Josh Hawley, A Portrait of a Right Wing Snowflake
Q’anon people have their conspiracy theory; I have mine; Josh Hawley is a vampire
“Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?” —Josh Hawley, without a trace of irony, with a straight face, in a speech at a “National Conservatism” conference (quoted throughout this newsletter, from the copy on The Federalist Society website)
My Theory
Thin, slick, short-seeming, with a long yet compact build, pale-skinned, with long white teeth, a tall narrow bony skull, and an affectedly suave manner, this young senator from Missouri is like the Count Dracula of today’s GOP.
Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images
(I chose this picture for the lighting)
His sleazy debonair manner is like a sticky handful of cobwebs shrouding a pulseless, lifeless moral abyss. To hear his sheet-white visage pedantically drone about big tech (sort of a fixation of his), you would think he must be living under a curse of some kind, that he had to have lived for thousands of years, not that his understanding benefited from all the history—best explained by the fact that he sleeps in a coffin all day long, only coming out at night on Fox to drain the blood, or rather the flickery attention spans, of his constituents’ glib self-aggrandizing nativism.
(Erin Schaff New York Times)
This (populist-aristocrat, scion of white male working class grievance-driven identity politics) poser’s insufferable preening and strutting betrays a malignant outsize narcissism and a deep-seated inferiority complex. The twisted glimmer of ironical self-awareness in his eye, compounded by his smug overweening vanity, has the combined effect of a detached charisma so chilling only an undead immortal could hope to manifest; and on closer scrutiny, the aura suggests he is probably cleverer, shrewder, for all the rabblerousing bluster about porn or silicon valley, than any of his other cronies, likely making him more dangerous. Only vampires like the count in Bram Stoker’s classic novel, have this inner abiding sense of the absurd, borne of a profound sense of futility—while compulsively seeking to project power, control, and, in a weirdly mocking gesture to instill terror with all their outer behavior, explicitly and implicitly.
Josh Hawley has called for a “revival” of American masculinity; as if as a lawmaker, the masculinity (or lack thereof) of the electorate were a legitimate concern for public policy. He is in fact so concerned that the subject of his latest book is a crisis of masculine identity, which he has the audacity to theorize is the moral cornerstone of American society. One blushes with embarrassment to realize surely he nominates himself to weather the storm of the terrible manhood crisis.
I’m not sure he’s fit for the task. Honestly he sounds like a bit of a wimp or a crybaby to lead a revolution in masculine morals. Writing for “The Unpopulist,” a Substack, Aaron Ross Powell says,
“…. As far as he {Hawley} is concerned, your freedom to choose your own happiness ‘denigrates the common affections and common loves that make our way of life possible.’ Hawley employs the phrase ‘our way of life’ narrowly. It’s not what you find in America’s bustling, multicultural cities. Rather, it’s present in small towns, traditional families, strong churches, and blue-collar work. These sustain the kind of cultural homogeneity that fosters nationalistic unity, in his telling. Hawley believes the reason all of America doesn't look like a Midwestern small town is because Hollywood, Big Tech, and foreigners are constantly injecting their alien ideas and cultures everywhere. Thus the proper role of government, which Hawley aspires to direct, is to use social and industrial policy to undo these influences and to impose a ‘happiness’ that isn’t freely chosen.”
He also strikes me as a little toffee-nosed to post up the mantle of male status to save American society, whose flourishing depends on it — In Reason Peter Suderman writes,
“A graduate of both Stanford University and Yale Law School, he went on to be a Supreme Court clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts before his 30th birthday. From there, he worked as a lawyer in private practice, a teacher at the prestigious St. Paul's School in London, and an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law. Along the way, he wrote articles for the conservative policy journal National Affairs and a scholarly book, based on his graduate thesis, on the life of President Theodore Roosevelt, published by Yale University Press.”
In The New York Times Elaina Plott and Danny Hakim write, “Throughout his life, whether as a student at Stanford or a law professor in Missouri, Mr. Hawley had impressed people as ‘thoughtful’ and ‘sophisticated,’ a person of ‘depth.’ And as a growing number of conservatives saw it, he also had the proper ideas. From the time he was a teenager, he had criticized the free-market allegiance at the center of Republican orthodoxy; when he arrived in Washington, he immediately launched into a crusade against Big Tech. The conservative think-tank class embraced him as someone who had the right vocabulary, the right suits and the right worldview to translate Mr. Trump’s vague populist instincts into a fresh blueprint for his party’s future — someone elite enough, in other words, to be entrusted with the banner of anti-elitism.”
