This profile of Josh Hawley, which highlights his supposedly “ferocious populism” and quotes somebody calling him a “true populist,” barely discusses his policy positions, which on ACA, taxes, minimum wage & many other issues are not “populist” at all. /1 washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/styl…
We don’t, for example, learn that Hawley, although not yet in the Senate, supported the Trump tax cut for the rich, that he opposed raising the minimum wage, that as AG, he fought to take health care away from millions of Americans./2
If to be a “populist” is to use the word “elite” in almost every paragraph and to condemn “cosmopolitanism,” than perhaps Hawley qualifies. /3
Not sure what it means to pair Hawley with William Jennings Bryan, a strong supporter of the labor movement and Goldwater, who, like Hawley, supported anti-labor right-to-work laws. /4
What makes this a “Greek Tragedy”? That the grandstanding Stanford and Yale educated son of a banker, who listened to Rush Limbaugh as a young person, and embraces conventional conservative positions on most issues is now cynically seeking to capture the Trump wing of the GOP? /5
It would have been more helpful to know what politics he espoused in his “political column” rather than that he employed one of the most cliched “flourishes” in punditry, especially of the right-wing variety. /6
And this is neither here nor there but am wondering why Hawley’s dad, who was president of Boatman’s Bank, which is described as “the largest commercial bank in MO,” and then Bank of America, is described as a “community banker”?/7
I know that “populism” is a contested term and that people like Hawley are routinely described as such, but the word “populist”or “populism” appears seven times in this article without any clear sense of what it signifies./8
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"Charming" Kevin McCarthy met with birther activists in his office in 2013 and accused three Jewish people--Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg--of trying to "buy" the midterms in 2018.
Given McCarthy’s misleading stories about the “deli” that he operated out of his aunt and uncle’s frozen yogurt store, it is interested that this is still up on his website bio.
Here's a @washingtonpost fact check about his deli. "Yet there are no ownership or sales records that can be located for a Kevin O’s Deli in Bakersfield, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration." washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec…
I’m not a historian of fascism but the idea that we shouldn’t use the term because it only makes sense in the context of its origins seems like an overly restrictive view of how political language (which I do study) works. /1
Many political phrases and ideologies outlast their original use. As Peter Gordon argued in @NYRB, the notion of restricting political terms to their context of origin becomes incoherent./2 nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/…
“Free enterprise” was popularized by abolitionists as part of their critique of chattel slavery. Conservatism was first employed in response to the French Revolution. Like many other political terms, they have been contested and evolved./3
As I have argued, conservative free enterprisers depicted the state and the trade union as the only forces constraining freedom. They underemphasized corporate power or denied it altogether by imagining even large business firms as agglomerations of individuals. /1
This worldview, in which their were only individuals acting in a free market and states limiting their freedom, has left them ill-prepared to mount a serious critique of corporate power and makes their current freakout seem hypocritical./2
Here’s an example from my book (p. 187) of free enterprisers describing the economy “as consisting of individuals only...whose ability to proper faced only one menace: the ever-present threat of ‘government strangulation’”/3
The claim that “the way [Trump] handled himself in the last 60 days" marks some sort of dramatic change in his actions and rhetoric is not credible. He has employed violent language & explicitly called his supporters to violence since his 2016 campaign./1 washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
In 2019 he said, "I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad/" /2 thehill.com/homenews/admin…
Here's an article from _March 2016_, well before he got the nomination, about "all the times Trump has called for violence at his rallies."/3 mashable.com/2016/03/12/tru…
Since Reconstruction, variants of the claim that "our freedom is being stolen" has been used to justify white backlash.
In a fairly anodyne version in 2016, Phil Gramm said, "I’m afraid that if we don’t win this election and overturn Obama’s programs now, my five grandchildren will never know the America I knew....our freedom is being lost." dallasnews.com/opinion/commen…
Gramm was, of course, evoking Ronald Reagan's 1961 claim that, if Medicare passed, we would spend “sunset years” telling “our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."/3
Query: Has anyone compiled a comprehensive list of the prominent people, politicians, media outlets, and organizations (ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the NAACP) calling for Trump's immediate removal from office?