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National Conservatism Conference speech by Sen. Hawley

TownieDeac

words are futile devices
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Hawley is 39 and already being called the intellectual heir to Trump. He's got Yale, Stanford, some fancy British prep school background. And in this very long and vague speech, he actually gets a lot right. He gets a lot wrong too and is clearly a ghoul, but I feel this is the rhetorical direction the GOP will be taking post-Trump. Trump is not a repeatable phenomenon for the GOP or Dems; he has no camp, he's not beholden to anyone in his party or any one lobby, he got elected by being a loose cannon celebrity who was not happy about America having a black president. So how do you keep up the rhetoric that's so successful? (The message that coastal elites are ruining the real America, posted from a gold penthouse in Manhattan or from the actual White House.) You do it with tropes of "middle" America, meaning both the middle class and the geographic middle as a code word for white, Christian Americans.

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-josh-hawleys-speech-national-conservatism-conference

Some snippets:

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.

We must recover and renew the dream of the republic.

Very Obama.

That work begins with a clear assessment of where we stand.

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.

Very interesting stuff here: 1) conflating running businesses and overseeing universities as the power brokers in America as if Goldman execs and Nathan Hatch are more or less equally shaping the country. 2) Globalism critique. Seems so oddly in conflict with free market capitalism/Liberalism. What does a closed society even look like today, both economically and politically? Even if America were to go more protectionist, tariff-y, it's not as though we can put that toothpaste back in

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.

The nation’s leading academics will gladly say this for the record.

MIT Professor Emeritus Leo Marx has said that the “planet would be a better place to live if more people gave [their] primary allegiance ‘to the community of human beings in the entire world.’”

NYU’s Richard Sennett has denounced what he called “the evil of shared national identity.”

The late Lloyd Rudolph of the University of Chicago said patriotism “excludes difference and speaks the language of hate and violence.”

And then there’s Martha Nussbaum, who wrote that it is wrong and morally dangerous to teach students that they are “above all, citizens of the United States.” Instead, they should be educated for “world citizenship.”

You get the idea. 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.

And all of this—the economic globalizing, the social liberationism—has worked quite well. For some. For the cosmopolitan class.

Whom it has not served are the people whose labor sustains this nation. Whom it has not helped are the citizens whose sacrifices protect our republic. Whom it has not benefited is the great American middle.

There is no economic basis for the argument he's making here: America will never be able to compete with cheap labor elsewhere. It sounds almost like he's getting to a Marxist critique about problems endemic to Capital vs Labor. Instead it's quite clear he's just talking about religion and race.

It’s time we ended the cosmopolitan experiment and recovered the promise of the republic.

Let’s start with this. America is not going to become the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is not going to become America.

We are a unique nation with a unique history and a unique purpose in the world.

That history began 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.

And so the idea of the individual was born.

And our first forbearers brought that radical conviction to these shores and reshaped the republican tradition.

They built a new republic governed not by a select elite, as in the days of old, but by the common man and woman, grounded on the premise that it is the common man and woman who are the noblest of citizens.

Factually wrong, the Senate is exactly the carried over tradition of elite ruling over populace, not to mention it took generations of suffrage for voting rights to get past land requirements, race, and gender requirements. And conflating the history of America with the history of Christianity is something else.




I'll stop here, there's lots more gems in here, but curious if others have dug into this dude. He seems less stupid on the face of it than most ghouls representing the party in Trump GOP America. But a competent Trump is probably the end of the republic, and I wonder if Hawley is nearly there.
 
He's all over twitter. He's a goober. Here are two recent tweets.

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A comparison I heard recently that I thought was good was the successful way these types conflate class and culture, e.g.,

A barista in NY with purple hair and a nose ring making ~$11/hr pursuing a women's studies degree at junior college is a great portrait of a coastal elite

Whereas

The owner of a Ford dealership in Missouri with a huge ranch and maxed out 401k is exactly who Hawley is calling "the middle"
 
The barista obviously has money to waste to be able to keep her hair purple.
 
He's all over twitter. He's a goober. Here are two recent tweets.


The exchange with Tucker Carlson is too much. Just a Stanford / Yale educated Senator who clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and a wealthy TV host who grew up in San Francisco and went to boarding school in New England complaining about the ELITES.
 
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...bill-banning-loot-boxes-pay-to-win-mechanics/

This is good.

His railing against Silicon Valley, though it comes from objectionable moral grounds, is generally correct.

He also speaks a lot about abstract concepts of loneliness, depression, suicide, addiction, etc., as cultural outputs of the problems we currently face as a society, and again I think he's right but gets the "why" wrong.

The danger here is that a politician who can say something that sounds right (or in some cases is, at least partially, right) but has a ghoulish, racist, theocratic mission can go far.
 
The exchange with Tucker Carlson is too much. Just a Stanford / Yale educated Senator who clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and a wealthy TV host who grew up in San Francisco and went to boarding school in New England complaining about the ELITES.

while full-throated supporters of a billionaire(?) New Yorker president
 
I'm sure there are a lot of smart guys who see the ease with which Trump has eroded the unwritten norms that govern our country and dream about unfettered power.

That's what happened to a great extent with the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar's rise to the dictatorship was preceded by several strongmen, most importantly Sulla, who weakened the traditions and norms of the Republic to the extent that it made it much easier for someone like Caesar to take over years later. One wonders if we have any would-be Caesars carefully watching and noting what Trump has done and are patiently waiting for their chance.
 
 
Yeah, I’m not, but I think our institutions will survive him.

Why? Republicans show no interest protecting institutions. Maybe we are talking about different institutions.
 
OH MY GOD GUYS THE SKY IS FALLING

LOL. We've had Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Boss Tweed, Huey P. Long, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, Dick Cheney, and now Trump as major political leaders with little to no ethics, clear anti-democratic authoritarian instincts, and who were supported by large numbers of people. It's not too much of a stretch to assume there are other pols out there with similar instincts and inclinations who have seen what Trump has done and are planning accordingly. If I remember correctly, there was a thirty-to-forty year stretch between Sulla's dictatorship and Caesar's rise to power, so I'm not saying that a dictatorship is around the corner, or that it will even happen. Just that Trump is setting lots of bad precedents that future ambitious and ruthless pols may exploit for their own benefit. That's not a "sky is falling" mentality, it's one that is borne out by past US history, and has lots of precedents.
 
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