A Long, Long Time Ago

How Josh Hawley became the most hated man in Washington—even among the conservatives who once saw him as a future president. @emmaogreen reports:https://t.co/tHXr4LmfCT

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 5, 2021

Three takeaways from this interesting article, in no particular order:

1) The article begins here:

Since Josh Hawley was a young man, powerful people have told him he was special. His teachers gave him the “Special R” award, just one feather in the Rockhurst High School valedictorian’s cap of outstandingness. Hawley’s mentor at Stanford, David Kennedy, took a shine to him just weeks into his freshman year, and came to see him as possibly the most gifted student he ever taught. At Yale Law, the dean, Harold Koh, took care to seat the young banker’s son from Missouri beside the state’s former senator John Danforth when Danforth visited. Hawley was working on a book about Theodore Roosevelt; he was fascinated by Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea that American democracy depends on regular people in local communities. It wouldn’t have been polite for Hawley to admit to ambitions such as becoming senator or president. But the glimmer of potential lingered in the air. Here, Danforth thought, is somebody who is really special.

And ends here:

Just a few months after he became a senator, Hawley wrote a searching essay about the theologian Pelagius, a fourth-century ascetic who preached about individual achievement, our inherent perfection, and the virtue of choosing our own way. Hawley delivered the essay as a commencement speech at the King’s College, an evangelical liberal-arts school in New York City. Of all the things he could have spoken to a crowd of young, talented Christians about, he chose Pelagius’s arrogance: “It is not the privileged but the common man or woman, not the elite but the everyday person, who moves the destinies of the world,” he told the graduates. The theologian misunderstood human nature, Hawley argued: “We are fragile. We are fallible. We suffer weakness and need. And we all stand in need of God’s grace.” By forgetting their obligations to their communities, Hawley suggested, even the most accomplished individuals can lose their way. 

So, Hawley is a Millenial snowflake who misunderstands Pelagius?  No; but it's ironic he misapplies Pelagius, who in the quote Hawley highlighted is closer to the Gospel teachings than Hawley is.  Yes, I accept (not as Hawley does, I'm sure) that we all need "God's grace," but Pelagius makes a very small-d democratic statement, which Hawley completely ignores.  And he misses it because he misses the fundamental teachings of the Gospels:  humility.  Jesus literally turned the "great man" theory of history on its head, both by becoming a world historical figure himself (a peasant from a Roman backwater) but by what he taught:  "The first of all will be last and servant of all."  Quite a bit more radical than Pelagius; certainly a lot closer to the truth of Christianity than Hawley.

2) Toward the end of the argument, we are treated to this:

Hawley’s former allies have turned on him because he represents truths they do not wish to see. Most conservative voters like Trump-style politics. Many think the election was stolen. The GOP electorate is becoming more working-class and ever so slightly more racially diverse, and populist economics may appeal to these voters more than free-market orthodoxy. Hawley had once offered a redemptive fantasy to a certain kind of conservative—all the benefits of Trump with the polish of a statesman. He was supposed to save elite conservatism from Trump’s crass embrace of conspiracism, trade skepticism, and thuggish assaults on the rule of law, not mimic it. Trump 2.0 is not what Hawley’s backers thought all that specialness was for.

I get the parallelism:  free-market orthodoxy v. "populist economics," but I fail to see anything "populist" about Donald Trump's economics.  Sure, he championed fast-food for dinners in the White House (not state dinners, since he never had any of those), but the people arrested after the Capitol assault flew there in private planes or could afford thousands of dollars in "combat gear" and had the leisure or vacation-from-work time to get to D.C., get a hotel room, put everything on the internet, and make their ways back home.  Everyone I know works for a living.  No one I know has the time it takes to go to D.C. for such a protest, much less the loose change for all that gear and guns (guns are expensive).  I know the appeal of "populism," and frankly, racism and white supremacy and "gimme some power!" are not the hallmarks of populism.  Nobody went to a Trump rally and chanted "Lock her up!" because Trump was railing at bankers or railroads (the bete noir of 19th century populism) or even the Federal Reserve.  "Populist economics" and Josh Hawley?  Where?  In what?  There's nothing cited in the article at all to indicate Hawley has said anything about even free-market orthodoxy (unless you count tariffs on China, which pushed many farmers over the brink into bankruptcy, or railing against "big tech," ironic since everyone following Trump relied on "big tech" to do so.  And didn't populism originate with farmers in the first place?).

But Hawley's positions on China and "big tech" put him at odds with the Club for Growth, which is actually less an advocate for "free-market orthodoxy" than it is for feudalism and a return to the economic policies of Hebert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge.  So the third point is the question of definition:   just what in the hell is "free-market orthodoxy" anyway?  Balanced federal budgets?  So, what, after the Trump tax break, Hawley's failure to champion ending Medicare and Social Security and almost any government funding not spent on defense made him heterodox to the Club for Growth?

3) 

Hawley did not call for or expect the violence. If you squint, it’s even possible to see a principled stand in what he was doing. Like many people, Hawley seems to believe it’s a bad thing that so many Americans distrust the electoral process, and he argued that it was better to debate those misgivings than ignore them. His objection was not grounded in an allegation of fraud, but a lawyerly theory about constitutional power; he found a plausible, if not very persuasive, way to question how mail-in voting had been conducted, as opposed to repeating the Trump team’s unhinged claims. But when the mob invades your debate society, it’s time to gavel the discussion to a close.

The violence was an invitation to humility that Hawley declined. After the senators had returned to their chamber and it was time for him to speak, Hawley thanked law enforcement and denounced the day’s violence, then plowed ahead with his arguments about Pennsylvania’s constitution. He ended up objecting to certifying the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

No, it isn't, really.  Not even if you close your eyes can you see a principled stand in what Hawley did.  Debating the issues of the electoral process is an argument for the Senate floor, or for a committee marking up a bill about electoral law.  His objection was not even "grounded in...a lawyerly theory about constitutional power."  It was based on a bit of dicta by Rehnquist in Bush v. Gore, an idea more suited to law review articles (which nobody but law professors read) and perhaps worthy of argument in chambers of appellate courts, but hardly ready for prime time on the day the Congress meets to conduct the ceremony of putting its imprimatur on the seal of the people's selection of their President.  It's not a persuasive argument because it's not a plausible argument, and the joint meeting of Congress to receive the tally of the electoral college was not the forum to make an argument: period.  It wasn't the mob that should have shut down Hawley's grandstanding:  it was the occassion itself, without the intervening chaos.  What happened after the rioters left just reaffirmed Hawley's inability to read the room.

And if "the violence as an invitation to humility that Hawley declined," well, quelle surprise.  He only drew attention to himself by eschewing all humility.  His critique of Pelagius is a convenient straw man:  he condemns Pelagius to a crowd of evangelicals in order to praise himself for his understanding of the nature of humankind's relationship to God.  It's a humble-brag, as he stands on the corpse he's made of Pelagius to elevate himself before the assembled multitude.  Christianity itself is "an invitation to humility," but Hawley decline that one, too; a long, long time ago.