It's in the Code ep 185: “Who Are the Elites?”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always, and as always, I want to begin by saying thank you to those of you who listen to us and support us in all the different ways that you do — particularly our subscribers. We can't do it without you. This series in particular can't do it without you. I need your insights, your input, your ideas for new series, new topics, new episodes, feedback on existing episodes.

I have been soliciting responses on the theme of questions I was not supposed to ask in church — or questions I was not allowed to ask in church — and would ask you to send me those. Daniel Miller, SWAJ: danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Send me those questions that got you in trouble in church, or maybe the questions that forced you out, or the questions that got you a stern talking to by the pastor or somebody else. Put that in your header: "Questions I Wasn't Supposed to Ask." That is the series that we are heading to next, after we finish Josh Hawley's book on manhood.

So with that, I want to dive in. As I mentioned, we're in Josh Hawley's book on manhood. We've been here forever. Feels like every page gets worse and worse and worse. We are now in his eighth chapter, where he lays out the fourth of his six roles that he insists men must take on to cultivate masculine virtue and save the country — six roles that he identifies. The title of this chapter is "Builder." So the role that we're on is the role of builder.

I've got to be honest: I'm reading this book as we go, and I haven't even finished this chapter because I just got so angry and frustrated reading it. Now, I don't like his book. I don't like what Josh Hawley has to say. I don't like what Josh Hawley stands for. I've been angry and frustrated for a while, but this chapter really, really, really got under my skin even more than most. As I've kind of reflected on why, I think it's because, maybe more than any chapter in the book, it really illustrates what I think is the absolute doublespeak — and I mean that in the technical sense of that term. If you haven't read 1984 lately, go back, take a look, although it's going to remind you a lot of the present, so it could be triggering — be aware of that. But the absolute doublespeak of the contemporary right and the MAGA elite. And I very specifically use the term "elite" here.

It is a chapter that is chock full of contradictions. It's full of non sequiturs — or just irrelevant points. It's full of misdirection, just like the rest of the book. But I don't know if any chapter so far has given voice to the willing reversal of the truth that is contained in these pages, that again defines the discourse on the right — that not only wants to obfuscate things or blame the left, but just absolutely reverses the actual way that things work. That's what I want to do today. I want to try to bring some of that to light. I want to get this off my chest, maybe rant a little. We'll see how this goes in this first look at this theme of building.

We can start with the most basic and probably the least maddening of the issues in this chapter, which is the actual theme. Hawley says — again, the title suggests that the theme is building — the role that men are supposed to play is that of builder. He supports this with a biblical example, not the one I expected. We'll get to this. I said last episode that I was pretty sure where he was going to go with this — again, I'm reading the book as we go — and I was wrong. It's a little bit surprising.

He gives a biblical example of what he thinks is a builder, and he gives another folksy example from his family life — this time his uncle Bruce, his dad's brother, who owns and operates a concrete company. And through this company, he, quote, "contributes, and he builds." That's what he has to say. So — building. Got it, Josh. Thank you. Building, builders, et cetera.

But then he gets slippery. He goes on to say, quote, "The truth is that manual work of the kind Bruce has done has become less and less valued in our society." Manual work. So I guess we're talking about manual labor of any kind, and not just building in a narrow sense. In other words, he broadens his topic from building to manual labor. It's not maybe the biggest deal, but there are obviously lots of kinds of manual labor that aren't building.

And then for the rest of the chapter, he broadens this even further to the concept of work as such. He says this is not surprising. He says that men's social contributions, their sense of meaning, their social value, come from working. But he doesn't specify what kind of work this is. So it turns out the theme isn't really building as much as it is just working. He does seem to primarily have blue collar work in mind. He refers to blue collar workers a number of times in this chapter, and I think that's why he has to tell folks these stories about his relatives once again, instead of stories about himself — because he doesn't do this kind of work. I don't think he has any stories he can tell us about blue collar work, which is going to be significant, because he's going to tell us — as all the right-wing elites always do — the value of hard manual physical labor. And there's nothing better than some dude who doesn't do hard physical manual labor telling you how good and important it is, how much it builds character, et cetera. I think we're going to get into that as we go through the rest of this chapter.

