A Constructive Populism

“We embark today on a great journey in service to a high calling,” he says. “And there is only one way to do that: standing shoulder-to-shoulder with friends and fellow believers in the cause of liberty. I am honored to stand here with you.”

The crowd eats it up. One man’s shout is audible through the cheers: “Now that’s the kind of language I’m looking for!”

It would be an understatement to say that 2018 has been a discouraging year for Missouri Republicans. Governor Eric Greitens, an ex-Navy SEAL who swaggered into office in 2016 promising to clean up corruption, is embroiled in a nasty scandal over an extramarital affair. He’s accused of snapping a surreptitious nude picture of his lover as an incentive for her to keep quiet about the affair, an act for which he now faces a felony invasion-of-privacy prosecution. The state party’s response has been to suggest that the criminal charge against Greitens is a “political hit job” that can be traced back to money from Democratic megadonor George Soros.

This helps to explain why the locals who pack into the barn today radiate such a strong sense of cheer, even relief. Hawley, 38, is the kind of guy they can get enthusiastic about.

Start with his résumé: Smart, good-looking, and charismatic, Hawley pairs small-town roots with impressive policy chops. He grew up in Lexington, population 4,500, and was a standout student at Stanford en route to a law degree from Yale. He clerked for Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts and served as senior counsel to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he worked on such high-profile Supreme Court cases as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 2011, he returned home to teach at the University of Missouri School of Law. In his first foray into politics, the 2016 attorney-general race, Hawley trounced Democrat Teresa Hensley with 61 percent of the vote. (He even outperformed Donald Trump, who collected 56 percent of the vote in Missouri.)

Senate Republicans, who are itching to oust two-term Democrat Claire McCaskill this year, pricked up their ears. After congresswoman Ann Wagner decided last year to defend her House seat rather than challenge McCaskill, state and national Republicans convinced Hawley to try his luck. It already looks like a tight race, with polls breaking for both candidates, generally within the margin of error.

So here Hawley is at the family-owned Stemme Farms, making the case that he knows and loves “the heartland way of life,” a way that revolves around love of God and country and the dignity of work, that those values have made him the man he is today, and that it’s high time someone carried those values into the lion’s den of Washington, D.C.

In some ways it sounds like your garden-variety populist pitch, the kind that’s all the rage in Republican circles this primary season. A Hawley skeptic might reasonably wonder how a Stanford- and Yale-educated constitutional law professor makes for an authentic populist. To which a Hawley supporter might point out that the Manhattan billionaire Donald Trump pulled it off.

But there’s an important difference in the populism Hawley’s hawking from the foreboding “American carnage” vision Trump sold during the 2016 presidential campaign. Hawley’s populism is a constructive enterprise, a matter of reminding the “coastal elites” what’s important and good about small-town America. In his speech, Hawley leans into the contrast as he speaks of his childhood in Lexington, “a working-class town full of hardworking people.” He recalls his respect for a man named Norman Vialle, who owned and operated the local Maid-Rite diner and drive-in.

“Mr. Vialle wore an apron to work, and the work he did was hard—often thankless, I’m sure, and never glamorous. But I never knew a more gracious man,” Hawley says. “And I saw in him what the Scripture means when it says that labor in the Lord is not in vain. Work performed with excellence and with honesty confers a dignity and independence that no man can buy and no government can take away.”

When Hawley went away to college and law school, he goes on, he met many impressive people who were destined for high-flying public careers. “But I never met anybody whose work had more value than Mr. Vialle’s, and I never heard any call to service more profound than the one I saw modeled in the place I called home.”

This isn’t to say Hawley’s stump speech isn’t full of bombs when it comes to McCaskill. “Hollywood and Wall Street and the D.C. political establishment have worked together to rig a system that favors them, the wealthy and well-connected, while ignoring the rest of us,” he says in his speech. “And Claire McCaskill is their eager ally. More than that, she’s their icon.”