And his thesis is downright insulting, come to think of it. What men is he talking about? When he considers American men emasculated, then which men precisely is he referring to? Is it all men? Or just the ones who don’t believe the last general election was stolen, as he does? The rest of us I guess, all conspirators in the lie pushed by elites that Biden won, who have been feminized by Joe Biden I guess, feminized by capitalism which Hawley hates, feminized by democracy, feminised by feminism, and modern life in general, feminized by what a lot of us would consider progress, consumer luxuries, technology and porn, and God knows what other trifles, of which conservatives are puritanically indiscriminately terrified. Hollywood you can add. Vaccines. Video games. Oh and 5G.
But Hawley has officially begun his crusade against bourgeois progress with social media, where he has sought to regulate infinite scroll (the feature of the algorithm that continually loads more material onto your feed to keep you scrolling). A pretty big manly step towards reinstating masculine virtue; with less time to scroll, now there’s more time to pursue manly endeavors.
“I want to talk with you tonight about another aspect of that ambition {the left’s ambition to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘remake’ America; not something he’s wrong about}. I want to talk with you about the Left’s attempt to give us a world beyond men {but this ‘beyond men’ nebulism is really out there}.”
“We meet at a time of reckoning. As we speak {‘as we speak’ for christ’s sake, and ‘reckoning’ how histrionic and pathetic is this attempt to fabricate drama and invoke gravity?}, the Left controls the commanding heights {and I’m so tired of hearing this ‘commanding heights’ phrase} of American society. They have the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate. Their voices predominate in the news media, in Hollywood, arguably sports, and of course, at our universities.”
I forgot. Hawley is also worried about sports. “Arguably” sports. He is sports skeptical then, perhaps similar to the way anti-EU Europeans are “Eurosceptics.” A sports-skeptic.
This All Starts to Make Me Insecure about My Own Manhood and I Realize How Emasculated I am
But exactly who the hell are the afflicted? He doesn’t say. Is it woke progressive men? Is it RINOs? Is it you? Is it me? Would he consider me emasculated? Why? Because I haven’t had sex in over a year? Because I’m not married? Because I don’t have kids? Because I don’t want to have kids? Because I’m an atheist? Because I’m not a manly Christian? Because I didn’t vote for Donald Trump? Because I haven’t had a girlfriend since college, or because I live with my mom, because I drive a Toyota corolla—a hand me down from my grandparents—to work where I labor for minimum wage as a check out cashier in a massive corporate grocery store? Because I’ve been out of college for three years and I’ve only barely started looking for a so-called real job? Because I like to read? Because I look down on social conservatives, because I find them ridiculous? Because I run a lame blog as an ideological exponent for unmanly feminine limited government, free markets and free trade? Thatcherism is bourgeois. Reagan wasn’t strong like Donald Trump. So does this make me a “cuck” as far right people on the internet abhorrently like to call people they accuse of being feminized? Or maybe it’s just because I watch porn. MAGA conservatives have a real ax to grind against porn. I guess I’m an emasculated, feminine cuck loser. At least I don’t play video games or watch sports.
“We should be clear in the message we send about family and unapologetic: There is no higher calling, and no greater duty, than raising a family. And we should encourage all men to pursue it.
To that end, I believe the time has come for explicit rewards in our tax code for marriage. Forget the marriage penalty. There should be a marriage bonus. And we should allow the parents of young children to keep more of their own money as well.”
My Hypothetical Foray into Hawleyan Masculinity
I suppose to be a real man then, I should take instruction from Count Dracula, or his constituents who watch Tucker Carlson every single night. Yeah I guess to be a real man involves sleeping in a coffin all day and waking up just to watch Tucker on a nightly basis. Yeah I should live and breathe Fox and whatever the prevailing hysteria is, generated by whatever the latest triggering culture war issue. I should wait on the very edge of my seat for whatever new stand Desantis takes next. I should seek hysteria and revel in it with communities of social conservatives who I find belonging with, as an excuse to throw a socially conservative tantrum all together.
