Josh Hawley and the Republican Populists, at War With Their Party

New York Times

28-04-2025

The lone Republican vote in the Senate last month to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees came from an unlikely Democratic ally: Senator Josh Hawley, the archconservative from Missouri best known for calling out 'wokeness' in all sectors of society, and for raising his fist to offer solidarity with supporters of President Trump hours before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
And yet the overdraft vote was hardly the first time Mr. Hawley had stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2023 he introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, which died in committee for lack of Republican support. He has broken from his party by refusing to vote for cuts to Medicaid as part of the budget reconciliation process.
In March he joined a Democrat, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, to offer a bill that would speed up the contracting process for new unions. A G.O.P. senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, signed on as a cosponsor, but otherwise, Mr. Hawley said in a recent phone interview, 'not a single Republican would touch it.'
Since his arrival to the Senate in 2019 at the age of 39 as its youngest member, Mr. Hawley has charted two seemingly parallel courses: as a full-throttle champion of socially conservative causes and, somewhat less noisily, as a populist who aligns himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, on many populist issues.
'His ultimate goal is to break the alliance the social conservatives have had with the corporate world since the Reagan era,' said Matt Stoller, a former Senate aide to Mr. Sanders.
The term 'populist' conjures two raw-knuckled protagonists of the agrarian South, Andrew Jackson and Huey Long, with whom the whippetlike Mr. Hawley, a Missouri banker's son who attended Stanford and Yale Law School, would seem to have little in common. But prioritizing working-class Americans over elites has been a key rhetorical theme in Mr. Trump's political ascendancy, and Mr. Hawley has embraced it.
His powerful compatriots in the movement include not only the president but also Vice President JD Vance and Stephen K. Bannon, one of Mr. Trump's top allies.
'The Senate is the Hate Trump Club,' Mr. Bannon said in an interview. 'Hawley's the only populist we've got there.'
Mr. Hawley may be a lonely voice, but he underscores a central question of the second Trump term: What will the president do to improve the lives of the working-class Americans who voted him back into office?
Tariffs, Mr. Hawley said in the interview. He called them 'a potentially vital tool' in bringing industry back to the United States, despite the turmoil in the financial markets and the fears of high prices they have ignited, particularly for those with lower incomes.
Mr. Hawley said he was particularly pleased about the 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles, 'which are being cheered loudly by workers in my state.' He added that Mr. Trump's 'instincts are absolutely correct' in his call to repeal taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security.
But he was more skeptical about extending the corporate tax cuts passed by Congress during Mr. Trump's first term. 'The populist-nationalist case for them was that they were meant to encourage companies to pay workers better and to bring back American jobs,' he said. 'The question is, have they done that? Not really.'
Skeptics suggest that Mr. Hawley's populism and the current Trump-inflected iteration is, like movements past, motivated more by grievance politics than by a desire for economic progress.
'As seriously as I'd prefer to take their ideas, I tend to put the term in quotes,' said Hannah Gurman, an associate professor of U.S. history and American studies at New York University. 'You look at how Vance said he's for unions, but not for the public sector or teachers. And you look at Hawley, who says he wants more industry in America but voted against all the Biden initiatives because they were too woke. There's always a cultural program to use as an excuse not to advance a serious policy.'
An Era Like Roosevelt's
Mr. Hawley said his populism began to take shape in his 20s when he was writing a book, 'Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness,' which included a focus on the economic inequities of the Gilded Age and was published by Yale University Press in 2008. 'I came to realize that we're living through a period like Roosevelt's,' he said, 'one where power has become increasingly concentrated among the very wealthy at the expense of normal Americans.'
Mr. Hawley planted his first populist markers as Missouri's attorney general. In 2017, he filed legal action against three of the state's largest opioid manufacturers, saying they had violated Missouri's consumer protection laws. That same year, Mr. Hawley became the first state attorney general to investigate Google over potential antitrust violations.
Those interests deepened in the Senate where, he said, his experience 'has only confirmed how very real the concentration of economic and political power is.' In his first speech on the Senate floor, in May 2019, Mr. Hawley criticized 'big banks, big tech, big multinational corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media' as aristocratic architects of a society that 'works mainly for themselves.'
Mr. Hawley's portfolio was soon overshadowed by his allegiance to Mr. Trump, who after his first impeachment trial ended in February 2020 singled out Mr. Hawley as 'one of the greatest supporters on the impeachment hoax.' Ten months later, Mr. Hawley was the first Republican senator to declare that he would object to the 2020 election results.
