“Josh Hawley has had a pretty good year. The Republican senator from Missouri has carved out a national profile with his smooth blend of theocratic quasi-authoritarianism combined with populist-inflected rhetoric that’s substantively barren enough to avoid threatening the party’s donor base. But Hawley has a weakness: he’s not content to simply be an oily demagogue competing for a niche role as Trump successor. As a prep school kid with degrees from Stanford and Yale, he still craves the respect of elites, and wishes to be seen as a serious intellectual, rather than just a crafty huckster with a nose for hot-button slogans that play on Fox News.”
“Over the summer, Hawley warned Tucker Carlson that Joe Biden and his entire party are ‘in thrall’ to ‘the Marxist left.’ Monday afternoon he criticized Biden’s nomination of Janet Yellen on the grounds that ‘the people who he wants to be in his cabinet are all a bunch of corporate liberals and warmongers.’ The Bulwark’s Tim Miller pointed out the undeniable contradiction. Hawley could have ignored the criticism – after all, it’s not like his target audience is going to complain that he attacked the Democrats in two mutually exclusive ways. But Hawley felt compelled to show that he is not just a glib demagogue mouthing slogans, that his talking points have actual meaning” – Jonathan Chait.