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Finally got around to reading this piece and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's not just a bio of Hawley, it's a broad-ranging and clear-eyed assessment of the troublingly illiberal drift of American conservatism and the GOP more broadly. newrepublic.com/article/154526…
Hawley was a culture warrior from a young age. In the heat of the first PC-wars ca. 1994, at the age of 14, Hawley was already calling for a visionary leader to emerge who could speak some rude truths to a morally decadent nation, someone like Dan Quayle. 
In many ways Hawley is a standard-issue Republican. Son of a banker, educated entirely in private schools (to the tune of about $500k the article estimates), Stanford undergrad who wrote for the conservative rag founded by Peter Thiel, then on to Yale law Federalist society...
...then clerkships with conservative judges (including Chief Justice Roberts) then Koch brothers junkets which brought in massive campaign funding from anti-regulation billionaires. To that extent, he looks like a Scott Walker or Scott Pruitt clone...
But what makes Hawley distinct is that he's hitched his wagon to the explicitly illiberal (post-liberal they call it) project of the folks who hosted the recent National Conservatism conference at the DC Ritz-Carlton. newyorker.com/news/news-desk…
This podcast discussion does a great job of sketching out why the emergent illiberalism on the right should be of concern, not just to progressives but also to conservatives of a more libertarian bent. listennotes.com/podcasts/know-…
What are these illiberal folks giving themselves (and more importantly, President Trump's tens of millions of supporters) permission to do?
What makes Hawley disruptive as an American conservative is that, like Tucker Carlson, he's stepped on the third rail of conservative politics by unapologetically calling for active government regulation of the market (esp. the tech giants) in the public interest.
But "the public" on whose behalf Hawley speaks is not a diverse and rambunctious public, but rather an explicitly faith-based public comprised of citizens who live "the right way" and are appalled by all of the chaos and "immorality" unleashed by the marketplace.
As many have noted, Hawley's depiction of harmonious and homogenous local communities (Burke's little platoons) ravaged by a culture designed by and for "rootless cosmopolitan elites" is textbook antisemitic dogwhistling.
Hawley is as anti-union and anti-public education as your average Koch-funded right wing robot. He worked to undo the ACA's protections for pre-existing conditions. His "populism," such as it is, poses little threat to the 1% and the 1% knows that.
What had previously contained the damage inflicted by the 1990s culture warriors was the GOP's lingering, libertarian concerns about state power. They could complain about immorality all they wanted, but the "true conservative" superego kept their will to power in check.
The rise of an avowedly, explicitly "post-liberal" or illiberal right, as exemplified by Hawley, has given conservatives permission to ignore that libertarian superego that had kept the angry, resentful id of conservative politics in check.
Here's a great piece by @joshtpm offering a similar take on the threat posed by GOP illiberalism. Trump is both a symptom and an amplifier of the American right's longstanding (but too often ignored) illiberalism. h/t @_SunshineRising talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-ame…
@joshtpm @_SunshineRising I worry that many in the Democratic establishment have not copped to the ramping up radicalism of Trump's GOP. Faith-based social conservatism + zero qualms about using state power to enforce one's vision of morality = something potentially quite ominous.