I should threaten people with death who would dare speak of cutting entitlements, and perhaps look towards expanding medicare coverage as Trump did, and I should slap tariffs on steel and aluminum as Trump also did. Gotta protect the steel and aluminum industries. Why don’t we just raise tariffs on everything though? Wouldn’t that be even more manly? Or maybe we should bring back coal mining. Manly work toiling away in a coal mine. At least there was dignity. Or public sector unions. And border security. Can’t forget that. Why don’t we just nationalize all industry and institute a permanent ban on all immigration and be done with it? Nationalized labor is manly. Remember when nationalized labor could shut down public transportation at any moment? Those were such great times. Manly men stand in picket lines, marching, protesting for fairer wages.
“Nationalization is inefficient. It distorts opportunity costs, leads to inflation, and slows growth,” the economist says politely.
“I don’t care!” The Hawleyan manly man cries his rebel yell. “I don’t want economic growth. It’s not manly!”
The economist startled at the outburst, frowns. “Market forces are not partial to your status envy,” he’s almost afraid to say.
In the Wall Street Journal Saturday essay, “Can the GOP Become a Working Class Party?” Gerald F Seib writes,
“Sen. Hawley is at the forefront of a coterie of young republicans, in congress and think tanks, who advocate policies that would mark a sharp break from the conservative free market gospel that has been the backbone of the GOP for more than half a century. They argue for abandoning free trade in favor of a network of tariffs to protect American goods and jobs, swearing off cuts to entitlement programs on which the working class rely, breaking up big tech firms, clamping down harder on immigration and finding common ground with union workers.”
Only an undead immortal in our government, incapable of aging, incapable of dying, who lives in eternity—where history never happens so you never have to learn from it—would propose this stuff, either a vampire or a cutthroat opportunist; someone who thinks neither the government can or will: ever run out of money to splurge on “workers,” or “families;” nor will social security ever run out of fresh blood for funding it.
Hawley is a vampire bat whose vision of political economy is parasitic. Indefinite entitlement spending, borrowing on tax breaks for traditional marriage against a broken federal budget, as we borrow more and more for an ever more entitled future (assuming Hawley doesn’t want to raise taxes) we think we can get away with paying for less and less, tariffs, a big not cheap border wall, industrial policy? Yeah this isn’t economic suicide. These ideas are quality intellectual imports from autocratic central Europe, Turkey, Hungary (or Transylvania in Hawley’s case), and they all sound like good—namely MANLY—ideas from manly countries with strong leaders. Eastern Europe is a veritable library, a hotbed of “savvy” ideas as Trump would say. I remember before he invaded, when Putin was assembling Russian troops on Ukraine’s border, and Trump called this, “very savvy.”
Tucker Carlson said Putin was just trying to secure his border.
In Turkey, Erdogan at the moment is actually convinced that by making the central bank flood the economy with easy money, that will stop inflation. I would like to ask Josh Hawley, why don’t he and I get in the driver’s seat at the Fed someday, floor the gas and drive the economy right over a cliff? Because of all his other fiscally conscious ideas, I wonder if he thinks plunging the country into double digit inflation would be worth the thrill of total manly recklessness.
More industrial production would bring back American jobs! Growls the masculine Hawleyan man.
For real Americans, he wheezes.
People like “Me,” he means.
Me me me me me. The real America. The real Donald Trump. Murica!
I had no idea that to be a masculine man, Mr Hawley, was to be so self-indulgent, self-pitying and selfish! To qualify as one, I guess I should plaster stickers all over my car too that say things like, “Biden Will Never Be My President”, as I spotted last weekend. I guess to be a real man involves eating at Arby’s and drinking huge bottles of soda too, the bigger objects you buy and the more junk you eat… and probably watching wrestling and Nascar, and either gorging my face full of food and filling my arteries with cholesterol, or refusing to get a vaccine, until I die of a heart attack or covid. At least I would die in my footsteps. Very manly.
I should get a Dodge Ram pick-up truck, fly a ‘Blue Lives’ flag on my mailbox, and go hunting with a semiautomatic assault rifle. I’ll just act very defensive and full of myself at all times and stomp around and make my best Trumpian sneer or Desantis’ glacial stare, everywhere I go. Extreme anger is a very manly emotion. To be extreme in general is a very manly way to be. If a waitress asks me to wear a mask, then I’ll punch her. If I just hit women who tell me what to do, then I’ll show how not woke I am, and therefore prove how manly I am. Genius right? I’ll remonstrate like a four year old with anyone who tells me what to do so much… I’ll make a plane turn around midflight if I have to! A real man is never afraid to be that guy. Civil disobedience is for cucks. What about uncivil, unruly, unhinged moblike manly disobedience? It’s not enough just to disobey. I should openly defy any and all authority and show how above the commonsense of civil society I am. You can reclaim your primitive manly instincts from the fetters of modernity through surprising people as much as possible with the sheer force of your manly aggression. Like do you know what was really awesome? When, seizing an opportunity to perform an attention-seeking self-important stunt, all those truckers in Canada frivolously rebelled against Canada’s vaccine mandate and then spontaneously toured all our highways, imposing their defiant grinning will on the liberal media everywhere they went.
