Josh Hawley, a 41-year-old US senator from Missouri, has spent the last four years positioning himself as one of the political heirs to Donald Trump – a more polished successor who can unite rightwing nationalism with populist economic policies. He is widely expected to run for president in 2024.
Hawley was the first Republican senator – soon joined by Ted Cruz – to announce that he would challenge the certification of the election results in Congress last Wednesday. Democrats, as well as several of Hawley’s Republican colleagues in the Senate, lambasted Hawley’s decision as irresponsible, inflammatory and politically cynical.
There is no credible evidence of fraud in the presidential election, which Hawley, a Yale-trained lawyer, presumably knows. He pressed on, however, defending his vote against certification as a symbolic gesture and noting that Democrats made similar challenges after Republican presidential wins in 2000, 2004, and 2016. On his way to the US Capitol on the day of the certification vote, he raised a fist in salute to pro-Trump protesters gathered nearby. He looked “like a doofus,” a Republican strategist complained to NBC.
Unlike Donald Trump, Hawley did not directly encourage the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol last Wednesday. But his move to muddy the legitimacy of the election undoubtedly fanned the flames. Now, with five people dead, human excrement smeared on the walls of a building many Americans regard as close to sacred, and widespread calls for Trump to resign or face impeachment, Hawley may have succeeded in casting himself as a mini-Trump – and is facing an accordingly fiercebacklash.
Although he condemned the violence at the Capitol, Hawley has doubled down on his decision to challenge the election. “I will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections,” he said in a public statement after the riot. “That’s my job, and I will keep doing it.”
As blowback builds, the question is whether Hawley – now an overnight pariah in Washington – will suffer politically for his wild gamble to pander to a minority of Americans who are diehard Trump supporters, and include Qanon conspiracy theorists. His decision to cast his lot with would-be insurrectionists, if only indirectly, may have been a bridge too far for many Americans.
Hawley’s mentor, the Republican former senator John Danforth, recently told the St Louis Post-Dispatch: “Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” Simon & Schuster has cancelled publication of a forthcoming book by Hawley. Several Democratic members of Congress have called for Hawley and Cruz to resign, as has his home state newspaper, the Kansas City Star.
Over the past several years, Hawley’s political star had risen unsettlingly fast. In his arch-conservative intellectual credentials, willingness to cast aside Reaganite economic orthodoxies for more populist messaging, and all-around chutzpah, Hawley has sometimes been characterized as a more clever Trump – and, perhaps, for that reason, more dangerous. What if “Republicans come back in 2024 with a smarter, slicker, savvier version of Trump?” Mehdi Hasan speculated in The Intercept last year. “[D]on’t be fooled, progressives. Josh Hawley is not your friend.”
Unlike Trump, an erratic and loud-mouthed reality TV star and real estate mogul with no previous political experience, Hawley has an impeccable conservative CV. He studied at Stanford and at Yale law school, clerked for US chief justice John Roberts, and at one point taught at St Paul’s School, an all-male London private school known for educating the British elite. In 2016, he was elected Missouri attorney general. After only two years in the post, he was elected to the US Senate in 2018, by defeating Claire McCaskill, a centrist Democrat whom Hawley painted as an out-of-touch liberal.
Hawley, currently the youngest member of the Senate, is known for his modishly slim-cut suits and his general eagerness for media coverage. “[I]n a town full of thirsty people, Josh Hawley is a man crawling across the Kalahari,” Charles Pierce, a political columnist for Esquire, wrote last year. “The most dangerous place to stand in Washington DC is any place between Senator Josh Hawley and a live microphone.”
Hawley is a conservative evangelical Christian who is ardently anti-abortion and known for railing against the “cosmopolitan elite”. Unusually for a Republican politician, however, he has also called to investigate and possibly break up major Silicon Valley tech companies and criticized corporations such as Walmart for underpaying their employees.
In December, he formed an unexpected alliance with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the socialist senator Bernie Sanders in an unsuccessful attempt to secure higher Covid relief checks. Hawley called the $600 checks which Congress ultimately issued insulting to struggling people.
The senator’s favorite pet issue, however, is the evils of big tech. He has pushed for the government to investigate Facebook and Google for antitrust and consumer violations and has described social media as addictive and “a parasite” on society. In 2019, he introduced a bill in Congress that would automatically limit time on social media platforms to 30 minutes a day unless individual users opt out of the requirement. The unsuccessful bill also sought to ban functions such as “infinite scrolling” and autoplay.
The libertarian wing of the conservative movement is, unsurprisingly, leery about Hawley and his enthusiasm for using the levers of the state to enforce morality. The libertarian magazine Reason has called Hawley “a first-rate demagogue” and “the ultimate Karen”.
The extent to which Hawley is actually an economic populist, let alone economically leftwing, is questionable. He opposed raising the minimum wage in Missouri and has endorsed anti-union legislation. But he has a finger in the wind, and is keenly attuned to the fact that the Republican party, historically the party of the more educated and affluent, is increasingly becoming the party of the working class.
Hawley appears to be placing his bets on a political realignment, one in which Trump was the beginning, not the culmination, of a political phenomenon. The Missouri senator has worked overtime to position himself as a voice for socially conservative, working-class Americans.
The notion that Hawley – Ivy League-educated, the son of a banker – is a man of the people may be difficult to swallow. Then again, Trump, a billionaire, successfully ran for president by presenting himself as an outsider attacking an establishment elite.
The question now is whether Hawley’s eagerness to court diehard Trump voters has helped his 2024 ambitions, or hindered them. His actions may be popular with part of his Republican base in Missouri, a state which Trump won by a more than 15% margin.
It seems less likely, however, that the American public as a whole will be sympathetic. Hawley did “something that was really dumbass,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, complained on NPR. “This was a stunt. It was a terrible, terrible idea.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
