WOKISM FOR OFAYS:

The infamous image of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri raising his fist in solidarity with the Trumpist mob assembled outside the Capitol on the fateful Jan. 6 morning found its ideal-- and inevitable--bookend at Thursday's concluding House Select Committee hearing. The Committee revealed footage of the senator skedaddling away from that same mob as it stormed the building.

Hawley was the first senator to announce that he'd challenge then President-elect Joe Biden's victory. And hours after running away from the mob he'd incited, and with the dust barely settled from a siege that had left five dead, Hawley did just that: He voted against certification, giving credence to the unwarranted concerns of a stolen election that catalyzed the insurrection.

Something deeper than ambition and opportunism propelled Hawley's participation in the attempt to overthrow a duly elected president. Hawley rejects liberalism--not as in the liberal left, as the word is too often used to describe-- but the principles of individual freedom and autonomy that are at the core of the American experiment. And it's not because he's a shallow reality TV host or a politician. He's thought deeply about liberty--and he doesn't like it.

Hawley's politics are driven by a social and political philosophy that has come to be known as national conservatism. But unlike recent converts, Hawley developed his ideas long before that term was coined, and long before he joined the Senate in 2019. [...]

His aversion to "more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade" is only partly driven by his belief that protectionism would help American manufacturing and working class jobs--although it would do no such thing; the opposite, in fact. But the bigger reason for his protectionist turn is to stop cosmopolitanism, to close the country to "foreign" people and ideas that, in Hawley's philosophy, drive us away from an authentic way of living. In short, his economic policies are driven not so much by concerns for the material wealth of Americans, but instead their cultural health--as defined by him.

It's no wonder then that Hawley embraced Trumpism and the primarily white cultural anxieties that motivates it. Hawley sees our dynamic, multiracial cities not just as enemies of the rural, God-fearing way of life, but as claxons warning of America's cultural and intellectual decline. 

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