Josh Hawley is progressives’ GOP soulmate in the Senate

Never have so many in Washington been so eager to expand government’s responsibilities in so many ways. No federal official, however, has an agenda of government enlargement as ambitious and comprehensive as that of Missouri’s freshman Republican senator. Josh Hawley’s bipartisanship invites progressives to share the fun of making government greater than ever.

Regarding current supply chain difficulties, Hawley says he has a plan for that. Writing last month in The New York Times, Hawley said the federal government should permanently micromanage U.S. trade. Mimicking progressives, who advocate “transformative” policies for this and that, Hawley wants Washington to “fundamentally restructure” trade policy, which he considers dangerously friendly to freedom.

The global trading system powered the astonishing enlargement of post1945 U.S. prosperity. Hawley, however, believes the system is a “failure” because supply problems have accompanied the pandemic.

He wants government to decide what products are “critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base,” and to require that they have more than 50% of their value made in America. Imagine the ocean of crony capitalism that would surround decisions about what is “critical” and “essential,” and what implicates “national security.”

But don’t worry. Vastly expanded legions of bureaucrats will make the many thousands of distinctions that Hawley, a selective critic of government’s competence, wants Washington to make.

Hawley’s proposal for a gigantic increase in government’s fine-tuning of the economy comes at a moment when inflation reveals, redundantly, government’s inability to even preserve the currency as a store of value.

Hawley, like many progressives, also advocates social engineering by activist government to solve gender-related problems. He has a plan for protecting American manliness. He sensibly worries that men are working and marrying less, fathering fewer children, and experiencing more anxiety and depression. As a cure, however, he offers his usual passion: radically increased government control of the economy.

While deploring “the victim mind-set,” he says that “over the last 30 years and more” men have been victims of free trade. This, he says, has left domestic manufacturing, which he implies is an incubator of manliness, “all but dead.” Well.

For more than 70 years the manufacturing sector’s share of real gross domestic product has varied within a narrow band — above 11%, below 14%. Granted, manufacturing employment as a percentage of total employment has declined, but largely because the productivity of manufacturing workers has dramatically increased, a development that Hawley might regret.

But facts cannot dampen Hawley’s economic determinism, which validates his advocacy of socialism as patriotism and gender rehabilitation. He embraces Theodore Roosevelt’s conception of “business as an adjunct to manhood,” and wants government to — again, he echoes progressivism’s vocabulary — “rebuild” the economy so “men can thrive.”

Hawley vaulted to prominence with his Jan. 6 fistpump showing solidarity with the mob hours before the U.S. Capitol riot. But forgive his hurrying to jump to the head of many parades. In an eighthgrade, young Josh signed himself: “President 2024.”