But Mr. Hawley was also working with Mr. Sanders at the time to steer direct payments of $1,200 to Americans as part of a Covid relief bill.
A year later, Mr. Hawley showed deference to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s trustbusting Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Lina Khan, in a committee hearing. He even offered her a chance to respond to the insinuation by a fellow Republican, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, that Ms. Khan had Marxist sympathies. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board later published a column with the arch title 'Josh Hawley Loves Lina Khan.'
Still, Mr. Hawley is regarded as a loner who has not built coalitions in the Senate like Mr. Vance did during his two years there. 'I'm not an arm-twister,' he told The New York Times five years ago.
His aloofness has extended even to those who find common cause with him, like Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Democrat and fellow Missourian who took to social media to concur with Mr. Hawley's support for improved rural mail delivery and for banning stock trading for members of Congress. But he said he had yet to hear back from Mr. Hawley. 'He's our state's senior senator, but he's not actively involved in our delegation,' Mr. Cleaver said.
Mr. Hawley is considerably more public-facing when it comes to hot-button cultural issues. His critiques of major corporations often include the view that, as he put it during an interview with Fox Business in 2023, such businesses possess a 'radical ideological agenda' bent on promoting diversity while censoring conservative perspectives.
In a speech last month at the evangelical Liberty University, he asserted that America was the greatest nation in history 'because our spiritual convictions are the convictions of the Bible.' In 2023, he published a book titled 'Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.' And in December he wrote a letter to Mr. Biden's defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, accusing him of prioritizing 'progressive gender experimentation ahead of warfighting' by permitting a transgender military employee to live in women's barracks.
His wife, the lawyer Erin Morrow Hawley, successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, and Mr. Hawley is himself an outspoken opponent of abortion. This year, Mr. Hawley introduced a bill that would end federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
Dipping Toes in Populist Waters
Mr. Hawley belongs to a conservative intelligentsia that includes Oren Cass, the influential founder and chief economist of the think tank American Compass. Like Mr. Hawley and Mr. Vance, Mr. Cass, 41, came of age not during the laissez-faire economic policies of the Reagan era but during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. 'A key driver for us,' Mr. Cass said, 'is the fundamental insight that free markets aren't delivering on the things we care about the most.'
Some Republican legislators have dipped their toe to test the populist waters, according to Mr. Cass. He included in the group Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has proposed increasing the minimum wage through an e-verify system; Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, who has teamed up with Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, to address how private equity consolidation is affecting fire truck manufacturing and the communities that rely on effective firefighting; and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, who has worked with Senate Democrats to reduce credit card swipe fees.
'I never ran for office thinking I was populist,' Mr. Marshall said in an interview. 'But on the campaign trail, I heard from a lot of farmers, ranchers and union workers who didn't feel like their senators had been fighting for them. I prioritize Main Street over Wall Street.'
Not everyone on the right accepts that dichotomy. 'It's the performative rhetoric of people who think in cartoon categories,' said George Will, the Washington Post columnist and veteran conservative commentator.
Mr. Will described populism as 'the belief that the public knows what it wants and that public opinion should be translated into policy without being delayed or diluted by intermediate institutions.'
'It's the exact opposite of what Madison talked about in using Congress to filter and refine public opinion,' he added, referring to James Madison's advocacy of checks and balances rather than a government continually roiled by public passions.
Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, likens his party's emerging attitudes to a partisan role reversal. 'I feel like we're in a blender of changing political identities,' he said in an interview. 'This populism reminds me of Democratic liberals in the '70s: apologists for the Russians, protectionists, skeptics of law enforcement. And now these populists are saying, 'We're tired of war,' when we're not even in one. The last time Republicans were this isolationist was the 1930s, and we lost Congress for most of the next 60 years.'
Mr. Hawley, who is thought to harbor presidential ambitions, has been careful not to get too far out in front of his party, or for that matter Mr. Trump.
But, he said: 'Donald Trump's election showed this: If the Republican Party is going to be a true majority party, we have to be pro-worker. The voters are giving us a chance now, but they've not bought in. We have to deliver.'