He is, according to the liberal blogger Ed Kilgore of New York magazine, “the face of the post-Trump right”. And the iconoclastic Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley has won the admiration of some American Catholics with his strong stances on big tech, corporate power and economic populism. In June, for instance, Matthew Walther hailed him as “far and away the most interesting Republican elected official in the United States”.
Other commentators have noted that Hawley is the politician that best approximates the post-liberal moment in Catholic intellectual circles. “The closest the post-liberals have to a spokesman in the Senate is freshman Josh Hawley, who attends an Evangelical Presbyterian church,” wrote Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon, after noting that Catholics seem to be Hawley’s natural support base. “Not six months into his term, Hawley has already established himself as a social conservative unafraid of government power.”
Former First Things editor and ex-Catholic journalist Damon Linker wrote of a recent address that “Hawley’s speech points to a post-Trump future in which the economic realignment Trump seemed poised to undertake actually gets going.”
One thing that is hard to miss in Hawley’s rhetoric is that, unlike virtually all other Republicans, he talks class politics.
“The 21st-century economy has generally favoured a small segment of society: the wealthy and well-educated at the top,” he wrote in The American Conservative in July.
In the speech Linker was commenting on, given at the inaugural gathering of national conservatives in Washington, DC, at which this author was present as well, Hawley lamented in his keynote “… flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity. We don’t make things here anymore – at least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands. And small towns like the one where I grew up in middle Missouri struggle and disappear and a way of life is lost. … Just about any American worker without a four-year college degree will have a hard time in the cosmopolitan economy. Maybe that’s one reason why marriage rates among working class Americans are falling, why birth rates are falling, why life expectancy is falling.”
That speech was criticised by Paul Krugman, among others, as anti-Semitic for its criticisms of “cosmopolitan elites” – an inevitable accusation against any kind of right-wing economic populism. The philosopher Yoram Hazony defended Hawley, remarking that “‘cosmopolitan’ is a normal term in political theory, history and other academic disciplines. It means ‘citizen of the world’ and has no anti-Jewish valence.”
At any rate, Hawley is beginning to show Republicans what a post-Trump party might look like. Populism in the US has historically come from the Midwest, and if it has any future beyond the current administration, it needs a more suitable spokesman than a New York landlord. And while the 39-year-old Hawley has a top-shelf education –
Stanford, then Yale Law, followed by clerking for Chief Justice Roberts – he recently made a sharp break with the luminaries of the conservative legal community.
In the Trump administration thus far, the appointment of judges has been an area of remarkable success, thanks mostly to the Federalist Society, which compiled lists of potential nominees from whom both of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have been picked. Senator Mitch McConnell attributes Trump’s agreement to back the list as being key to his election in the first place by reassuring social conservatives. So far, Trump has kept his side of the bargain.
Hawley, however, in what is probably the best example of his populist streak, defied the conservative legal establishment to force the withdrawal from Senate confirmation of Michael Bogren, a Trump judicial appointee, by questioning his record on religious liberty this June.
In a statement following his withdrawal, Bogren attributed his downfall to “gross mischaracterisations of my representation of the City of East Lansing in the Country Mill v City of East Lansing litigation. I have been accused of being anti-religious, anti-Catholic and a religious bigot.”
The longstanding complaint of social conservatives is that they are the least favoured part of the conservative coalition, whose priorities always get subordinated to those economic liberals, constitutionalists and defence hawks. Hawley’s shot across the bow of the Federalist Society is a good indication that he intends to dispute these priorities.
Support for religious liberty has been a constant in Hawley’s career so far. He was senior counsel to the Becket Fund before moving back to his home state, and was backed by the Catholic Association in his run for attorney general of Missouri in 2016.
Hawley has even dived into theology in a commencement address at the Evangelical university King’s College. “A Pelagian society,” he said, “is one that celebrates the wealthy, prioritises the powerful, rewards the privileged. And for too long now, that has described modern America.” That was the first time I’ve heard a politician taking on an obscure heresy by name.
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