When Joe Biden asserted a year ago that “history will treat this administration’s time as an aberration,” he captured the mainstream belief that Donald Trump’s populism can be erased through a return to “normal” government. Among corporate-friendly Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans, the presumption is that American politics will return to the neoliberal path set by Reagan, and core ideas about limited government and free markets will remain static.
Progressives are resisting this return to the default settings of American politics, pressuring Biden to set a new course. On the right, the future is more uncertain. However, at least one prominent Republican, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), is gesturing toward refining Trump’s populism into a far more disciplined counterrevolution to the goals of the left. Although inchoate, post-Trump populism is evolving into a right-wing conception of statecraft that allows for a mixed economy dominated by “patriotic” firms—something long considered alien to mainstream American conservatism.
Hawley’s politics advances the communitarian nationalist framework of heterodox conservative intellectuals and “anti-globalist” media personalities, which Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) have also flirted with. Of course, it’s far from guaranteed that this will become Republicans’ dominant philosophy; it’s just as likely that the right will further descend into rank conspiracy-mongering. But with an emphasis on productive national capitalism, as opposed to global capitalism, the populist right could very well coalesce the GOP around a figure whose platform resembles the “social” nationalism of Europe’s radical right, marrying industrial policy and a moderately expanded welfare state with conservative social values and an anti-immigrant agenda. If there is one ascendant Republican leader who could undertake that transformation, it’s Hawley.
AMONG HAWLEY’S STRENGTHS is his deceptive appearance, in which he comes across as merely another soldier for the Christian right whose populist rhetoric belies his elite résumé. A Stanford- and Yale-educated lawyer who led Hobby Lobby’s Supreme Court fight against the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act and later tried to overturn the ACA as Missouri’s attorney general, Hawley decisively won Claire McCaskill’s Senate seat in 2018, continuing the GOP’s rout of purple- and red-state Senate Democrats that began in the 2014 midterms. Early profiles of Hawley in national publications like The Atlantic and New Republic painted him as a folksier yet more intellectual version of your standard congressional Republican. His ties to Koch money and support for a right-to-work bill in Missouri during his campaign for attorney general, these articles concluded, did not differentiate him from his party’s reflexive embrace of big business.
Indeed, in most respects, Hawley remains an unremarkable Trump loyalist. FiveThirtyEight calculates that he agrees with the Trump administration almost 85 percent of the time, which has included supporting the border wall, co-sponsoring legislation to restrict legal immigration, and attempting to formally dismiss the impeachment process as “bogus.” Consistent with his party’s deepening suspicion of international institutions and Trump’s flirtation with trade wars, Hawley is also an avowed China hawk.
Before the pandemic, Hawley stood out for his fixation on how to curb the concentrated power of Big Tech. His critique has encompassed anti-monopoly and data privacy stances, as well as hackneyed assertions about the censorship of conservative speech on social media and search engines. To the extent they’re sincere, Hawley’s antitrust beliefs possibly date to the book he wrote in his twenties on Theodore Roosevelt. But as far as policy niches go, his crusade against Big Tech was visible but safe terrain for a new Republican senator courting coverage on partisan cable news.
More recently, Hawley has amplified his call to revive American industry and challenge international trade priorities. In May, he drew attention for proposing to “abolish” the World Trade Organization in a New York Times op-ed, arguing that a new trade system should be developed “without compromising nations’ economic sovereignty and their internal control of their own economies.” Though he fumbled the origins of the post–Cold War acceleration of free trade and outsourced manufacturing, Hawley has evinced a clear grasp of how deindustrialization has afflicted smaller cities and towns, unlike his mostly indifferent Republican colleagues. Powerful U.S. multinationals and financial firms have for decades encouraged conservatives to ignore this consequence of globalization, yet Hawley makes it one of his core themes.
Hawley’s critique overlaps in part with progressive concerns over the effects of trade liberalization, which have grown since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. During the Democratic presidential primary, for example, Elizabeth Warren unveiled a new trade plan as part of her vision of “economic patriotism,” emphasizing the loss of U.S. jobs to China and other countries due to corporations seeking lax regulatory environments. Hawley’s attacks on the WTO reflect a greater preoccupation with China’s economic might and geopolitics, with no mention of climate change or social justice, but his convergence with progressive dissent from the conventional wisdom on trade points to the role industrial policy will increasingly play in a post-COVID-19 economy. Hawley’s professed support for mutually respected “economic sovereignty,” moreover, is indicative of how certain traditionally left-wing attacks on globalization have migrated into the discourse of the modern populist right.
