It’s the question that many politicos have been asking: What happens to the Republican Party after the Citizen Donald Trump era?
Here’s another question that is linked to that: What happens to cultural and religious conservatives — those that backed Trump and those that opposed him (openly or privately) — after this fever dance of an administration is over?
That was the topic looming in the background of a recent Emma Green think piece (yes, another one) at The Atlantic that ran with this headline: “Josh Hawley’s Mission to Remake the GOP.”
In most press coverage, the Missouri freshman is painted as a rather standard-issue conservative in the U.S. Senate. After all, those conservatives are all alike — even if libertarian folks often clash with religious conservatives in ways that don’t get much ink.
However, journalists who parse the texts produced by Hawley will notice strange subplots, like the fact that he is known for, as Green puts it, “casually citing the philosopher Edmund Burke and the Christian monk Pelagius in a single stretch.” But here is the paragraph where things get serious:
His speeches around town, including one he delivered … while accepting an award at the annual gala of the American Principles Project Foundation, a socially conservative public-policy organization, are bracingly defiant of Republican orthodoxy: He rails against income inequality, condemns the policy deference afforded to corporations, and speaks warmly about the civic value of labor unions. He often talks about the “great American middle” being crushed by the decline of local communities, the winner-take-all concentration of wealth, and the inaccessibility of higher education. And he said that the modern Republican Party’s split over competing impulses toward free-market economics and social conservatism has led some conservatives to ignore the effects of their policies on the middle and working class. “It’s time to do away with that,” he told me.
You need another clash?
