This profile of Josh Hawley, which highlights his supposedly “ferocious populism” and quotes somebody calling him a “true populist,” barely discusses his policy positions, which on ACA, taxes, minimum wage & many other issues are not “populist” at all. /1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/josh-hawley-missouri-senator-trump-election-fraud/2021/01/16/2fed38a6-55e4-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html

We don’t, for example, learn that Hawley, although not yet in the Senate, supported the Trump tax cut for the rich, that he opposed raising the minimum wage, that as AG, he fought to take health care away from millions of Americans./2

If to be a “populist” is to use the word “elite” in almost every paragraph and to condemn “cosmopolitanism,” than perhaps Hawley qualifies. /3

Not sure what it means to pair Hawley with William Jennings Bryan, a strong supporter of the labor movement and Goldwater, who, like Hawley, supported anti-labor right-to-work laws. /4

What makes this a “Greek Tragedy”? That the grandstanding Stanford and Yale educated son of a banker, who listened to Rush Limbaugh as a young person, and embraces conventional conservative positions on most issues is now cynically seeking to capture the Trump wing of the GOP? /5

It would have been more helpful to know what politics he espoused in his “political column” rather than that he employed one of the most cliched “flourishes” in punditry, especially of the right-wing variety. /6

And this is neither here nor there but am wondering why Hawley’s dad, who was president of Boatman’s Bank, which is described as “the largest commercial bank in MO,” and then Bank of America, is described as a “community banker”?/7

I know that “populism” is a contested term and that people like Hawley are routinely described as such, but the word “populist”or “populism” appears seven times in this article without any clear sense of what it signifies./8