Beneath Hawley’s preppy exterior and unwavering loyalty to Trump lies a deeply ideological interpretation of political purpose and social order. It reflects the conviction that conservatism equals moral governance, not anti-government politics. As such, Hawley is invested in a narrative of national betrayal that holds both parties culpable for moral, social, and economic decline. This expands upon Trump’s theme of American carnage, threatening to turn his superficial, fleeting challenge to entrenched economic elites into a more forceful critique.
Hawley has evinced a clear grasp of how deindustrialization has afflicted smaller cities and towns, unlike his mostly indifferent Republican colleagues.
In a speech at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference—a title whose foreboding historical echoes organizers and attendees must have willfully ignored—Hawley decried a “cosmopolitan consensus,” determined to implement “closer and closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms.” According to Hawley, this consensus has enriched elites in finance, tech, and entertainment, while leaving Middle America “with flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity.” The themes resembled Hawley’s first Senate speech, which also pitted an “arrogant aristocracy” against a disrespected, lonely, despairing American middle. Hawley largely eschews the “individual responsibility” politics of traditional conservative thought, instead attempting a philosophical fusion between communitarianism, as expressed in his praise for “strong religious communities” and traditional marriage, and a right-wing vision of an activist state.
Far more than any Republican angling to extend the party’s hold on working-class whites, Hawley is assimilating the “social” nationalism characteristic of European right-wing populists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński. While tailored to the political dynamics of each country, “social” nationalism reflects a strategic move toward the left on economic issues, often encompassing welfare benefits, higher wages, public services, housing, infrastructure, and industrial policy. Beyond the familiar welfare chauvinism that seeks to exclude immigrants and refugees from state benefits, Europe’s most prominent right-wing populists aim to prove they represent a vast precariat alienated from the continent’s global cities, and that only they can restore each country’s national cohesion through a strong state.
Since Europe’s widespread imposition of austerity measures following the financial crisis of 2008-2009, these populists have honed a policy-based vision of right-wing solidarity that recalls early strands of fascism that were more overtly critical of capitalism, which split labor’s support for social democratic and communist parties. Amidst an unprecedented economic crisis, it is a political model primed for export and Americanization, especially in light of the United States’ stark regional inequalities.
IN HIS MOST ideological speeches, Hawley has already employed the Euro-populist framework to dramatize his calls for a new social contract. However, the global pandemic has created an opportunity for Hawley to test the boundaries of Republican policymaking. The objective is twofold: to elevate Hawley as a future savior of the party, and to hone an image as a sincere public servant that can transcend polarization, without giving the appearance of betraying Trump.
As the pandemic cratered the economy, Hawley emerged as one of the few Republican senators calling for direct cash assistance as well as a solution to keep workers on payroll. Before passage of the CARES Act and its weekly provision of $600 in additional unemployment insurance through July, Hawley introduced a plan to provide monthly transfers of $1,446 to $2,206 for families with one to three children. While the proposal excluded individuals and was modest compared to progressive calls for a monthly universal basic income of $2,000 for the pandemic’s duration, it demonstrated Hawley’s eagerness to position himself as a rare figure on the right willing to provide economic relief to working families beyond a single stimulus check.
More surprising was his “Rehire America” plan, which aimed to stave off the explosion of unemployment insurance claims as the national lockdown went into effect in late March. The plan envisioned the federal government covering up to 120 percent of business payroll for all rehired workers and 80 percent of wages for businesses facing revenue shortfalls, capped at $50,000 per worker. In a New York Times interview in late April, Hawley flexed his relative independence from Republican economic orthodoxy, touting that he consulted economists across the political and ideological spectrum to develop his plan. Although it went nowhere in the Senate, it notably tilted toward the recovery programs implemented by Western and Northern Europe. A more expansive version of this payroll-support concept has been embraced across the Democratic ideological spectrum, from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), though the House version didn’t make it into the Democrats’ pandemic response bill, the HEROES Act.
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. Josh Hawley asks a question during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on police use of force, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., June 16, 2020.
Part of Hawley’s broader strategy is to be recognized as a responsible public servant “just doing [his] job,” which has entailed occasional bipartisanship with some of the Senate’s more economically progressive Democrats. Last summer, he introduced a bill with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to close the U.S. trade deficit through new taxes on foreign capital inflows. Following reports that debt collectors and some banks were seizing stimulus payments from indebted people, Hawley joined Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in demanding the Treasury Department act to ensure no one was denied their full relief check. When the dire shortage in medical supplies came to light in advance of the shutdown, Hawley introduced an act to secure critical supply chains; he has since signaled interest in working further with Baldwin and Brown on industrial policy. As public-interest watchdogs and investigative reporters sounded the alarm over the gargantuan corporate bailouts in the CARES Act and related bills, Hawley took aim at United Airlines for reducing thousands of employees’ hours despite protections against this in the airline bailout terms, insisting that United return the money if it did not reverse course.
