Missouri is struggling. Its GDP growth has trailed the nation for 20 of the last 22 years. St. Louis is one of America’s fastest-shrinking cities. The labor force is declining, too, by 30,000 people in 2017 alone. Life expectancy fell by more than a year between 2012 and 2018, a decline that the Missouri Department of Health blamed on rising deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide.
It is hard to disconnect these facts from the usually purple state’s turnout for Donald Trump in 2016. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton 56% to 38%, beating the Obama-Romney spread by nine points. Missouri was not alone: Across the country, counties suffering spikes in suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol deaths, those with less education, and those facing joblessness were all significantly more likely to vote for Trump.
Having branded itself the party of free trade and Big Business, the GOP found itself swept into power on the coattails of a candidate either dismissive of or outright opposed to each. Rather, Trump’s victory came from those voters, including blue-collar Missourians, who felt they have lost out in the economic order many Republicans championed. In the wake of Trump’s victory, therefore, the Republican Party has faced an identity crisis, what some call a “realignment.”
In this moment, perhaps no man is better positioned to shape the future of conservatism than Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
In 1998, Joshua David Hawley left Lexington, Missouri (pop. 4,500), for Stanford. He majored in history, graduating with highest honors. After a brief interlude teaching, came Yale Law, then a federal clerkship, and finally a year working under Chief Justice John Roberts. By 28, he had written his first book. A stint in private practice was followed by work at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (where Hawley worked on the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case), then a professorship at the University of Missouri School of Law. This was all before winning election as Missouri attorney general and then, two years later, the state’s junior senator.
When Hawley came to Washington in 2018, therefore, he was no stranger to the halls of power. Yet the Senate’s youngest member is a consummate populist, presenting himself as a champion of the working man against the ruling class. In a September floor speech, he blamed America’s “governing class” for Missouri’s declining life expectancy, saying that “the policies it has pursued for decades — on trade, on immigration, on finance — have helped drive working people to this crisis.”
This rhetoric has been matched by a bevy of bills, although few have become law. In particular, Hawley is known for his war on Silicon Valley, pushing proposals from banning “infinite scrolling” on websites to prohibiting the sale of video game “loot boxes” (which, for a fee, provide a random, in-game item) to children. This has earned him heterodox popularity, with supporters almost as likely to come from the anti-monopoly Left as the traditionalist Right.
Virtually everyone agrees, however, that Hawley will be key to building the Right post-Trump. This is, in part, because of his paradoxical status as an elite critic of the elite. But it is also because of Hawley’s philosophical depth, uncharacteristic of a national politician. In speeches and essays, Hawley has outlined a political and metaphysical worldview that may be at the heart of his cross-coalitional appeal.
Supporters of the nascent “realignment” agree on very little. But an exploration of how Hawley thinks may in turn cast light on how they will come to think and how the rest of the post-Trump GOP may come, in time, to think as well.
The Middle-Class Republic
Hawley’s critics might accuse him of that most-Marxist sin: class consciousness. His account of America’s greatness is distinctly concerned with class. As he put it in his maiden speech in the Senate, “The United States is unique in history, as a Republic governed not by a select elite, but by the working man and woman.”
Hawley, however, is not talking about class struggle, but justice. As he explained in a 2012 essay in the right-of-center policy journal National Affairs, the “just” society is one that enables humans to (per Genesis 1:26) have “dominion” over the world around them, exercising “authority over the created order with the responsibility to tend and care for it.”
Hawley identifies this notion of justice not only in the Bible, but also in Aristotle. It appears throughout the American tradition, from The Federalist Papers to Lincoln’s belief that slavery was abhorrent because it constituted “a total destruction of self-government.”
America, to Hawley, is based on this idea of self-government. Here, dominion is available to more than the upper classes, which is why it was America’s working men who, Hawley said in his maiden speech, “explored a continent, who built the railroads, who opened the West, … the workers whose labor launched the Industrial Revolution and whose ingenuity made the American economy a marvel of the world.”
Two Theories of Freedom
This theory — call it “republicanism,” call it “populism” — implies a particular concept of freedom, one which links liberty to self-rule. As Hawley puts it in another National Affairs essay, “participation — in government, and in society — is itself a form of freedom … Democratic life is itself liberty.” Freedom means not only lack of coercion but also “personal discipline, planning, and hard work” — that is, stewardship of freedom. This was the same theory propounded by many of the Founders Hawley cites as intellectual influences, including John Adams and James Madison.
