On Tuesday, Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced the Higher Wages for American Workers Act, which proposes to raise the national minimum wage to $15. The move overwhelmingly won loud opposition from the right — but praise from a handful of progressives.
“I am not by any means a Josh Hawley fan but credit is due,” said Matt Conroy, a Democratic Congressional candidate in Illinois.
“People who say that Democratic victories are inevitable…don’t understand how hard toward a populist agenda Republicans like Hawley and Crenshaw are willing to pivot,” said Sam Weinberg, campaign manager for Democratic Congressional candidate Kat Abughazleh.
But within a day, Hawley had pivoted back to the right with a stern letter to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who he accused of “financing and materially supporting the coordinated protests and riots that have engulfed Los Angeles in recent weeks.”
The move was a harsh reminder that calls for a populist coalition between the left and the nativist right are an exercise in utter delusion. While there may be narrow opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to cosponsor bills such as the HWAWA, the populist right remains an existential threat to socialists in particular, and any broader support for its politics, leaders, and institutions risks empowering a dangerous opponent.
For several years now, right-leaning populists have badgered the left for its skepticism of Hawley, pointing to his occasional populist gestures as evidence that he can be “worked with.” Matt Stoller, for example, remarks: “It’s fascinating how Josh Hawley keeps rolling out pro-worker platforms…yet liberals and leftists use calling Hawley a fraud or a fascist as an in-group social signal to each other,” Matt Stoller said.
But Hawley’s letter suggests that left skepticism may be grounded in a bit more than social signaling. It may be legally impotent, but it should be regarded as part of an ongoing Republican effort to plunge America back into another red scare. Its goal is not just to place a cloud of suspicion over the protests, but to connect America’s broader socialist movement to any crimes that take place. The letter’s preservation notice — requesting that PSL retain a whole library of information from “internal communications” to “donor lists” to “financial documents” to “public relation strategies” — is plainly the first cast of a fishing expedition to find anything that Republicans can construe as incriminating.
Ironically, there’s good reason to believe that Hawley’s own efforts are part of a broader coordinated campaign. Within minutes of his announcement of an investigation into PSL, the New York Post published an article by Mike Gonzalez hyping flimsy evidence to back up his claims. Gonzalez, incidentally, just so happens to be a Senior Fellow with the Heritage Foundation.
Gonzalez also wrote a book, NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How To Combat It. Some key excerpts:
“…there’s an invaluable lesson to be learned, in this instance, from the McCarthy hearings…”
“…violence gives elected officials reason to investigate the group and its leaders, and in fact such hearings would be an important tool in the fight against NextGen Marxism. Congress must…ask them how much of the mayhem they…coordinated. If laws were broken during the riots, looting, and burnings, Congress can refer the matter to the FBI.”
“It is important to revisit as well the changes that were made during the civil rights era that shifted the definition of “peaceable assembly” to allow more rights for protesters.”
Hawley’s actions thus far seem to correspond quite closely to several of Gonzalez’s recommendations. If the book is any indication, Republicans are likely to use Congressional hearings as an opportunity to put on record testimony that they can then spin as incriminating in order to justify a referral to the FBI. They are also likely to look for opportunities to stage a court fight so that SCOTUS can concoct a narrow and draconian redefinition of “peaceable assembly.”
These are not the designs of an a prospective ally of the left. Whatever their feelings about populism are, Hawley and his nativist faction are out to destroy not just left politics, but also basic civil liberties that Americans take for granted. The left would do well to draw attention to this point, and for godsakes, to stop rehabilitating these people as friends to wokers.
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