It’s the question that many politicos have been asking: What happens to the Republican Party after the Citizen Donald Trump era?
Here’s another question that is linked to that: What happens to cultural and religious conservatives — those that backed Trump and those that opposed him (openly or privately) — after this fever dance of an administration is over?
That was the topic looming in the background of a recent Emma Green think piece (yes, another one) at The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “Josh Hawley’s Mission to Remake the GOP.”
In most press coverage, the Missouri freshman is painted as a rather standard-issue conservative in the U.S. Senate. After all, those conservatives are all alike — even if libertarian folks often clash with religious conservatives in ways that don’t get much ink.
However, journalists who parse the texts produced by Hawley will notice strange subplots, like the fact that he is known for, as Green puts it, “casually citing the philosopher Edmund Burke and the Christian monk Pelagius in a single stretch.” But here is the paragraph where things get serious:
His speeches around town, including one he delivered … while accepting an award at the annual gala of the American Principles Project Foundation, a socially conservative public-policy organization, are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy: He rails against income inequality, condemns the policy deference afforded to corporations, and speaks warmly about the civic value of labor unions. He often talks about the “great American middle” being crushed by the decline of local communities, the winner-take-all concentration of wealth, and the inaccessibility of higher education. And he said that the modern Republican Party’s split over competing impulses toward free-market economics and social conservatism has led some conservatives to ignore the effects of their policies on the middle and working class. “It’s time to do away with that,” he told me.
You need another clash?
Green notes that, before this rebel alliance guy got into politics, he “worked for Becket, the D.C.-based religious-liberty law firm, and was part of the victorious legal team in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court decision that allowed certain religious exemptions from the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.”
That’s good social-conservative DNA, there. But what about the fact that Hawley is “totally comfortable citing statistics popular on the progressive left: the fact that 70 percent of American wealth is held by the top 10 percent of households, according to the Federal Reserve, or that working-class wages have stagnated compared with the rapid wage growth among top earners.”
Heresy, in many country club settings and even a few pulpits and pews.
But here is the meaty passage that reporters need to focus on, as they try to get a handle on the divisions inside the GOP tent that will fly apart if and when Trump falls or exits.
Hawley’s economic views are set apart from the left in part by his diagnosis of America’s problems. He sees social isolation and the erosion of local communal life — including church, family, neighborhoods, and labor unions — as intimately tied to declining economic opportunity for the middle class. “Economic policy and our communities and neighborhoods sit right together. They’re really intertwined,” Hawley told me.
And unlike most Democrats, Hawley argues that cultural pathologies have helped create this fractured political moment, particularly the cult of individualism that he says drives everything from public policy to pop culture. In a vision of America in which liberty is primarily about unlimited personal freedom, he said in his speech to the American Principles Project Foundation, “place and home don’t matter much, and civic participation is beside the point.” This same vision produces “economic policy focused on individual advancement, where advancement means making more money and consuming more stuff,” he said, according to his prepared remarks. “So in popular culture, billionaires become heroes, and the everyday working man becomes just some guy who never realized his potential.”
Yikes. Read it all.
FIRST IMAGE: Sunday morning Hawley family pillow fight before church. From Facebook.