy and ignores technical reality, much like the Allied failure to prepare for the closing of the Strait of Hormuz despite decades of war-gaming. When a leader is chosen because they are straight out of central casting, the organization risks being led by someone who values the appearance of strength over the actual exercise of intelligence. Hegseth’s melting down when lawmakers point out his responsibility for failure is merely the modern version of the prickly skin Dixon identified fifty years ago.

The comparison to General Elphinstone in Kabul is particularly chilling. Elphinstone was a gentleman of aristocratic connections who was physically decrepit and prone to fatal procrastination. He spent more time worrying about the construction of a bridge than the survival of his army, and his indecision led to the total destruction of his force. Like Elphinstone, the modern authoritarian leader procrastinates on technical innovation—such as drone output—while obsessing over unsoldierly details like beards. This sex-role identification creates a systemic bias against unconventional thinkers, favoring those who fit the traditional mold. The result is a lane of corpses in the snow, or its modern equivalent: a military that is technologically outpaced by smaller, more agile nations while its leaders posture for the cameras.

The strategic importance of maintaining public and intellectual control over the military hierarchy cannot be overstated. Without this control, the military organization naturally drifts toward a leveling down of capability, where the mediocre are promoted for their conformity and the gifted are pushed out for their dissent. Dixon’s legacy is the recognition that while his science may be dated, his observations on the stultifyingly bad features of these organizations remain relevant. The traits that make a military work in peace—discipline, uniformity, and ritual—are the very things that act against performance at the most crucial times of war. The ghost in the Pentagon is not one of limited intelligence, but of a specific personality type that finds safety in the rules of the past while the future is being decided by drones and algorithms.

The modern US military, operating under a Hegseth-ian mindset that prizes being white, male, and clean-shaven over being creative and unconventional, is at risk of repeating the senseless goings-on of 1854 and 1914. If the organization continues to favor the central casting leader over the intellectual innovator, it will remain a device for receiving information that it is psychologically incapable of processing. The result will be a continued lag in technological adaptation and a reliance on frontal assaults against enemies who have already moved into the drone era. The cost of such wrong decisions grows exponentially with technology, meaning the next great military disaster will be reckoned not in hundreds, but in mega-deaths.

Ultimately, military incompetence is preventable, but only if we are willing to interrogate the psychological makeup of those we put in charge. As long as we allow the ghost of the donkey to haunt the Pentagon, we will continue to pay for the errors of generalship in blood. The fifty-year echo of Dixon’s work is a reminder that the profession of arms is not honored because the best part of the nation has ceased to follow it; it is not honored because the institution itself has become a sanctuary for the rigid and the regressive. To ignore the psychology of the authoritarian mind is to invite the tragedy of the next great military disaster, one that no amount of testosterone or parade-ground bull will be able to avert.

 

[1] Johnson, K. (2026, July 31). The book that predicted Pete Hegseth’s failures. Foreign Policy.   https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/31/hegseth-norman-dixon-iran-war/  If it’s behind a paywall, I have created a pdf copy linked here. from my subscription.

[2] https://rarebits.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-architecture-of-american-impunity.html

[3] Dixon, Norman F. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. New York: Random House, 1994. Revised edition of the original 1956 publication. If you would like a pdf copy to read I have one for friends and relatives who can contact me via email. Others should check at their local library.

[4] Hansen, Suzy. "Made in the USA." The New York Review of Books. Last  modified June 19, 2026.  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/06/11/made-in-the-usa-in-the-arena-pete-hegseth/.  Again I have a pdf copy for friends and relatives from my subscription if it’s behind a paywall.

Other Resources regarding Hegseth psychology:

A Very Dangerous Person’: Alarm As Pete Hegseth Revels in Carnage of  Iran War." The Guardian. Last modified March 8, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran.

"Just a Moment..." Just a Moment... Accessed August 1, 2026.  https://newlinesinstitute.org/gender-peace-security/how-hegseths-speech-reveals-a-shift-toward-masculinizing-u-s-policy/.

Mayer, Jane. "Pete Hegseth’s Secret History." The New Yorker. Last  modified December 2, 2024.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history.

McMaster, H. R. (2011). Dereliction of duty: Johnson, McNamara, the joint chiefs of staff. HarperCollins. 

Olds, Josh. "Hegseth’s Testosterone Testing Plays into MAGA Mythology."  Baptist News Global. Last modified July 27, 2026.  https://baptistnews.com/article/hegseths-testosterone-testing-plays-into-maga-mythology/.