Most of these forays into areas of government oversight and public welfare have been just that: loose threads of public statements, letters of concern, and proposed legislation. Despite having no major legislative impact, Hawley’s shrewd instinct for a long-term political calculus has been on display throughout the pandemic. He has earned bursts of attention for acknowledging the severity of the economic crisis, while most of his party has resisted extending more aid to struggling Americans. This has given him the luxury of building a policy portfolio with a few seemingly bold, heterodox positions that could distinguish him from his party’s leadership in the event of an electoral collapse in November, without having to singularly own a piece of actual legislation.
Of course, Hawley’s rhetorical flourishes and gestures toward economic heterodoxy cannot entirely mask his evasion of deeper, more structural causes of inequality. His silence, for instance, on the penurious federal minimum wage and obfuscation of the role of unions in securing shared prosperity illustrate the limits to his attempt to assemble a few pro-worker bona fides.
Because he cannot possibly denounce the litany of firms, executives, and dark-money entities behind decades of Republican assault on the U.S. welfare state, Hawley’s narrow critique of capitalism can only serve to advance an illiberal conception of the social peace. On one hand, his ideas echo the century-old Republican prescription that a protective tariff serves industry and labor alike. On the other hand, his patchwork approach to industrial policy suggests a neo-corporatist agenda, in which a privileged segment of labor can have input on wages and benefits, but not challenge the broader regulatory environment. That trade-off, which would strain and divide the labor movement, would also create major obstacles to a worker-led and internationalist Green New Deal as the country and the globe near an irreversible climate crisis.
Despite having no major legislative impact, Hawley’s shrewd instinct for a long-term political calculus has been on display throughout the pandemic.
Like his European counterparts, Hawley is much more in his element lambasting the depredations of foreign or “cosmopolitan” capital that sap the national strength embodied by humble, “left behind” citizens. His lamentations over today’s “shrinking middle” reflect the ahistorical view that economic life is shaped between virtuous, patriotic capitalism and its parasitic opposite. This stokes Trumpian resentment toward “globalist” elites for their support of multiculturalism and immigration, which in Hawley’s worldview most jeopardize Middle America’s cohesion and traditions.
What is clear enough is that Hawley’s modulated apostasy on free-market ideology is no mere exercise. His political icon is Theodore Roosevelt, whose “new nationalism” attempted to curtail labor’s ratcheted militancy through moderate concessions from capital and the state. Should he seek the presidency in 2024, Hawley’s favorable attributes—he is telegenic, has intellectual curiosity, and lacks overt malice—wildly surpass those of Tom Cotton, another contender for Trump’s heir.
IT REMAINS TO be seen whether Hawley is the kind of politician who would actually follow through on a few measures that would anger Wall Street and the Republican donor class in the pursuit of higher office. The appeals to working people that would be required in 2024, however, are contingent on who is elected in November and what is done to maximize economic recovery. Against a backdrop of mounting bottom-up pressure, improving the real economy would at a minimum include meaningful antitrust legislation, a revamped industrial policy, expanded child care and paid family leave, raising the minimum wage, and a major infrastructure plan. A figure like Hawley, who could manipulate mainstream media into portraying him as the right’s answer to Elizabeth Warren, will have ample ideological space to confound corporate Democrats while making a forceful pitch to voters willing to trade zombie neoliberalism for a modicum of economic well-being.
Between the country’s extreme polarization and worsening inequality, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Democratic policymakers over the next four years. This summer’s nationwide revival of Black Lives Matter protests granted a glimmer of hope that public opinion is recognizing how deleterious and pervasive racism and white supremacy continues to be in the United States. In a matter of weeks, protesters exposed the vulnerabilities of complacent Democrats, but more significantly, they blindsided the right. The reactions have varied between authoritarian bloodlust, disbelief of calls to defund the police, and somber appeals to perhaps a now fictive silent majority.
Two days before Cotton previewed his unvarnished neofascism in a notorious New York Times op-ed, Hawley gave a speech on the Senate floor that tried to reconcile the outmoded principle of color blindness with a circumspect condemnation of the police brutality George Floyd and other Black Americans have suffered. He then pivoted to a rebuke of rioters, a defense of the overall integrity of American police departments, and a sermonizing message that economic policies that provided dignity from rural America to the “urban core” could bring about national healing.
That speech could be seen as evidence of an idea to run as a “uniter” in 2024, but Hawley does not seem prepared for how rapidly political ground is shifting. The same, though, could be said for Joe Biden.