He tends to have blue collar work in mind, but not completely, because he also tells the story of his grandfather — not the farmer; that was one grandfather, he told the story about the farmer grandfather. Now it's another grandfather who was the manager of a small storefront, JCPenney. So I guess we're talking about retail, not blue collar narrowly construed. I don't know. I guess what he has in mind is work that doesn't require a college degree — maybe something like that. At any rate, once again, right out of the gate, his presentation breaks down at basic points, which makes it kind of hard to figure out what the hell he's talking about.

Okay, fine. That's, as I say, the most basic problem with this chapter. I have a lot to say about his vision of work and his diagnosis of it within American society. But before we dive in, I also want to note that I actually have a point of agreement with Hawley. I don't agree with our friend Josh much, but I guess I should note when I do. On page 131, he says this — after saying that manual labor has become less and less valued in our society, he goes on to say, "not least because the elites who set the cultural tone largely disdain those who work with their hands." In other words, disdain on the part of elites is part of why this labor is not there.

Now I have a lot about how I disagree with Hawley here. We're going to come to that. But I agree with this. There are a lot of well-educated, high-income people in the US who absolutely do disdain and look down on those who work with their hands — people who do manual labor, physical labor, blue collar work, what have you. It's not everyone who's well-educated or high-income, but it is a lot of people, and I think that that's a fair criticism to make. Notice: I didn't say that's strictly coming from the left or something like that. We'll talk about that as we go.

I was reflecting on my own experience here. I spend a lot of my time around academics. Just to give an example, I'm most familiar with some from big-name, prestigious institutions. A lot of academics don't make crazy amounts of money, but some do. Some make a lot of money. But it's certainly high prestige, certainly well-educated, and so forth. And some of those academics that I spend time with from those institutions — they are amazing, down-to-earth people. But some have exactly the kind of attitude that Hawley points out. I have heard more dismissive, throwaway comments about artisans or skilled laborers or day laborers or builders than I can probably count — just throwaway comments about people who do that kind of labor. And I've known my share of academics who, at the same time that they're busy sort of looking down on those people as being below them in some way, couldn't do so much as change a tire or mow their own lawn, but they'll look down on people who possess skills and abilities and capacities that it has oftentimes taken years to perfect.

Skills that they don't have or don't possess. Doing things they couldn't do. And yet they'll still be sort of dismissive of them, or complain about how much they charge, or suggest that those people are living a lifestyle beyond what they should be living given what they do, or something like that. I've seen this. It's not limited to academics — I just use academics because that's an example that I'm familiar with.

What I was reminded of is: a few years ago I was at a symposium. There were some big-name academics — I'm not a big-name academic, I'm not from a big-name academic institution — but there were some academics there who were big names, well-established, from prestigious institutions. And there was one morning before everything got kicked off: the hotel we were staying at had this patio area, and we'd poured a cup of coffee, gotten a muffin, whatever, and we'd gone out to the patio area. Landscaping company that mows lawns was there — I guess it was the day they mow the lawn of this hotel.

As they're mowing it, these two academics — big-name guys from these prestigious institutions that I'm sitting with, just drinking coffee — were complaining. They're complaining about the noise. They're complaining about how rude it is for this person to be there at this time. "Don't they know people are here working? They shouldn't be here this early. They shouldn't be doing this. They should be more considerate. Maybe we should talk to the hotel management and see if they can come back later." And I gently sort of called them out. I was like, you know, this guy's just doing his job. He's just here working early. He's going to be out in the heat and the sun working all day, mowing other people's lawns and doing these things. And these two big-name academics were just talking trash about this guy who was clearly just doing his work. The disdain that I felt from them for this person — it was embarrassing. It made me ashamed to be sitting at the table with them.

And so I get that attitude. I've seen that attitude. And I want to note: when Josh Hawley talks about the disdain of working-class people, that's often a real thing. It does come from cultural elites. It does come from people who are well-educated. It does come from people who have lots of money. That's a real thing. So Josh — hey, if you're listening — I don't think you are, but if you are — I'm acknowledging that that is correct.

But that brings me to what got me absolutely just boiling about this chapter. And here it is. Josh Hawley, as routinely — if you look at his public statements and things he sometimes says, and legislation that he proposes and so forth — he has positioned himself as a voice for, quote-unquote, "working Americans." But he is part of the political party that has championed — and continues to champion — the economic and social policies that have absolutely gutted blue-collar America for the past half century.

