Is Josh Hawley Dumb or Evil? No, the Answer Is Not Both. by David Corn June 26, 2021 
Sen. Josh Hawley got his history wrong—on purpose. It's part of his racist anti-anti-racist demagoguery. Tom Williams/AP This sounds like a mean and hyperpartisan question. But consider what Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri who yearns to inherit Trump’s demagogic mantle, said a few days ago on the Senate floor: “I’m worried that President Biden is nominating for federal office individuals who do not share a view of America as a good and decent place, who do not believe that the history of this nation is worth celebrating, nominating instead people who believe that this is a country founded in racism and shot through with corruption.” The Liberal Twitterverse immediately pounced and dumped a boatload of snark upon this ambitious pol for such a display of ignorance. After all, there is no doubt that the United States was founded in racism. Many of the founders owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson enslaved more than 600 human beings during his life. As of 1799, George Washington held 123 people as his personal property. More to the point, the founding document of the nation, the US Constitution, incorporated the three-fifths clause, under which a slave would be counted as 60 percent of a free person for the purposes of determining taxation and representation in the US House of Representatives.
It was easy to slam Hawley, the January 6 fist-pumper, for this dumb and ahistorical remark. Slavery was baked into the nation’s origins. This is not a controversial notion. Anyone who has ever watched the musical 1776 knows that the founders accepted slavery as the price of admission for independence. In social media jabs, tweeps noted that Hawley, a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, ought to know better.
And he does. Hawley was a history major at Stanford. Not long ago, David Kennedy, the acclaimed historian who was Hawley’s thesis adviser, told my colleague Tim Murphy that Hawley was “probably the single most capable undergraduate I taught in more than 40 years.” Hawley’s honors thesis on Theodore Roosevelt became a book—which is quite unusual for an undergrad—and in that work Hawley derided TR’s effort to address the increasing concentration of corporate power with enhanced governmental regulation and pronounced Roosevelt “statist, racist, and coercive.” (And Roosevelt sure was racist. If you don’t believe me, read Stephen Kinzer’s The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.)
Whether Hawley was right or wrong about Teddy, the point is that Hawley is well-steeped in American history—and its racial component. To whitewash the birth of the nation is a purposeful act. No slip.
The other day, actor and activist Wendell Pierce observed that the ongoing Republican attack on Critical Race Theory “is a political strategy to stoke ‘White Fear,’ a common right wing practice. It’s also an attack on intellectualism [that] authoritarian movements have used throughout history.” And with his remark, Hawley was seeking to exploit the current crusade against CRT and develop a more basic line of attack: You cannot be a good American if you acknowledge the reality that slavery was a foundational flaw of the United States.
Hawley is following a Soviet-like model of historical revisionism, with no lie too big to be embraced for political gain. (This is the guy who led the Republican effort in Congress to block the certification of the 2020 election—and then lied about having supported Trump’s Big Lie.) His floor remarks were straight out of 1984, in which George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Hawley’s rhetoric is not merely patriotic blather aimed at side-stepping a stain on the nation. That would be too obvious. He’s far more savvy—and underhanded—than that. He is adopting a racist anti-anti-racism to appeal to white grievances. This is the latest tactic for the Trump wannabes: Delegitimize the effort to confront the American racism of the present or the past and whip up and appeal to white resentment. (Recently, Sen. Ted Cruz, a likely competitor to Hawley should they both seek the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, absurdly exclaimed that Critical Race Theory was “every bit as racist as the Klansman in white sheets.”)
For years, the Ivy League–educated Hawley has been concocting a populism of the right that demonizes elites and Big Tech. (At a recent congressional hearing, he waved a copy of a story I co-wrote about Amazon’s growing influence in Washington.) His assault on “cosmopolitan” “globalists” has prompted criticism that he too readily employs the coded language of anti-Semitism. This guy is a schemer. He understands that racism was a building block of the United States. He also realizes that when he targets those who would dare state this fact that he is indeed stoking white fear. That’s no mistake. He seeks to deny racism to exploit racism. 
What to Read, Watch, and Listen To Richard Thompson, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967–1975. Virtuosity is hard to fathom. Complete mastery of a skill is unknown to most of us. And every time I see Richard Thompson, the pioneering folk rocker, guitar hero, and talented songwriter, perform live, I ponder what it is to be the best. That’s what I did a few nights ago, when I attended a Thompson show at the Birchmere music hall outside Washington, DC. This was my first post-pandemic concert. (I’m not sure we are truly post-pandemic, but let’s go with that for now.) If you’re not familiar with Thompson’s distinctive guitar playing (his right thumb thrumming the lower strings and his other four fingers—in a seeming impossibility—simultaneously plucking chords and playing lead lines) and with his well-crafted songs, you have truly missed out. See the video below for a fan favorite, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” In the solo gig on Tuesday night, Thompson delivered a marvelous rendition of this tune and treated the ecstatic crowd—live music, once again!—to classics stretching back to his days in Fairport Convention, a British band that can fairly lay claim to creating folk rock, and to numbers off the album he recorded during the pandemic at his New Jersey home.