Despite a new political reality defined by the pandemic and protests against police violence, Biden’s general-election campaign strategy has mostly affirmed the perception that the country’s crises begin and end with Trump. Yet the myriad forms of racial, economic, and other social inequalities that have crystallized into the most sweeping rejection of American political order since the 1960s demonstrate that a return to the status quo ante Biden represents is no less morally bankrupt for America’s multiracial working class than the routine perfidy of contemporary Republicanism. Insofar that a Democratic victory in November is predicated on a voter desire for normalcy, the dramatic decline in Trump’s support among boomers suggests Biden’s resolutely nonideological appeal to decency, stability, and competence is the surest path. Recent signals about Biden’s actual agenda, from both his advisers and Biden himself, have oscillated considerably, reflecting as much the pressures of satisfying a diverse and economically polarized coalition as the looming institutional constraints that would impede a forthright pursuit of wide-ranging reforms. But if Biden governs under the myth that society prefers gradualism at any cost, he will be as hard-put as ever in meeting progressive demands that are antithetical to his conception of what American politics is fundamentally about.
Set next to Biden’s promise to “restore the soul of this nation,” Hawley’s own vision of national cohesion seems no more corny or quixotic. It adapts Sherrod Brown’s refrain about “the dignity of work” while weaving a narrative about an honorable middle and working class under the foot of self-serving elites. The untrained ear will miss the anti-Semitic connotations in Hawley’s attacks on cosmopolitanism, but it might perceive in his critique of America’s power structure a broad agreement with Bernie Sanders.
Of the foreseeable contenders, Hawley has shown every inclination to sanitize and yet further radicalize the Trumpist trajectory.
Hawley’s attempt to acknowledge grievances of the “urban core” is likewise more deliberate than innocuous. Where Trump’s white nationalism fuses shock-jock provocation with the crude invective of George Wallace, Hawley has a preacher’s conviction in the rightness of a patriarchal social order, one that would reinforce the country’s racial hierarchy but not openly disparage the basic dignity of racial minorities—at least those who are citizens. Anachronistic appeals to color blindness may well provide a balm to sections of the middle and working classes fatigued or threatened by the more militant calls for justice that today’s activists utilize.
Therein lie the qualities that make Hawley’s ascent in national politics both compelling and unnerving to watch. His deft fluctuation between solemn tributes to traditional values and community and fiery, anti-elite rhetoric exemplifies the choreographed mass politics of the radical right. In order to rehabilitate the Republican Party, it is very likely that its next presidential nominee will offer a Faustian bargain to reform the country’s miserly social contract, dividing the working class and further siphoning off white moderates who fetishize, above all else, romantic notions of decency, decorum, and leadership. Of the foreseeable contenders, Hawley has shown every inclination to sanitize and yet further radicalize the Trumpist trajectory. Such a ploy would be especially potent if Washington’s chronic dysfunction fails to abate.
Should Hawley ultimately helm the post-Trump Republican Party, it is unlikely he will fully emulate Trump, in either style or governance. For one thing, he simply doesn’t radiate over-the-top, authoritarian swagger. At present, he is an uncertain bridge between the intellectual realm of heterodox conservatives and the libidinal nationalism of Trump’s base. But his own charisma may yet make him the ideal political vehicle for the “common-good constitutionalism” espoused by Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule, which echoes the fusion of “moral” economics, a strong state, and a defense of national culture and Christian heritage endemic to Europe’s anti-globalization right. Were Hawley to breach conservative opposition to the welfare state, or at least impose regulations to compel big business to spur investment in the real economy alongside novel fiscal expenditures for redevelopment in the aging industrial belt, it would serve to veil the authoritarianism that Trump has activated in Republican politics while leaving the central theme of “law and order” undisturbed.
The mounting clash between an activist left, a neoliberal center depleted of vision and mandate, and an ever more illiberal right is dissolving one myth of American exceptionalism: that the modern fragmentation and realignment of political parties endemic to Europe’s developed democracies cannot happen here. Another myth is also in the process of being disproven: that a critique of capitalism could not possibly take form on the right, let alone within the top ranks of a political party more associated with the zealous expansion of “free markets” than any other in the history of the world.
As the economy continues to undergo grave turmoil, the left and the mainstream of the Democratic Party, while antagonists, remain bound in their fear of Republican nihilism. But a more potent fusion of economic nationalism and traditionalism could radically reshape our politics, depriving the warring factions of the center and left of a sound way forward. While fossil fuel industries and Wall Street would still profit handsomely under a future President Josh Hawley, “America First” would become an entrenched creed among anyone who felt Republican policies had rescued them. The dangers for society and the climate should be explicit, and yet the Democratic Party remains dangerously unprepared, fearing more its own metamorphosis than that of its opposition.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this article stated that Hawley wrote a book about Theodore Roosevelt in college. He wrote it when he was 28. This has been corrected.