He's a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, the inheritor of a Republican Party that has embraced — we could call it neoliberal, or supply-side, or trickle-down, or Reaganomics, whatever you want to call it, they're all the same thing. They have embraced those economic policies since the Reagan presidency. It has been the economic orthodoxy of the political right and really the political middle since the Reagan presidency forward.

So his is the party that extolled the virtues of unlimited free trade that led to the exodus of jobs overseas to countries with fewer worker and environmental protections — that helped destroy American manufacturing and so many blue collar jobs. That was his party. His is the party that gutted public education in this country and refused to support retraining of American workers as the economy shifted. You get all the jobs going overseas, you move away from manufacturing, energy production changes — you have huge swaths of American workers who can't do the things they were trained to do. And his is the party that gutted education and opposed any efforts to have systematic retraining programs so that people can get the skills they need to do other work. That's his party.

His is the party that made it a piece of economic orthodoxy that the highest goal of working is not the support of the workers, but the redistribution of wealth into the hands of CEOs and shareholders who get rich off the backs of workers. Trickle-down economics — the whole idea that all the money should be funneled to the CEOs and the shareholders, and as they get richer it will trickle down to the rest of us. That's his economic orthodoxy. His is the party that has enshrined a tax policy that taxes working Americans and wage earners at higher rates than corporations or the fat-cat CEOs whose money comes from stock options or real estate or capital gains. You pay more in taxes as a wage earner. That's his party. His is the party that has worked to eviscerate American labor movements and sought to take away workers' rights and protections at every level and of every kind. His is the party whose economic orthodoxies have led to the wage stagnation of recent decades — so that people like me, in real dollars, make less than our parents. All the statistics about this being the first generation that's going to be less well-off than their parents and the generation before them. Congratulations, Josh Hawley. That's your party, that's your political orthodoxy, that's your economic policy.

His is the party that has made it so that so few Americans can afford to make a living as blue collar or manual laborers. One reason why there are so few people doing that is nobody can afford to do it — and his party is the party whose economic orthodoxies have led to the greatest economic disparities since the Gilded Age. That's Josh Hawley and his party. His is the party that built an economic system that explicitly and proudly prioritizes the well-being of economic elites at the literal expense of everyone else in society. The highest good within neoliberalism is to funnel money to the economic elites — that is the highest good.

And this guy — that guy — the inheritor of that economic policy and that kind of ideology — he has the gall to call out elites who disdain blue collar work? Josh, I don't give a shit what your grandpa did. I know who your political party is. I know what its policies are. I know what they have done to this country. I know what they have done to blue collar workers. You, my friend, are the elite. Yours is the party that has done this. Yours is the party that has built itself around the economic elites. That's the gospel of your party. You and people like you — you're the ones who did this to us.

So don't sit there and decry the elites who disdain labor. And if you don't believe me, maybe you've heard Josh get on TV and say things about workers. You know, that sounds pretty harsh, Dan. I don't know if he really thinks these things. His choice of a biblical example of a builder shows this. It shows that priority for the elites.

So I mentioned earlier that when he looks for a biblical figure to represent the builder, he doesn't go in the direction I thought he would. Now, if you're familiar with the Bible, or you're familiar with sort of right-wing discourse about it, and somebody says, "Oh, he's going to find an example of a builder in the Bible" — like me, you probably expected him to cite Nehemiah. Now, who's Nehemiah? If you don't happen to know: he's the guy who was tasked with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem when the Jewish people were allowed to return to Palestine under the rule of the Persians. So the Jewish people were taken captive into the nation of Babylon; they were exiled from their city. The Babylonians were eventually conquered by the Persians. The Persians allowed a portion of them to return back to their homeland and rebuild the city of Jerusalem, and Nehemiah is the one tasked with doing this.

People on the right love the story of Nehemiah, in part because of the whole builder thing, but also because he built walls. I'm not kidding — when they want to make a defense of building walls, they'll point to Nehemiah. It's also the case that the Book of Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible is pretty xenophobic in its tone. There are some parts of the Hebrew Bible that sort of counterbalance that, but it's there. And so people on the right love this. They love Nehemiah. So I fully expected that's what he was going to pick. The Book of Nehemiah is literally organized around a building project, so it seemed like a natural choice.