This last is a bit of a stretch: McCaskill’s nobody’s beau ideal of a progressive. Hawley justifies the claim by pointing to McCaskill’s substantial campaign contributions from Hollywood and the financial industry: “Those are the people that she works with,” adds Hawley’s press secretary Kelli Ford. “You don’t get the money unless you’re doing something to make them happy.” The simpler explanation is that McCaskill is a Democratic senator in an increasingly Republican state, and Democrats are keen to hold on to the seat in a closely divided Senate.

Despite Hawley’s populist streak, his relationship with President Trump has been complicated. After the release of the Access Hollywood tape during the 2016 campaign, which contained old audio of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, Hawley called the comments “shocking, repulsive, and utterly indefensible.” Then, last August, former senator John Danforth, one of Hawley’s mentors, wrote a blistering op-ed attacking Trump, saying that the Republican party “has been corrupted by this hateful man, and it is now in peril.” Trump allies and opponents alike pressed Hawley to embrace or denounce Danforth’s position. Judging discretion to be the better part of valor, Hawley did neither, which seems to have worked out just fine. Last November, Trump casually endorsed Hawley during a tax-reform speech in St. Charles, and, on March 14, he flew to St. Louis for a Hawley fundraiser, calling him “a wonderful guy who’s running who knows what it’s all about.”

Hawley doesn’t style himself a Trumpian candidate precisely; rather, he speaks of Trump’s ascendancy as a sign that the times are changing, and conservatives need to change with them.

“We are at a generational turning point, and that’s true for us as conservatives,” he tells me. “The postwar politics that ran roughly from 1948 until 2001, that era’s over. We’ve been in a transitional time, and I think the election of President Trump has made this very clear, that the postwar era is finished. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s just to say it’s done.”

According to Hawley strategist Brad Todd, Hawley and Trump represent “complementary” populist visions driven by concern for the interests of the middle class rather than those of large institutions. “In 10 or 15 years when you look back on this time in history, everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, remember when the media sort of joked that populism was just a tool to get Trump elected?’ ” Todd says. “No, it turns out there was a real movement that became sort of the animating spirit of the conservative movement. I think that’s where we are.”

Hawley himself frames contemporary populist unease in constitutional terms.

“We’ve got a long tradition in our country that reaches back all the way to the founding, and even before, of understanding that one of our most fundamental rights is the right to self-government,” he says. “There’s a real sense in which we are not governed by our elected officials in this country. We’re governed by administrators who report to nobody. That is a big, big problem in this country constitutionally. And people know that—that’s why they’re concerned about the ‘deep state,’ that’s why they’re concerned about their voice not being heard.”

Stemme Farms sits just west of St. Louis, and it’s an astute locale for a rally: just far enough from the city to maintain the rural aesthetic, but still close enough to make it a reasonable trip for suburban Republicans.

And, for that matter, for local Democrats: Hawley’s event attracted a substantial cohort of protesters, who gathered across the road holding signs with slogans like “Ladder-Climbing Politician” and occasionally embarking on anti-Hawley chants. One ringleader told me they were there to protest Hawley’s handling of the Greitens investigation: “He’s declined to seriously investigate his biggest donor.” (This was a misguided reference to Hawley’s office’s finding that Greitens’s staff had not violated Missouri laws in their use of a texting app called Confide; the Greitens investigation remains ongoing.)

McCaskill and the Democratic Senate Majority PAC are making similar criticisms, seeking to tie the attorney general to the beleaguered governor his office is investigating. One TV spot says that Hawley “proclaimed Greitens innocent” and ends by asking, “Is Josh Hawley bought and paid for?”

“That’s total nonsense,” Hawley tells me, “the idea that we softballed anything. Look, I’m a prosecutor. I’m proud of my record in the attorney general’s office,” he says. “We’ve already brought four major public corruption prosecutions in my first year in office. Those were all underway by last fall, including against members of my own party. I have an active investigation into the governor, so I don’t want to say too much more about that, currently pending, but I’ll just say: This is classic Senator McCaskill trying to change the subject from her own terrible record.”

The Greitens affair is a headache for Hawley and has the potential to hurt him in the general election. Today, though, the Republicans inside don’t seem too bothered by the party crashers across the street from Stemme Farms. “You know how important this is,” a man in a Vietnam cap tells his friend with relish. “There’s protesters out there.”

Andrew Egger is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.