Thompson was in fine form, his playing as dazzling as ever. (Rolling Stone has enshrined him in its list of 100 Greatest Guitarists—though he deserves a higher spot on the roster than the one assigned.) At the Birchmere, his sharp wit was on full display, while he basked in the we’re-out-of-lockdown celebratory mood that generated a communal warmth. Experiencing his wizardry once again was a return to normalcy.
And there’s more. Thompson has a wonderful new memoir out. In Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967–1975, he chronicles his days as a London teen obsessed with traditional British folk music who helped birth the genre of folk rock. There are the usual stories of bad (and good) band dynamics. A tragic car crash. Cameos from John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and others. Overall, it’s a heartfelt tale of an earnest but often uncomfortable young man seeking to plot a musical course and a personal path at the same time. You can’t help but be impressed by Thompson’s unbending devotion to the folk tradition while being in the middle of the rock-and-sex-and-drugs era and becoming a renowned rock guitarist. That personal journey, as he recounts, led him into Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, which he still practices.
Beeswing is chockful of reflections on music and song. (This is a guy who occasionally performs a show called “1,000 Years of Popular Music.”) He notes that songs are written “to decode life.” And here’s one observation that stuck with me: “The string arrangement on Nick Drake’s ‘River Man’ is the greatest in popular music, better than ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Kashmir,’ or any other contender.” After the show at the Birchmere, I asked Thompson about this. He arched his eyebrows and remarked, “Have you listened to it?” Yes, I had. “And...?” I wasn’t going to argue. Take a listen and see what you think. There is, though, one flaw in the book: It doesn’t fully explain how he got to be so good. That remains a mystery.
The Bureau. I was late to this excellent five-season-long French drama of intrigue and derring-do within a unit of the Directorate-General for External Security, the CIA of France. It’s le Carré-ish, which is the highest compliment that can be awarded any tale of espionage. Character-driven, reasonably realistic, focused on the knottiest foreign policy dilemmas of recent years (including Syria). And lots of French attitude. You will not find a better spy show—or a better drama. If I knew how to, I would insert a chef’s kiss emoji here.
Got any feedback on the above or recommendations of what I should be reading, watching, or listening to? Send them to thisland@motherjones.com. Dumbass Comment of the Week A feature like Dumbass Comment of the Week tends to require a certain cheekiness. Especially these days when there are so many contenders from which to choose. Yet what to do when the winner spurs no chuckles and nothing but horror? Watch this clip that was highlighted this week by Will Sommer, a reporter for the Daily Beast: 
Claiming that up to tens of thousands of people were involved in a “coup” against Donald Trump, Pearson Sharp, a reporter for the rabidly pro-Trump and conspiracist One America News Network (OAN), remarked, “What happens to all those people who were responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them? Well, in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution.”
After this clip justifiably caused a ruckus on social media, Sharp tried to weasel his way out, saying, “I'm simply reporting that conspiring against the government to overthrow an election, with the help of a foreign government, would be treason. If that is investigated, and if that is proven, then US laws maintain that execution is a legal punishment for those crimes. That is the extent of the report. Neither I, nor OAN, are suggesting anyone should be executed.” What bullshit. Sharp called execution “a very good solution.” That ain’t reporting. That’s an endorsement. Some might say it’s even encouragement. In days past, such a reckless statement—okaying mass executions—would be grounds for dismissal, even at a conservative outlet. (Fox News once fired Glenn Beck for being too extreme.) But Sharp still has his job, it seems. His simple “reporting” was not just dumbassery. It was dangerous.
Got a suggestion for a Dumbass Comment of the Week? Send it to thisland@motherjones.com. MoxieCam™ Before. 
After. 
Read Previous Issues of This Land June 22, 2021: Why the GOP is pushing “political apartheid”; Ted Cruz wins Dumbass Comment of the Week; recommendations for an Apple TV+ series and a book on the curious origins of the universe; the first Clash tour of the United States (and being trapped in a van driven by a punk on acid); MoxieCam™; and more.
June 24, 2021: How an alleged 1/6 conspirator who called for executing Trump’s foes hooked up with a prominent Republican Party official; new Los Lobos; and more.
Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.
|