But Hawley went in a different direction. He tells the story of David — if you know David and Goliath, it's that David. But this is David later; this is David after he's king of the Israelites. As king, David conquered the city of Jerusalem and made it his capital. Hawley cites a couple of verses from the Book of Second Samuel, reading: "David took up residence in the fortress and called it the City of David. He built up the area around it from the supporting terraces inward." That's it. Hawley's biblical example hangs on this one verse about King David that says he "built it up" — doesn't actually say Jerusalem, it says "the fortress," but he's talking about the city of Jerusalem.

Here's why I think that's such a telling choice for him. David didn't build anything. Now, if you're hearing that and saying, "Well, hold up — the Bible says he built up the area around it" — yeah. But he didn't, Josh. David didn't cut or haul the stones. He didn't go down to the quarry and do all of that physical labor. He didn't heft them into place. He didn't make sure the grading was correct or that the walls were plumb. He didn't engineer the buildings. He did none of it. David, as king, had a bunch of other people do it for him. So in choosing King David as his example, Hawley chooses exactly the kind of elite he pretends to criticize. He chooses a rich and powerful man who can sit back and order those below him to do the literal work of building his capital.

And what that tells me is how natural a choice, how natural an interpretation this is for Josh Hawley — that the guy at the top who doesn't do the literal building is the builder. Think of Donald Trump. People talk about Donald Trump in real estate. Donald Trump doesn't do anything — he tells other people to do things. That's how elites work. They don't have to actually do anything. They just point and say "do it," and other people have to do it. That's his model. King David sitting on his throne, directing other people to build stuff. He chooses a rich and powerful elite as his model of the builder.

And here's why I think it's an even more telling choice. If he wanted to highlight down-in-the-dirt-with-your-hands work, he could have still looked at David — but he could have talked about the younger David. He could have talked about David the herdsman, living rough out with the animals, having to fight off predators, making sure people don't come and steal them. He could have talked about that. He could have chosen the blue-collar David, if that's what mattered to him. But he didn't do that. He chose King David. And in making that choice, he shows us where his priorities are. He shows us who he sees as the real economic driver and social force. He shows us his neoliberal character. He's not about workers — he's about the elites. It's not people like his uncle Bruce that he really valorizes or sees as the drivers, as the real men. Remember, there's the whole masculinity thing — we're not even getting into the masculinity thing as much here as we are the economics of this. But the whole masculinity thing — it's not really about his uncle Bruce. It's the people who hire him to pour their patios and build their retaining walls, because they're rich and powerful enough to have somebody else do it for them. That's his ideal. That's his social vision.

And in making that choice, he absolutely reveals his indifference to the people who really work and build, despite everything that he says. And he is completely typical of the political right in this regard. He's simply expressing what has been the economic and Christian orthodoxy of the social and political right for decades. They will talk about work and they will talk about workers, but what they really mean is anything that benefits the elites economically — who are seen as the real drivers, the real people of value in society.

So all of that drives me crazy. That makes me angry. But it's not enough for Hawley. No, it's not enough for Hawley — the political elite — to echo this elitist orthodoxy from one side of his mouth. He also has to decry so-called elitism out of the other side of his mouth at the same time. That's what I mean by doublespeak. He's endorsing elitism, expressing his own elitism, while critiquing elitism at the same time.

And of course, of course, of course — not only that, but he blames the decline of blue-collar work and social value not on the neoliberal economic policies that he and his party have championed for half a century, systematically destroying blue-collar America. Nothing. Not a word. No. Instead, as always, he blames the liberals and the "new Epicureans" — his standard accusations. He says, for example, that the "chattering classes" of the 1960s caused the decline by insisting that such jobs were, quote, "dead ends or degrading." But what he leaves out, of course, is that when people talk about those jobs being a dead end, it's because neoliberal economics made them a dead end. They made it so that most Americans cannot make a living doing that kind of work. It literally devalued that kind of work. It forced Americans to do something else, while at the same time refusing to give them the ability to do so.