I was a smoker in college, and then I quit. But maybe I should become a smoker again. How about this for a campaign slogan? Make Smoking in Murica Manly Again… I would vote for that person. You know the more cigarettes I smoke, the more masculine and American it will make me. I was also a prodigious beer drinker in college. I should go back to binge drinking Budweiser, PBR, Busch, and Miller High Life too. Wait a minute… You know what? Since so many MAGA conservatives didn’t go to college, damn it! On second thought, I shouldn’t have even gone to college! I would be so much more masculine without a college degree.
I should have been strung out on opioids instead, and I should have dropped out of high school. “I love the uneducated,” Trump said. The sooner you give up on education, the better. The manlier. When work leaves my local factory town, I shouldn’t chase after it. In contradiction to every previous generation of workers, I should not migrate but I should stubbornly remain wherever I am and fester in self-pity, and drug abuse. Someone get me some of that manly pain medicine! And then while I was getting high and wasting away in a manly hillbilly trailer park, as soon as I see some former bright orange reality tv star spouting off about China and illegal immigrants, then I should thank God with the euphoria of just having discovered an empowering universal rationalization for all of my shame! Now having just discovered my manly self-worth, I’ll start blaming “elites” for “shipping” jobs overseas, and I’ll project my inferiority and self-loathing onto illegals. I worked hard to be an addict whose dependency the government subsidizes with supplementary security income!!!
Immigrants are a justified target for a manly man, entitled to everything, to try and claim a synthetic feeling of importance through dumping on… I wasn’t collecting welfare benefits from the government as opposed to working, while getting high on opioids all day.
No!
I have not just failed to adapt to a service economy; because rather than suck it up I have since pretended to be morally superior to everything that isn’t manly enough for me, because JD Vance and Josh Hawley told me I had a right to act like it.
No!
I am not a loser. I am a noble victim—and a manly one, the “cultural backbone” (Hawley’s phrase) of the economy before self-dealing Washington elites conspired to hollow out my community by liberalizing international trade, and stole my job from me. And immigrants got me high! Elites ship jobs overseas and line their pockets while preaching amnesty and immigrants smuggle in drugs who are—as the great outsider speaks truth to power—murderers and rapists. Nothing is my fault! It’s a very manly trait to outsource responsibility for my issues onto illegals, when elites outsource working class American manly jobs—to China!
“Domestic manufacturing once supported millions of American men with good wages, who in turn started and supported families. Now that industry lies all but dead on the altar of globalism” —Josh Hawley
I Give Vent to All My Manly Resentment and Don a Red Hat
I should listen to everything Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump tell me. I should simply stop dead in my tracks, drop whatever I’m doing, and I should believe everything, as long as someone who’s a Republican and extreme says it. If as Marjorie Taylor Greene says “Jewish space lasers” start California forest fires, then I should just believe it without thinking. These people care about me. I feel heard. I am important. I’m just going to concentrate on simply feeling the sensation of those self-assuring raw emotions that reinforce convenient fictions. My delicate ego will only perish of suicide otherwise. Hence the obsession of the far right with male suicide: male ego is on the wane!!!
To think about anything (rather than feel pleasurable sensations) or to use one’s mind ever, on the other hand, is weak and unmanly. Thinking would also involve the risk of using critical thinking skills, reason and inductive logic, and that kind of thing I haven’t done since middle school, and it could lead to causing me to question my loyalties. Wouldn’t want that.
Donald Trump demands loyalty. To be loyal to someone who pledges they care about me is much more manly. Well then I’ll behave just like a dog. Dogs in a Hawleyan sense, are manly creatures. If Trump loses an election, I should blindly assume the election was rigged because Trump says so. A real masculine loyal man would go all the way to defend their manly honor and charge into the capitol and scream his lungs out, “WHERE ARE ALL THE GLOBALISTS!” (Like someone did)
E&E News and Politico
If I were an elected representative, I would make sure I’m the very first member of my party to elect to decertify a free election (as Hawley was)—that is if manly insurrection doesn’t pan out.
