Josh Hawley's toxic populism

This conception has the potential to transform the lawmaker into an empty vessel—a showboater and a grandstander—or even a powerful purveyor of falsehoods and crankery. It demands that legislators represent the people by giving them voice, no matter what. It says nothing about what to do when what the people want is baseless or even dangerous. It doesn’t account for what happens when what the people want is insane.

It’s a flawed and feckless view of leadership. Indeed, it is practically a form of anti-leadership, for it renders elected officials helpless before the whims of their constituents. And it’s a misunderstanding of the constitutional vision of the Senate—the chamber of which Hawley is a member—which was designed at least in part to restrain the raw populist impulses of the House of Representatives.

Hawley might say he’s acting as a public servant. In his pre–public office writing on the Progressive visions of Roosevelt and Wilson, he called for an ethic of “self-determination” in which the people get to choose their own society. But that ethic, he noted, requires a kind of responsibility and commitment on the part of elected officials, a duty to the polity rather than merely to oneself.

Hawley has clearly failed that test, feeding and validating false and destructive beliefs not only from voters but from Trump himself. It is more than a little ironic that Hawley, who has accomplished little of substance as a lawmaker, has so often framed his arguments as critiques of a Congress failing to do his job. In nearly every case, the failure was Hawley’s.