The Future of Right Wing Populism Is Every Idiot I Went to High School With
Note: I’ve made use of Frozen Pages in this piece — if you wish to see what this man has written, but don’t want to give traffic to his publishers, use the Frozen links. However, in the first one, there are images that didn’t freeze — so be aware.
Some people call it “Missour-ah”, and I’m pretty sure that means their ancestors were confederates. I call it “Missour-ee” because it’s homophonous with “Misery” and my maternal ancestors fought for the North.
On Friday of last week, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley published a piece in the National Review calling the attempt to defund the police an attack on the American Way of Life (warning: links to the National Review.) The tagline of the piece, “Protecting Americans and the American Way,” was, “We must defend against the left’s anti-American, anti-police narrative.” (Frozen Page here; no images, sadly.)
It’s not a good piece. I don’t say this because I disagree with it – I do, quite strongly, disagree with it – I say this because it’s just not a terribly well-written piece, and is an excellent argument against the virtues of an education from either of Hawley’s almae matres, Stanford and Yale. To think that someone could graduate from such supposed top schools and still make errors that wouldn’t pass muster in a Freshman English class! Hawley lovingly crafts a straw-man, and then attacks it with such vigor that you’d almost think he believes himself to be doing something useful.
The real problem is not the header image – which shows the headless torso of a police officer with a “mourning band” covering his badge number and a Blue Lives Matter patch – but at the end of the first paragraph, where Hawley writes, “And now many left-wing activists, cheered on by the media, are ready to do away with law enforcement altogether, campaigning to ‘Defund the Police.’”
In short, Hawley is conflating the moderate position – “defund the police” – with the more radical position of “abolish the police.” These two policy positions are different, and while a number of police abolitionists view defunding as a good first step, there are also many people who support defunding without supporting abolition. Conflating the two is thus a way of discrediting the moderate position.
To be frank, I support police abolition — but defunding would be a fine step. However, his conflation of the two positions is, I believe, indicative of intellectual dishonesty. He is either an idiot arguing in good faith, or a bad actor. While I believe him to be an idiot regardless, I have done further research and now am also convinced that this man is a bad actor.
What I find most baffling about this is the argument that Hawley uses to support his position, claiming that “the costs of this radicalism will be borne not by the many elites who advocate it but by the working class of all races — both those who are most vulnerable to crime and those who staff our police forces and protect our neighborhoods.” This ignores the historically white-supremacist origins of policing as protectors of private property as well as the historic origins of specifically American policing in southern Slave Patrols and analogous northern constables charged with running off Native Americans (research found in the footnotes of the Behind the Bastards episode “Behind the Police”). Hawley’s use of class-oriented language without understanding the class dynamics of the interaction between the police and the policed is troubling. More on that later.
He goes on to write that:
The truth is, American elites don’t fear violent crime because, increasingly, they don’t encounter it. Those below the poverty line are more than twice as likely to be the victims of violent crime as those with high incomes. Rather than make high-crime neighborhoods safe and habitable for the people who live there, urban elites demolish them and put up luxury high-rises for the upper class. And from the safety of a luxury loft, policing becomes an abstract concept.
He’s casting the demands of activists to defund the police as the demands of a wealthy “elite”, and not those of the people being policed. Of course, being the definition of an elite – a U.S. senator – perhaps policing has become abstract to Hawley, who previously served as Attorney General of Missouri, and thus has not interacted with the police as a normal citizen in quite some time. Policing, for him, is something that is done to other people.
Protests on the Plaza, KCMO. Image taken from the Hutch Post, in Hutchinson, KS.
While he comes close to the truth when he begins the statement that, “Law enforcement has its share of corruption, no doubt, but the police are not the foot soldiers of modern-day oppression. They are the thin blue line whose service and sacrifice makes life in a free republic possible,” it falls apart around the 25% mark. What we saw at the end of May and in the first weeks of June were the police acting as just the foot soldiers of modern-day oppression that Hawley claims they are not – something he would have seen if he ever returned to the state that elected him to the senate. Perhaps if he were actually on the ground when the police started firing expired tear gas canisters into the crowd in J.C. Nichols Park he might assess the situation differently, but Hawley is exactly the kind of out-of-touch ideologue that he claims “the Left” is made up of.
But first, an aside: I’m writing this piece because I’ve been reminded of how bad a person he is, but he’s also just so bad at argument that I can’t imagine he was ever a good lawyer. How, exactly, will police be defunded, destroyed, and federalized all at the same time? I’ve started drinking because this position strikes me as so incoherent that reading this counts as an arcane form of self-harm, so perhaps I’m not following the logic, but it seems to me that none of his nightmare scenarios really work, especially because he seems to be proposing that they all will happen simultaneously.