There’s nothing effete or feminine about the savior, Donald Trump by the way. There’s nothing unmanly at all about his flippant hand gestures, and his incessant primping and posturing or the way he moves his mouth when he speaks, making that ‘o’ shape and pursing his lips all the time. Nothing feminine about his excessive vanity either. Spray tan? Whitened teeth. Come on. He’s not superficial. Trump is a very manly very masculine guy with manly noble character traits. He’s just comfortable with who he is or confident. So in other words, it’s actually manly to be that metrosexual. There’s a lot of manly honor and courage in Trump. He’s honest. He never lies. He says honest things like that immigrants are rapists and murderers, and he doesn’t care what the left thinks. That makes him manly. If you have enough self-confidence to say something spiteful you know will anger the liberal media, that makes you a masculine Hawleyan honest man who speaks truth to power.
Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth. But judging Hawley by his masculinity book or his WAPO column to the effect that the survival of the GOP depends on its new identity as a working class party, and judging him by his association with some of the most radical MAGA elements in the GOP, and the fact that he is rather one of the central architects of their nationalist policy goals, I don’t think I can be that far from correct to ridicule him for suggesting that to convert myself into a MAGA caricature, it would make me a REAL AUTHENTIC MANLY RED-BLOODED AMERICAN MAN!
Somehow I Come Back to My Neoliberal Senses
After Republicans did terribly in the midterms, he floated this crassly cynical (you might say despairing) vision of a winning agenda in the Washington Post,
“Right now, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads. Its leaders can, of course, attempt to resurrect the dead consensus of offshoring, amnesties and ‘free trade.’ That’s the path to further losses.
A reborn Republican Party must look very different. It must offer good jobs and good lives, not just higher stock prices for Wall Street. And it must place working Americans at its heart and take them as they are, rather than treating them as resources to be exploited or engineered away.
That’s the way to victory. That’s the way to national renewal.”
If “national renewal” is only a retreat from liberal capitalism, and if Hawley thinks the GOP can do no better than embrace a nihilistic working class identity politics, then I am proud to say I would give anything to return the GOP to the party of the rich!
Ode to Peace and Quiet
Whatever happened to the party of the rich? Whatever happened to the idyllic normality of institutions like private clubs? Remember the good old days before people started senselessly, violently demanding radical change for its own sake? Before all this cringing clamor about “workers” and “families” and “jobs?” Remember back before the pick up trucks with gigantic custom wheels tearing through your neighborhood like every god damn business day were a fucking monster truck rally, covered in American flags and threatening stickers, including skulls, and the red hats—remember back when conservatives wore Vineyard Vines, and Patagonia quarter zips, and Polo—always something Polo—and everyone looked like a stuck-up self-content dork? Remember when conservative women were as attractive as they were intellectually vapid, with pink and lime green summer dresses, tennis whites, and their monograms on boat bags before they started to look like tweaking meth addicts like Marjorie Taylor Greene—who runs a Crossfit gym who could probably kill me with just her thumbs?
Someone make this pick up truck go away! My soul, feminized by “free market fundamentalism” (as Marco Rubio calls it), pushes back… What happened to all the monochrome luxury SUV’s, all the gray and navy blue BMW’s and Range Rovers? What happened to the serenity and seclusion of the private yacht club, the country club, the golf course? Tennis, squash, sailing, croquet, golf anyone? The smell of freshly cut grass, wood varnish, salt water on a weekend morning… Before there was ever a whiny shit about “big tech” or “border security” or “abortion” or “gun rights,” remember when conservatives were all about peace and quiet and being left alone to pursue leisure in serenity? What happened to serenity! Whatever happened to wanting to be left alone and the virtue of minding one’s own business? Whatever happened to only asking that people shut up, stop complaining and go to work for god’s sake? What about taxes and regulation! Remember when the right used to want less meddlesome government, not more! Less people telling other people what to do! When we wanted less intrusion into our personal affairs, and more space? Liberty? Privacy? Wealth? Seclusion? Open air and open space, and peace and quiet to live your own life?
Conservatives were always assholes, but we used to be more subtle about it.
Then along came Josh Hawley.
— Jay