Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri made the following remarks this week at the National Conservatism Conference.
“The cosmopolitan agenda has driven both left and right. The left champions multiculturalism and degrades our common identity. The right celebrates hyper-globalization and promises that the market will make everything right in the end, eventually … perhaps.
“In truth, neither political party has seemed much interested in the American middle for quite a long time. And neither has seemed much interested in the republic the middle sustains.
“But the old political platforms have grown stale. And the old political truisms now ring hollow. The American people are demanding something different, and something better. It’s time we ended the cosmopolitan experiment and recovered the promise of the republic.”
You’ll probably notice the both-siderism involved here. The Republicans are at fault for supporting globalization and the Democrats are at fault for embracing a kind of one-world philosophy that doesn’t embrace American exceptionalism. Hawley has caught the most flak for using the charged word “cosmopolitanism,” which has a history of being applied in particular to Jews, with extremely unfortunate consequences. Had he chosen some other word, people might have paid more attention to the full breadth of his remarks and noticed that they’re really not that far off from what a lot progressives say about Wall Street, globalization, free trade, the monopolized economy, and the hollowing out of Middle America.
It’s actually a remarkably populist speech that with a few edits would be well-received in many progressive quarters.
So we need new thinking and new policies to bring the work that makes for citizenship to every person in America willing and able to work.
That means encouraging capital investment in the great American middle, in our workers, not just in financial assets.
That means investing in research and innovation in the heartland of this country, not just in San Francisco and New York.
That means challenging the economic concentration that stifles small producers and family enterprises.
That means new pathways for skills and job training, so Americans can get the tools they need, and the respect they deserve, without the mountain of debt that the higher-education monopoly now imposes—and I have proposed new legislation to this end just today.
It means trade policies that put American workers first, that prioritize them over cheap goods from abroad, that encourage the real production of real things here, and not just arbitrage schemes by the great corporations.
It means an immigration system that rewards and nourishes American labor rather than devaluing it.
That sounds like Hawley is a subscriber to the Washington Monthly, because we’ve been hitting on most of those themes for years now. It sounds a lot like what progressive presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been arguing.
To be sure, there are other elements of his speech that diverge dramatically from anything you’ll see from the left, most of which involve his desire to carve out a common history and set of assumptions that don’t include the opinions of newcomers or the multicultural population centers on our coasts.
“The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together…Things like place and national feeling and religious faith. They regard our inherited traditions as oppressive and our shared institutions—like family and neighborhood and church—as backwards. What they offer instead is a progressive agenda of social liberation in tune with the priorities of their wealthy and well-educated counterparts around the world.”
He insists the left “degrades our common identity,” and that’s not something he’ll find any support for in progressive circles.
Unfortunately, he did decide to use “cosmopolitanism” as a pejorative and a contrast to what he sees as a virtuous American Republic. Whether this was an intentional dog-whistle to the white supremacist right or simply a terrible mistake, it has all but erased everything else he said.
If he wasn’t such a partisan, he might have noticed there are people on the left who absolutely agree that “economic concentration that stifles small producers and family enterprises” is a huge problem and that have also observed that the modern economy works much better for San Francisco and New York than it does for Detroit or St. Louis. He’d notice that progressives have opposed unfair trade practices that cost American jobs and that many Democrats are working to relieve the burden of college debt. On his list of grievances, the majority are things that the left is more concerned about than the right, even though the blue states are generally prospering under the status quo more than the red ones.
And if hadn’t used an anti-Semitic trope to attack the left, the left might have noticed that Hawley is a potential ally on a host of legislative initiatives. But, for whatever reason, he made his decision and now he’s being justifiably blasted for it.
It’s unclear why he insists on dividing the people suffering in small towns and rural America from the people suffering in mid-size cities who are also victims of economic concentration. Unfortunately, race plays an indisputable part in how he frames his idea of a virtuous America. The multiracial populations of even our rich coastal cities are also victims of the monopolization of the economy that “stifles small producers and family enterprises,” so the only reason to exclude them is that they’re multiracial or “cosmopolitan.”
For Hawley, despite getting many things right, he still errs by thinking diverse urban populations can’t or do not share his concerns, or that they don’t suffer from the same problems as poor but aspiring people in the rest of the country. He casts them as the enemy, and that’s the main reason his speech will only be remembered for its divisiveness.
An odd word like “cosmopolitanism” (a word I have never spoken out loud) does not appear out of thin air.
The only way it appears in speech or print is because someone was digging around in a sack of rarely used words, looking for just the right one.
He’s not huffy about corporate concentration for the same reasons as the left, he desires different results from the left, and he will always insist on poison pills that are central to his critique because it’s ultimately about white grievance. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton (and lesser extent Marco Rubio but he’s a piker and a lightweight) are trying to forge a way forward for the Republicans and repackage Trumpism in a more acceptable/palatable manner.