This is the Strasserite flag — your gut reaction to this image is most likely the correct one.
Given Hawley’s attempt at co-opting the language of class warfare, his staunch nationalist tendencies, and his fondness for the Defense Production Act, disdain for the First Amendment, I fear that Josh Hawley is not a garden variety conservative, but a Strasserite(1 ) who’s learned to talk like a Republican. For more evidence, let’s turn to a speech that he gave at the National Conservatism Conference in July of Last Year (transcript available here on a frozen page.)
In this speech, he talks about a number of things, but mostly he seems to be saying that what’s needed is a “third position” of some sort. He said that:
The great divide of our time is not between Trump supporters and Trump opponents, or between suburban voters and rural ones, or between Red America and Blue America.
No, the great divide of our time is between the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society. And to answer the discontent of our time, we must end that divide. We must forge a new consensus.
The senator, pictured here looking like the sort of man who would say this.
As an aside: I’ve met like 30 people with that same mouth, and each and every one of them has been an asshole.
Which, you know, not necessarily the worst thing in the world. I’ve heard plenty of people use this as a lead in to talking about how the American political system is bullshit – which it is – but then he goes on to state:
For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.
This class lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.
And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.
Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.
On economics, this consensus favors globalization—closer & closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms. The boundaries between America and the rest of the world should fade and eventually vanish.
The goal is to build a global consumer economy, one that will provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, and funded by American dollars.
But it’s about more than economics. According to the cosmopolitan consensus, globalization is a moral imperative. That’s because our elites distrust patriotism and dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.[sic]
The nation’s leading academics will gladly say this for the record.
Do I think that Josh Hawley is necessarily an anti-semite? No. I see no evidence of any direct anti-semitism from him at all — but that’s the point of a dog whistle, with which this passage is rife. While a Christian, he does acknowledge that Jesus was Jewish, stating (incorrectly) that he believes that individuality was invented “2000 years ago, when the proud traditions of the self-governing city-states met the radical claims of a Jewish rabbi, who taught that the call of God comes to every person, and the power of God can work through each, so that every human being has dignity, and standing, and can change the world.” However, the way that he talks about this “cosmopolitan class” does directly mirror the language used as dog whistles by Neo-Nazis: globalist, cosmopolitan, elite. The fact that he uses this language makes me uncomfortable, and I suspect would discomfit anyone who knows history (as Hawley, presumably, does – he majored in history). Edit: Other people have noted this; his only response was a tweet, reading, “The liberal language police have lost their minds.”
Do I think he’s wrong in his analysis? Not completely. I think that the problems he sees most Americans dealing with – he discusses how people are living “with flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity.” But his sense of nationalism is too strong for him to note that the people who are gutting the American economy are, themselves, American (note how 8 of the top 10 are American, note also how they got richer during the pandemic). Just a guess, but I think it’s safe to assume that the one surviving Koch brother, an American, is probably closer to Hawley in politics than to any academic I’ve ever met outside of the Business School.
Do better, Stanford Department of History.
Do I trust any aspect of his analysis? No. Look, Hawley is fundamentally illiterate when it comes to history – which is shameful, given that he has a degree in it that he paid more than $100,000 for in 2002. Ignoring the fact that the concept of the individual originated long before Christianity, that the Early United States had suffrage limited to land-owning white men. (He actually says that the US was framed to be governed “not by a select elite, as in the days of old, but by the common man and woman.” White women didn’t get the vote until 1920, and black people didn’t get it ensured until 1965.)
In short, to summarize: Josh Hawley seemed to me to be an uninteresting idiot for a very long time – but I fear that he’s a kind of idiot that’s altogether more interesting and more dangerous. He increasingly seems to be the sort who seeks to ride the wave of right-wing populism that he sees beginning to rise. I have heard some grumblings that he may be the next “big thing” on the right after the current president has left office, and given the predictions of a massive economic downturn coming in August, I fear that there may be a lot of fuel for right-wing economic populism.
It is essential that some kind of counter-narrative be prepared for that moment, something that dispenses with the tired tropes that have been deployed in the past and have kneecapped the American left for decades. As much of an idiot as Hawley obviously is, he seems more competent than the current crop of bad actors, and and as such, he needs to be prevented from getting any closer to the levers of power than he already is.
Every passing year makes me trust you less, RHS. And I didn’t trust you a lot to begin with.
Addendum: It has come to my attention that the subject of this article and I went to the same high school (it also produced Tim Kaine, the Miracle Whip of Vice Presidential Candidates, and the bastards behind the Payday Loans industry), and I have to say that this is the one thing that has damaged my confidence in my education more than anything else.
1. To understand what a Strasserite is, you can read this wikipedia article, or just think “someone who acts like a communist, but is more racist. than anything else.”
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