Senator Josh Hawley and Me
His version of National Conservatism troubles me
One of the featured speakers at this year’s National Conservative conference was Senator Josh Hawley. I disagreed with much of what he said.
Hawley set out to make an explicit case for Christian Nationalism. He blasted the American government for flying the Pride Flag, and he proposed instead to inscribe “In God we trust” in every government building.
None of that bothered me. I recently wrote that
One reason that most Jews are reluctant to move right is that they have what I call Christophobia. This is not a fear of Christ. It is a fear of Christians.
…we have to find a way to directly confront and overcome Christophobia.
But Hawley also described the economy in crude Marxist terms. He denounced “capital” and “Wall Street.” He said that its interests were opposed to “labor,” and he called for reconfiguring the economy so that a man could earn what he called a “family wage.”
I have co-written, with Nick Schulz, an entire book devoted to showing what is wrong with this “labor vs. capital” view of the economy. You can start with the summary that I posted.
Ordinary textbook economics is a model of the 19th-century economy, not the contemporary one. We write,
We used to teach that there are three factors of production: land, labor, and capital. We described an economy consisting of amber waves of grain, routine unskilled work, and belching, clanking machines inside of factories.
But most people today do not live in that economy. Instead, we work in quiet offices on land whose value has nothing to do with its agricultural fecundity, doing tasks that are highly specialized and differentiated.
I went on to quote from the book:
…in the United States, white-collar work rose from 22 percent of the labor force in 1910 to 76 percent in 2000. One hundred years ago, Americans worked mostly with things. Today, they work mostly with symbols and/or with people. To put it another way, over the course of the 20th century, we went from 3/4 of the labor force working in the textbook economy to 3/4 working in the intangible economy.
If you picture manufacturing as men doing hard, physical labor, you are out of date. You might as well picture farming as being done with horse-drawn plows.
There is a social divide in this country, but it is not between capital and labor. It is between the college-educated (especially women) and the non-college-educated (especially men). This social divide is very disturbing, but it is complex. Unlike Senator Hawley, I do not believe that it can be addressed by tariffs, trade unions, and minimum wage laws. In fact, I do not believe that this social divide rests primarily on the economy.
I agree with Tim Carney and others that it is our culture that has become family-unfriendly. I agree with Melissa Kearney that the absence of two-parent families is a major problem, which is very prevalent among the non-college educated. I agree with Lenore Skenazy that the college-educated are not raising their children to be confident and independent. She recently wrote with Zach Rausch,
We now describe The Anxious Generation as a tragedy in three acts. Act 1, the loss of community, began in the 1960s and 1970s, when local communal life and obligations began to weaken, and social distrust began to rise (as described in Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone). This loss of trust led to Act 2, the loss of the play-based childhood. That began in the 1980s but really accelerated in the 1990s when children were pulled indoors, away from the unsupervised play with peers that had been typical for most of human history. As more immersive and exciting virtual worlds emerged, kids were drawn away from the real world and into the virtual one. The early 2010s marked the beginning of Act 3, the rise of the phone-based childhood, with the advent of smartphones and enhanced-virality social media.
Senator Hawley’s depiction of our social divide as a conflict between capitalist villains and worker victims struck me as antiquated. His diagnosis is simplistic, and his prescription is at best irrelevant and at worst harmful.
It seems to me that the family culture of the 1950s is better than what we have now. But we are not going back there. The amount of toothpaste that you have to squeeze back into the tube is just too great.
We will have to adapt to the situation as it exists in the 21st century. I hope that we find ways to change social norms, so that more people get on track to have many grandchildren. But those better social norms are going to emerge out of trial and error, not from Senator Hawley’s Marxist-inspired schemes of economic planning.
substacks (other than mine) referenced above:
@
Your diagnosis of the social divide is incisive.
The political difficulty: You can't beat something with nothing. A mere "hope that we find social ways to change social norms" via "trial and error" won't win elections or guide policy.
Until new norms somehow emerge, much of politics will continue to address the social divide as thought it were a conflict between capital and labor — or perhaps a mercantilist conflict among nations.
Roughly speaking, two rival economic policy frameworks will command the debate:
1) The "redistribution" framework. Tax and transfer. Means-tested welfare. Ideas about universal basic income.
2) The "pre-distribution" framework, to shield U.S. labor from competition and to improve the bargaining power of workers. Pro-labor regulations. Minimum wages. Tariffs.
In terms of political psychology, pre-distribution appeals to workers because it "levels the playing field." Capital and foreign nations can be alter-cast and out-cast as enemies. Pre-distribution operates upstream, so to speak.
By contrast, redistribution operates downstream and therefore may more readily be dismissed rhetorically as "handouts."
In a nutshell, Arnold's diagnosis -- 'It's the culture, stupid!' — is correct. However, because no one knows how to fix culture, policy discourse will continue to focus on economic drama. The pre-distribution framework naturally appeals to workers (including 'staff') because it integrates old-school sentiments of 'the dignity of labor' and evergreen 'us vs them' politics.
I'd recommend an alternative interpretation of all that workers vs capitalists narrative stuff as less seriously economic and more as a proxy for the "Party Elites vs Republican Voters" inner struggle in the GOP for the intellectual reformulation of the party's purpose and ideas. He is really alluding to the meme of the party elites being typical elites and only fake "conservatives" who in reality have been corrupted by social pressures and money to side with "woke capital" by conning and then betraying and selling out their own constituents. The cultural crack-up and increasing anger and strain of tension and incoherence has been building and worsening for a long time, and Trump coming out of nowhere 9 years ago to easily crush over a dozen top establishment figures was a consequence and symptom of the underlying disease being ignored and left untreated for a long time. For a more severe case of an even later stage of this disease, see the recent totally catastrophic crack-up of the even more fake "conservative" tories in Britain. The national-level GOP pretends to want to do things it conspicuously elects to not pursue in earnest at every opportunity and the only policy action in any of those directions is happening solely at the state level in places like Florida and Texas.
So, in the struggle to win the hearts and minds of Republican voters and gain control over the future direction of the party, there are certain blanks in the narrative that have to be filled in and a pent-up demand to explain the cause of the rift and position oneself against the soft, fake, corrupt liars running in the party and in the pockets of donors who don't give a damn about the interests or preferences of normie Republican voters. That's where a lot of the evil capital stuff comes from. "Every big company wants more immigration and more visas for cheaper labor at the expense of the American worker, and they donate heavily to the GOP establishment politicians to make sure they get it and that any noises to the contrary are just baloney to sucker the chumps for yet another election cycle."