Josh Hawley’s striking critique of American life

Hawley ended with a rousing call for “a new politics of family and neighborhood, a new politics of love and belonging, a new politics of home.” On a personal note, it would be wrong not to notice that his critique of contemporary life largely overlaps with my own. My book, My Father Left Me Ireland, is about recovering a vision of “home” in our political imagination that inspires the kind of selflessness our society and its institutions — including institutions of the state — need from us. So naturally, Hawley’s vision intrigues me.

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Of course, I don’t know if speeches like this will make Hawley an effective senator or an agent of change within his party — though Moynihan was somewhat famous for writing like an intellectual with views somewhere between William F. Buckley and Christopher Lasch, his votes never distinguished him all that much from Ted Kennedy. But they certainly mark the Missouri freshman as a man to watch in the Senate.

Likewise, the heart of the question Hawley is getting at — the one that has sparked fierce intra-conservative debates for months — isn’t going away: It’s all well and good to thunder from Olympus, but what precisely is to be done? The answer in my book was personal and small-scale, if also foundational: Accept more children into our lives, and be good fathers to them.

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