Hawley’s actions rebrand him as Mr. Insurrection
It’s been easy to forget, after his Senate grandstanding helped summon a QAnonish riot, that the weeks leading up to the nightmare Jan. 6 actually went pretty well for Josh Hawley.
In mid-December, in a policy gambit that was supposed to set him up as a champion of conservative populism after Donald Trump, Hawley, R-Mo., joined Bernie Sanders to champion adding new relief checks to a COVID spending bill. The idea picked up belated support from the White House, passed the House as a $2,000 benefit and gathered enough steam that the GOP candidates in Georgia’s Senate runoffs felt required to lend their support.
When both Republicans went down to defeat, Hawley was positioned to make the case that if Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled Senate had moved on his check idea, the GOP majority in the chamber might have been saved.
Instead, Hawley’s challenge to the Electoral College certification became a potentially career-defining story. Rather than being Mr. Populist or the $2K Guy, he’s branded as Mr. Insurrection — or, on the pro-Trump right, as a martyr to liberal cancellation.
This rebranding is an example of how any attempt to build a conservative populism after Trump is likely to be sucked into the vortex of crazy around the former president, who has taken the array of populist impulses on the right and made them all about himself.
For conservatives interested in economic populism — meaning, basically, a more middle-America-friendly economics, a program of sustained support for workers and families rather than just upperbracket tax cuts — Trump’s ascendancy has always been a weird mix of vindication and calamity.
When the coronavirus arrived, Trump had an opportunity to put nationalist and populist impulses to work — the former in trying to keep the virus at bay, the latter in dealing with the economic fallout. Instead he practiced denial, leaned on hack advisers and presided over unnecessary death and political defeat.
Throughout this experience, populist idea guys as well as politicians like Hawley planned for a future in which populism’s vindication could be extended and developed, and its connection to Trump’s vices and failures gradually severed.
But that severing became less likely the more Trump made himself the focus of all of right-wing populism’s cultural impulses.
Over the next few years, this will have two likely implications for the right’s sincere economic populists.
First, they will watch the Biden administration poach issues that they once hoped to own, from big tax breaks for families to big spending on domestic infrastructure.
Second, they will watch their party nominate self-proclaimed populists, in states like Ohio and Arkansas that should be the base for a working-class conservatism, who are just acolytes for the cult of Trump — figures like Jim Jordan and Sarah Sanders, let’s say, with a policy agenda condensed to owning the libs and dog whistling to the QAnoners.
Such a future might seem to vindicate the left-wing view, expressed eloquently by Daniel Luban in a recent Dissent essay, that the general possibility of right-wing economic populism never materializes as specific political reality: “Protracted experience suggests that we should only believe the American right can move left on economics once we’ve witnessed it happen.”
Except this isn’t quite what experience suggests.
The American right usually moves somewhat left on economics when it takes the presidency.
It’s more accurate to amend Luban’s point and say that the American right doesn’t usually move leftward on economics in a thoughtful, coherent and sustainable way — that the move is usually ad hoc, undercooked and cheerfully unprincipled, which makes it more likely to be abandoned once the party is out of power.
This is the problem that conservative policy thinkers and the occasional farsighted politician have sought to solve: If the party’s move to the center is inevitable, why not make it sustainable?
In a way, the Trumpification of the party makes this problem more urgent, because his downscale political coalition needs a populist economic agenda if it’s going to ever build outward to a national majority.
But for the immediate future, no populism is likely to emerge that isn’t primarily about fealty to Trump, and no national majority can be forged on the basis of that fealty — not by Trump, and not by Hawley or any other too-clever courtier hovering beside the Mar-a-Lago throne.