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.