Republican freedom was well-suited to early America, where wide-open spaces gave citizens the opportunity to be independent and productive and forced them to govern collaboratively. In fact, Hawley wrote in 2010, this relatively equitable economic arrangement was widely considered to be a necessary precondition of free government. As such, the great economic realignment of the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the late 19th century, was bound to produce a fundamental upheaval in the republican order.
“By the opening decade of the 20th century, … the yeoman ideal seemed increasingly out of reach, and the link between liberty and self-government less certain,” Hawley wrote. “The Progressive movement was born of these worries.”
Out of the Progressive Era emerged “a new liberal synthesis,” articulated, in turn, by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. Rather than being participatory, progressivism made government the guarantor of people’s freedom, a concept whose meaning also changed. Gone was republican liberty, replaced by what Hawley might describe as “Pelagian” liberty.
A Christian heresy, Pelagianism is the belief that people are born untainted by original sin, and therefore, salvation is possible through will alone, without God’s grace. As Hawley explained during a May commencement address at King’s College, “Pelagius held that the individual possessed a powerful capacity for achievement” because if we can save ourselves, we can do anything. Pelagianism, Hawley argues, is the belief that you can “emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self.”
It is this “self-creation” that for Hawley constitutes progressive freedom. He points often to the plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which claims that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Liberty becomes license, not freedom mediated through self-rule.
The New Oligarchy
This might wax academic, but it is foundational to Hawley’s ideological outlook and thus his policy views. Pelagianism, he argues, dominated in the stratified, eugenics-obsessed Progressive Era and today has taken over again.
“A Pelagian society is one that celebrates the wealthy, prioritizes the powerful, rewards the privileged,” Hawley told the King’s College class of 2019. “For too long now, that has described modern America.”
Hawley’s critics again might call this class warfare, but it is more a critique of meritocracy. The perverse implication of Pelagianism is that if salvation is within our power to attain, then anyone who does not is morally inferior. Analogously, in a society where achievement determines status, those who rise to the top, those with a college degree or a white-collar job, are considered valuable, while everyone else is dismissed as worthless.
The result is the emergence of what Hawley sees as a new elite, aristocracy, and even oligarchy: the tech moguls of Silicon Valley and the Ivy-educated, liberal class in New York and D.C. This elite dismisses “the plain virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice, things like humility and faithfulness.” That dismissal, in turn, drives policy.
“Over the last several decades, American policymakers have increasingly screened out the lives, the needs, the aspirations of working-class and middle-class Americans,” Hawley told the Washington Examiner. “Most people in this country don’t go to a four-year college with a degree; the large majority do not. Most of them don’t want to. Most of them do not want to move 200, 300, 400 miles from where they live. They would like to live with their family in proximity to people they know to have a sense of community. This is the aspiration of the Great American Middle.”
These aspirations are not merely preferences. They are consummate examples of republican freedom.
Strange Bedfellows
Framed in these terms, Hawley has two legislative goals: dismantling the new aristocracy and supporting the “Great American Middle.” His war on Big Tech, in particular, is about disempowering an elite that Hawley thinks got rich without creating real value for everyone else. Other bills, such as his proposal to relocate federal agencies throughout the country or his plan for a more dovish monetary policy, are aimed squarely at buoying workers.
This has not been the Republican Party agenda over the last decade. Consequently, Hawley finds himself with a heterodox set of admirers.
One of those is Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post and a prominent Catholic traditionalist voice in the “realignment.” In March, Ahmari co-signed an open letter in First Things attacking the GOP’s “dead consensus.” The letter reads in part like a Hawley speech, decrying 20th-century conservatism’s preoccupation with “individual autonomy” and insisting that “the fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest.”
The similarity between Hawley and these new traditionalists is one Ahmari is happy to embrace. He extolled Hawley for invoking Pelagius and told the Washington Examiner, “If you listen to his speeches, and you read his op-eds, he gets this [critique]. He gets it at a philosophical level.” At the same time, Ahmari explained, Hawley’s rhetorical approach lets him go places that his fellow traditionalists cannot.
“He is formulating this critique of our current model and our current arrangement,” Ahmari said, “but he’s doing it in a vernacular and a language that is deeply, deeply American, and he does it in a way that First Things manifesto writers can’t always achieve.”