Josh Hawley isn’t mad about Nike offshoring jobs and running sweatshops, he’s mad that Nike is able to sign on Colin Kaepernick in the face of widespread white opposition and it be a profitable thing to do, or the women’s national team has radically anti-reactionary politics and the country loves them. That’s why the State must now intervene, and make things the way they are supposed to work. Stealing left language to critique capitalism from a nationalist ideology as part of a project to reestablish a former American glory at the expense of minorities and women. It’s just fascism. He knows what “cosmopolitan” means and I’ve seen an uptick in its use on the internet ever since Trump came on the scene. Hawley supported tax cuts for more increase in capital concentration, opposes minimum wages and labor rights of any kind. Fuck Josh Hawley.
And it’s the racism (and anti-Semitism) that’s increasingly a problem for Republicans. That’s the thing about demographic changes: they’re relentless. Every year 3 million (or so) mostly older, whiter, richer, more conservative Americans die; and every year 4 million (or so) mostly younger, darker, working & middle-class, more liberal Americans become eligible voters.
The other thing Republicans have hardly even begun to reckon with is that once you decide to marginalize the racists and nativists in your coalition, it takes *decades* to build your new coalition. (At least, that’s been the Democrats’ experience over the last 50+ years.)
Your title reminded me of Damon Linker back in June, commenting on Tucker Carlson praising Elizabeth Warren’s economic point of view. Linker was going on about the idea of Carlson running for president in 2024. To him Carlson sounded progressive on economics, while of course still being conservative on all the social issues.
The quote from Warren: “Politicians love to say they care about American jobs. But for decades, those same politicians have cited ‘free market principles’ and refused to intervene in markets on behalf of American workers. And of course, they ignore those same supposed principles and intervene regularly to protect the interests of multinational corporations and international capital. We can navigate the changes ahead if we embrace economic patriotism and make American workers our highest priority, rather than continuing to cater to the interests of companies and people with no allegiance to America.”
Carlson: “she sounded like Donald Trump at his best.” I evidently haven’t heard Trump at his best, but Carlson I gather sees a big change in their approach to economics as the the right way for conservatives to remake themselves. I believe he said some of these things at the National Conservatism Conference.
Linker here: https://theweek.com/articles/845696/tucker-carlson-president
Carlson report here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/06/she-sounds-like-trump-his-best-tucker-carlson-endorses-elizabeth-warrens-economic-populism
So now I want a Warren/Carlson ticket, which would solve all 99 of our problems.
The strongest element in this speech to “conservative” lunkheads is regional hostility, the virtuous American “middle” against pagan multicultural coastal “cosmopolitanism” who are taking all the economic spoils from the hardworking (Christian) religious . He’s not talking about “middle” in the political sense, but literally the regional. Also, too, more blather inveighing against the shadowy “elites”, who are always exclusively (and amazingly) a component of the left. Soros? Buffet? Of course.
It sounds like the sort of speech an aspiring present day Hitler would construct–especially with the “cosmopolitan elites” of the (communist) left. As noted yesterday, It Has Happened Here; American fascism is no longer simply theoretical. So enraged right wing victim-hood and grievance as usual. There’s no way forward here and the rising stars of National Trumpalism (like Hawley) will never be political allies on any issue. This speech is more an open declaration of civil war.
I looked up the legislation Hawley says he’s proposing to deal with student debt. No proposal to change the inequities in the system of financing higher education: it’s to make colleges directly responsible for graduates’ employability, across the board, charging them 50% of every defaulted loan. To me this direct financialization of the relationship between college and student is a strategy for sharpening the difference between public and elite private schools: to make the former more than ever pure job training centers while the latter will dominate the luxury fields–pure sciences, humanities, social sciences, since their graduates get rich regardless of what they major in. And it’s explicitly intended as a punishment for public universities because they’ve “gobbled up truckloads of taxpayer dollars.”
Hawley has learned how to make sympathetic-sounding gestures to the (white sector of the) working class much the way Trump did in 2015, with his apparent desire for single-payer health care and trillions on infrastructure and ending the carried-interest loophole, most of which turned out to be pure fiction. He’ll always be on the side of increased inequality, though. He’s not an ally.
Sounds racist to me. Fuck those black and brown people. We white.
Well, “common identity” doesn’t extend to commitment to democratic principles, that’s for sure!
Nope on this speech. Living in a major city of western New York, the retail apocalypse caused by Amazon and the stifling of broadband competition caused by just not enough population to bother stringing new wires affects me just as much as the rural folks 20 miles away.
His party’s consistent deregulation approach has led to this. Now he wants to pander to disaffected white Protestant liberals. Nope.