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If you picture manufacturing as men doing hard, physical labor, you are out of date.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.

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