It's so frustrating — I'm getting all tongue-tied here. The modern Republican Party is built on disdain for exactly the kinds of Americans that Hawley pretends to defend. I think the scariest part is he might not even know this. He might not even recognize it. He might actually believe the story that he's telling. I don't know. But he, once again — and excuse me — has the gall to ignore that entire history, and to blame exactly what he and his party have done for decades on the people who have sought to counter that, who have sought to fight for blue-collar working Americans, who have sought to fight neoliberalism for decades. He wants to blame those on the political and cultural left who have combated that neoliberal destruction of working-class America.

And here is the most galling part of all. His doublespeak works. The Republican Party and the MAGA movement — they have mobilized culture war issues. And you all know this, if you listen to us. They have mobilized culture war issues like abortion, and anti-LGBTQ rights, and anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia, to rally the very people they have harmed for decades behind them.

So we now have millions of American blue-collar workers who support a billionaire president and his oligarch cabinet — who have become rich off of their backs and their work — through tax cuts that don't serve them, and sending jobs overseas, and all of it. They have millions of those workers whose economic interests are diametrically opposed to the people that they vote for. But they have successfully rallied around culture war issues to mask all of that and to build that movement.

And those same people will read Hawley and they will believe every word. And they will blame the Bernie Sanderses of the world, or the AOCs, or anybody else who's been fighting for their rights — fighting for fair wages, fighting for greater worker protections, fighting for greater regulations. They will target any of them as their enemies while the oligarchs pull the strings.

And part of that is because a whole generation of ruling-class Democrats also drank the neoliberal Kool-Aid. I've got to wind this episode down — I don't have time to go into it, but you can email me if you want. We know there was a whole generation where this was Democratic orthodoxy as well — centrist Democrats, and I'm looking at you, Bill and Hillary Clinton — who also drank the neoliberal Kool-Aid, who bought in wholeheartedly. That's part of why millions of Americans believe that story. And they also know — we also know — that part of why they believe that story is the Democrats took them for granted.

The lesson of the last election cycles has been that the Democrats and people on the left, for too long, assumed that they had the working class behind them. They took their eye off of them, and then they fell prey to the demagoguery of Trump and MAGA and people like Hawley — who can dress it up and make it look nice and make it sound nice and tell you that they're just telling you good Bible stories.

And in the meantime, Hawley and everyone like him makes one final move. And here it is: after making it increasingly difficult to live in blue-collar America, making it increasingly hard for blue-collar Americans to survive — what is he going to do? Is he going to blame neoliberal economics? Nope. Is he just going to blame the left? He's not even going to stop there. What he's going to do is challenge the social value or the masculinity of anybody who's supposedly not a blue-collar worker. He wants to talk about a crisis of masculinity. He says that part of the crisis of masculinity is that men don't work — and he means blue-collar work. He says it's the crisis facing America. His party made it hard, made it nearly impossible, made it so that there's no incentive for doing that kind of work — and then challenges the masculinity of men who don't. The crisis of masculinity that he identifies, that he thinks is so real that he wants us to buy into — it's a crisis he and his party perpetuated.

This chapter really, really bugs me. If the economic stuff is not your cup of tea, I promise we'll get more into what he specifically says about masculinity, how this kind of work ties into masculinity. We'll get into how he's talking about David and those things in more detail. But today, as I say, I had to get it off my chest — just the galling tone of this text, extolling the virtue and value of manual labor and blue-collar work from a guy whose party has done nothing but eviscerate that part of America for decades.

We're not done with Hawley. We're not done with what he'll say about builders or workers or masculinity and how it relates. But for today, we need to wind it down.

So let me say again: thank you for listening. If you're a subscriber, thank you in particular. If you're not and you would consider subscribing, I would ask you to do that. If you've gifted us a one-time gift or something like that, thank you. For everybody who joins us at the live events and office hours and those things — thank you. Those are great. We love those. Please keep those coming. If you don't have money to give right now, it's a hard time. There are a lot of purposes drawing our resources, and I get it. Just tell people about us. Forward links. We want to keep doing the things that we're doing, continuing to expand — and we can't do it without you. Thank you so much. We'll pick up again with Josh Hawley in the next episode, and until then, as always, please be well. Until we get a chance to talk again — thanks so much.