Just How Fake Is Josh Hawley's Populism?

Even if it has some real substance, we shouldn't take it at face value.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

I’ll admit my bias right up front: From the moment Missouri senator Josh Hawley arrived on the national scene, he has struck me as an absolutely spectacular phony. That’s seldom the best way to judge a politician — no one has been more critical of the “authenticity” trope than I have — but the insincerity of some characters is so over-the-top that it’s hard to take them at their word on almost anything.

It started when, running for Senate in 2018, he aired an ad in which he emoted passionately about his commitment to making sure health insurers couldn’t deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. The problem was that as state attorney general, Hawley spearheaded a multi-state lawsuit trying to get the Supreme Court to declare the Affordable Care Act — the law that for the first time made those very denials illegal — unconstitutional. It was like an arsonist telling you how important it is to them that your home be protected, while they splash gasoline on your front door and light a match.

Then there was January 6, when Hawley gave the Trump mob a big ol’ fist pump as he walked by them outside the Capitol, then ran for his life when the mob broke its way inside. Soon after, he voted against certifying the 2020 election.

But we’re not here to catalogue Hawley’s sins. What interests us today is the fact that he is in the process of a change — not quite a transformation, but an evolution. He is clearly positioning himself for the 2028 Republican presidential nominating race as the candidate who actually believes what the GOP has been saying about how they’re the party of the working class.

What are we to make of this? Is the appropriate response to any Republican who says they’re on the side of working people, “Shut up, you liar”? Or is it to engage with them on the policies they claim to believe in? Because he’s going farther on substance than any prominent Republican, Hawley’s case is a good prism through which to examine this question.

The movement man

There is nothing personally blue-collar about Josh Hawley. The son of a banker, he’s a prep school kid who went to Stanford and Yale Law School, where he was president of the Federalist Society chapter. Then he went on to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, where he met his wife Erin, who was one of the architects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and is currently working to make sure women lose access to medication abortions.

In other words, Hawley is a right-wing movement man, through and through. He’s also one of a cadre of smooth-talking Republican politicians who got their training at the most selective universities, a group that includes Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard Law), and of course J.D. Vance (Ohio State, Yale Law). These Republicans all claim to despise the “elites,” no matter how elite they themselves are. If a guy from Stanford and Yale Law isn’t an “elite,” then who is? Hawley explained in a 2019 speech:

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.

Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.

Shudder at the terrifying specter of…cosmopolitans! The speech calls out a bunch of liberal professors, because if there’s anything that gets the reg’lar fellas down at the diner mad as heck, it’s something Martha Nussbaum once said.

In other words, Hawley has been delivering the same version of cultural populism that most in his party have embraced, which allows them to say “Those elites look down on you, so vote Republican!” Whereupon they cut taxes for the wealthy and slash the benefits regular people rely on. But this is where things get complicated.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get

For a few years now, Hawley has been on the lookout for ways to display his pro-worker bona fides. During the 2023 auto workers strike, he visited a picket line and said, “I want to stand with them and their bold struggle to actually get what they deserve.” He said nice things about Lina Khan, the anti-monopoly crusader who led the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden. More recently, he has criticized the Medicaid cuts in the budget bill Republicans are currently negotiating, writing that “If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will be replicated in states across the country.” He has even pushed back on the despicable Republican argument that everyone on Medicaid is a contemptible moocher. “They’re not on Medicaid because they are malingerers,” he told the New York Times. “They are on Medicaid because they can’t afford private health insurance.”

And now, Hawley has joined with liberal Vermont senator Peter Welch to sponsor a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and index it to inflation, so it would continue to rise as the cost of living goes up. Hawley presents this as part of a “pro-worker framework” that does contain some things labor activists have been after, including banning “captive audience” meetings, in which employers force workers to attend meetings where they are pummeled with anti-union propaganda and threats that if they join a union they may lose their jobs.

All of which is…surprisingly good, especially for a Republican. Unlike most in his party, Hawley isn’t saying he’s pro-worker but doing everything in his power to destroy the one thing that can give workers power (unions); he’s actually advocating for at least some of the labor agenda.

But is Hawley actually trying to move his party in a pro-worker direction? It’s an important question, because he is just one senator, and if he’s presenting himself as the pro-worker guy but doing little or nothing to actually change the horrifically anti-worker policies of both this administration and his party more generally, then it’s not worth very much.

Hawley has a chance to answer that question with the new Republican budget. He’s criticizing the bill now, but how is he going to vote? Four Republicans would have to vote against the bill for it to go down, and that seems unlikely — we could see the moderates Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins vote no, but that would still leave the GOP with two votes to spare. Which would mean Hawley could vote no if he wanted but not threaten the bill’s passage.

In that eventuality his vote would still be meaningful as a symbolic act, but not nearly as much as if he actually wielded the deciding vote. In any case, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict he’ll vote for it anyway. He’ll say that he had reservations, but it was just too important to get those tax cuts and all the other ways the bill will destroy everything good the government does for people, so he had to go along.

However he votes on the budget, Democrats and liberals have to decide what to do in the face of someone like Hawley who isn’t just a complete liar when he says he cares about working people (like most Republicans) but backs it up with at least some substance. I’d suggest a three-part approach that can be applied to anyone:

1. Assume their bad faith. Because that’s usually the safe assumption, and it keeps you vigilant.

2. Attack them for the ways they betray working people on a whole range of issues: wages, worker rights, regulations, taxes, health care, education, the consolidation of corporate power, etc. If they want to claim to be pro-worker, they have to show it consistently.

3. Challenge them to prove you wrong. It’s great that Hawley has come out for increasing the minimum wage. So let’s see him campaign for it, and convince his fellow Republicans to go along. Let’s see him stand up to Donald Trump when he’s undermining worker power. If he doesn’t do that, he’s just a poser.

Don’t worry; if Josh Hawley just gives you the willies, you can rest assured that there are a hundred reasons to dislike him that have nothing to do with what he thinks about workers. And he’s still part of a broader scam Republicans pull on their most ardent supporters, in which they claim to be standing up to the “elite” on behalf of regular people, then screw those supporters over again and again, making their lives and their communities demonstrably worse while encouraging them to gorge themselves on resentment and anger.

For Hawley — or any other Republican — to truly be able to say they stand with working people, they’d have to start dismantling that scam. Until they do, they don’t deserve much credit.

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