Then there’s the other side of the political horseshoe. Matthew Stoller, a self-identified liberal, is a leading advocate for “hipster antitrust,” targeting Big Tech (among others) with antitrust tools. For Stoller and his left-leaning compatriots, Hawley looks like an unlikely ally. Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Stoller explained that their common ground comes in large part from Hawley’s philosophical views.
“He is rejecting libertarianism and the neoliberal framework for organizing our economy and our society,” Stoller said. “He’s saying some things should not be commodified: a sense of place, of rootedness, of church, of family. These are things that should not be commodified.”
Hawley, Stoller said, is going further than his Senate colleagues who have criticized Big Tech simply for alleged bias (a criticism Hawley has also leveled). By contrast, “on political economy, [Hawley and I] see the same threats,” whether it is China or Big Tech: “concentrated power.”
Perhaps because of this, Hawley and Stoller are on a similar page when it comes to freedom, too.
“There’s this old way to understand liberty, which is that liberty means the ability to govern one’s self, and through that to govern one’s society,” Stoller said. “In the 1960s, we began confusing liberty with license. … That is not traditionally what liberty meant.”
Neither Stoller nor Ahmari are perfect ideological duplicates of Hawley. But that is part of what makes the senator so peculiar: He attracts allies who might never agree otherwise, except on their shared skepticism of “autonomy,” or “neoliberalism,” or perhaps, “Pelagianism.”
Familiar Foes
As traditionalists cheer him and some on the Left warm to him, Hawley has simultaneously become one of the libertarian Right’s greatest foes. Once ascendant, small-government libertarianism is increasingly out of fashion under the conservative big tent.
“I don’t like a lot of these ideas,” Robby Soave, associate editor for Reason magazine, told the Washington Examiner, “but I can recognize when I’m not winning.”
Soave, who called Hawley’s agenda “Bloomberg-esque,” thinks the senator is doing more meddling than liberating.
“I think he believes that we should use the power of the state to make people’s lives better,” Soave said. “We should not simply get the state out of people’s lives so they can make decisions for themselves, but we can improve on their situation by telling people what they ought to do or what they ought not to do.”
Other, less libertarian conservatives make a similar argument.
“As long as consumers retain the ability to make their own choices, big companies tend to correct,” Kent Lassman, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “When you get government involved setting a policy … you take away the agency from consumers, and you give the agency to government regulators, which tend to be very inflexible. They don’t adapt to new entrants; they don’t adapt to new technologies.”
For Lassman, much of Hawley’s legislation crosses a line for conservatives who oppose the federal government making choices for individuals.
“Conservatism is rooted in the ability of individuals to chart their own path,” Lassman said, adding that he meant “the individual or the small-business owner or the person deciding about their investment in their education for their family; I’m talking about individual decisions made vis-à-vis the state, vis-à-vis the law.”
Lassman and Soave represent a long-standing view on the Right: Government action is almost always another step down the road to serfdom. Hawley would almost certainly say he sympathizes; he told the Washington Examiner that he wants government to empower communities, not direct them itself.
But that gets to the heart of the dispute surrounding Hawley. In the 21st century, is it enough for government to get out of the way? In the Silicon Age, does freedom require more than noncoercion?
The People’s Party
Hawley is often labeled a populist. Asked about the original Populist Party, he noted that the era in which that peculiar alliance arose was “a moment in history that’s very similar to our own in many ways.”
“It was a moment of significant social, economic, international upheaval, which we’re experiencing now as well,” Hawley said. “The late 19th, early 20th century was also a moment when the existing political coalitions were in a state of collapse and reforming, which is clearly what we’re in the midst of right now.”
“We’ve been a middle-class democracy from the very first, and that I think has really shaped the character of the country,” he added. “And I think the Populists reflect that, … and I think we’re struggling with that today.”
Just as the Progressive Era was spawned by destabilization, Hawley thinks a similar destabilization — unfettered trade, Big Tech, and free-market fundamentalism — is behind the plight of voters such as those Missourians who backed Trump. Opponents disagree, insisting that the sickness is thanks to the government overreach they think Hawley wants more of.
Time will tell who’s right. What is clear is that, in the meantime, the realignment will be a battle of philosophies as much as politics, and one side knows who its champion is.
Charles Fain Lehman is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon, where he covers social issues and policy.
