Missouri Attorney General and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley speaks to supporters during a campaign stop Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018, in St. Charles, Mo. Hawley is seeking to unseat Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Earlier in the week, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was the keynote speaker at the what was billed as the National Conservatism Conference. The conference was not a national conference of movement conservatives but a inaugural meeting to discuss where the more traditional view of conservatism has failed. This is the way that National Review snarkily described it:

Discerning the existence of an “intellectual Trumpism” has been a preoccupation of the chattering classes for the past couple of years. At a conference in Washington, D.C. this week, that movement began to take clearer shape under the banner of National Conservatism.

What is National Conservatism? For three days, starting on Sunday and continuing through Tuesday, an impressive group of academics, journalists, and political figures from across the American Right gathered in the ballrooms of a D.C. Ritz-Carlton to ponder that question. They aim to establish institutions guided by the sentiments that led to Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Yoram Hazony, a political philosopher who published a book called The Virtue of Nationalism last year and organized the conference, described the three-day event as “the coming together of diverse bands of conservatives.” Talks that toggled between anti-libertarians and Calvin Coolidge scholars, isolationists and defense hawks, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and long-time social conservatives put that diversity on full display.

Despite this plurality of views, or maybe because of it, a common understanding of conservative nationalism took shape at the conference: The nation is the most logical vessel for political organization known to man, and supranational entities threaten the social attachments that allow for human flourishing. Those attachments have been frayed by decades of unfettered capitalism and inattention to traditional social structures, like the family and organized religion.

Speaker after speaker called for stronger government intervention in the economy, almost uniformly rejecting libertarian principles. Tucker Carlson, one of the keynote presenters, received a warm reception for his theory of the case, evidently shared by the conference hall. “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from the government anymore, but it comes from the private sector,” the Fox News host said. Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) entranced the crowd with bromides against a “cosmopolitan consensus” boosted by woke progressives and conservatives with too much faith in markets.

I have to admit I’m much more sympathetic to this world view than I am to the views of either libertarians or movement conservatives. I think that conservatives have, in many ways, bought into the libertine views of the Cato-types in regards to drug use and buggery and “tolerance.” They have become entirely willing to let corporations control speech in a way they would never countenance government control. And they have created a god out of consumerism. They have been willing to help the left drive Christianity from the public square and turn a society that was once famed for its faithfulness into one where you can get fired or driven into bankruptcy for being a Believer. Hawley has, along with Ted Cruz, become an absolute rock star, in my view, it trying to slam the door on the ability of Big Tech to control our politics and manipulate our lives and in standing up for the principle that the primary goal of he United States is to make lives for its citizens better.

This was Hawley’s speech.

Here is the complete text.

Here are the highlights.

No, the great divide of our time is between the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society. And to answer the discontent of our time, we must end that divide. We must forge a new consensus.
,,,
That work begins with a clear assessment of where we stand.

For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.

This class lives in the United States, but they identify as “citizens of the world.” They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.

And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.

Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.

On economics, this consensus favors globalization—closer & closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms. The boundaries between America and the rest of the world should fade and eventually vanish.

The goal is to build a global consumer economy, one that will provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, and funded by American dollars.

But it’s about more than economics. According to the cosmopolitan consensus, globalization is a moral imperative. That’s because our elites distrust patriotism and dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.
…
Theodore Roosevelt once wrote that “the Roman Republic fell” when “the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, [and] who voted without reward according to his own convictions” ceased to exist. Our present-day leaders seem determined to repeat the experiment.

Is it any surprise that in the last half century, as our leaders have pursued a program the American middle does not espouse, does not support, and does not benefit from, that public confidence in American government has collapsed?

Is it any wonder that American voters regularly tells pollsters they feel unheard, disempowered and disrespected?

Because who now listens to the American middle? The cosmopolitan agenda has driven both Left and Right.

The Left champions multiculturalism and degrades our common identity. The Right celebrates hyper-globalization and promises that the market will make everything right in the end, eventually … perhaps.

In truth, neither political party has seemed much interested in the American middle for quite a long time. And neither has seemed much interested in the republic the middle sustains.

But the old political platforms have grown stale. And the old political truisms now ring hollow. The American people are demanding something different, and something better.

It’s time we ended the cosmopolitan experiment and recovered the promise of the republic.

I find it hard to disagree with this. The “cosmopolitan experiment” has, as Hawley implies, created a class dependent upon government largess for their survival. It is creating the “bread and circuses” of dying Rome. It fuels out of wedlock births, drug and alcohol abuse, and all manner of social pathologies because a life without purpose is a life wasted. A whole culture of globalism, espousing the exact same views as Hawley describes, has been on public display since at least the mid-1980s. Books have been written about it being an imperative if we are to usher in some Age of Aquarius where the world is at peace and everyone is above average. None of this was controversial in anyway until Hawley’s speech. Now it is.

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1152023408630095872

If you follow the link you’ll find that someone writing at something called “PRI.org” claims ‘Cosmopolitan’ is a dog whistle word once used in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.

In this article the target is an actual Jew, Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Consider that for a moment.

There is more.

Yeah, Hawley knows better than to put the word “rootless” in front of “cosmopolitan”. But others hear that dog whistle, and he knows that too.

— Mark R. Yzaguirre (@markyzaguirre) July 19, 2019

Dafuq??…as the kid’s say.

And Hawley quotes a woman who is an adult convert to Judaism

So the Missouri senator who used the word “cosmopolitan” (which has an anti-Semitic history in 20th century) as a negative in a speech tries to double down on it by quoting Martha Nussbaum. But he *misreads/misleads* the quote. Follow along… https://t.co/DKI4teZ72b

— Matthew Boedy (@MatthewBoedy) July 19, 2019

No thought is given by this assclown to the possibility that she was quoted because she’s a scholar who has written in opposition to nationalism.

We no longer live in the era of Hitler’s Germany nor, no thanks at all to the Democrats and the American left, the USSR.

How does Princeton University Press use the term "cosmopolitan"? Well, here's one of their political theory books, which uses "cosmopolitan" in the subtitle to refer to global citizenship (without any anti-Jewish implications) :https://t.co/6vsBP7fWWr

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 19, 2019

And here is "cosmopolitan" being used in this way in the title of a book from Harvard University Press: https://t.co/EIhmJCEXt2

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 19, 2019

And in the title of this Oxford book: https://t.co/ZxgvlhTjgC

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 19, 2019

So, you see, @JamesFallows, it is you who does not know what "cosmopolitan" means. This term, descended from Stoic philosophy, is in common use in educated discourse to mean "citizen of the world." In common use, it has *no* anti-Jewish valence.

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 19, 2019

Sen. @HawleyMO is, as you emphasize, an educated man. And so it's not surprising that he used the term "cosmopolitan" exactly correctly in his well-received speech at the National Conservatism Conference.

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 19, 2019

Anti-semitism is endemic on the left and that is why they are so quick to hear these dog whistles that no one else heres. The thing about dog whistles is that if you hear them, you’re the f***ing dog.

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