It's in the Code ep 187: “It’s Important Work—As Long As Someone Else Does It”
Summary
Josh Hawley tells us that blue-collar and manual labor are the domains of true masculinity. He tells us that they are the path to freedom, and meaning, and purpose. He tells us that men have no social value if they do not undertake this kind of work. But is any of this true? Does this kind of work bring us the freedom he claims? Is he really the voice of “working men?” Or is he another elitist who benefits from the exploitation of workers while masquerading as a liberator? Dan argues that this is the real story. Listen to this week’s episode to find out why.Transcript
Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code. This is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, your host, pleased to be with you as always. And as always, want to say thank you for listening, thank you for taking the time to be here with us as we do this. And as always, want to invite you to reach out to me. Best way: Daniel Miller SWAJ, danielmillerswaj@gmail.com, if you've got thoughts, comments, feedback. Also do Office Hours live once a month. You can join me there in Discord. We have our live events, supplemental episodes once a month. Take any questions that you might have if you want to bring up things about this series and questions and ideas. You can send them to me directly. And also, we are coming up on the end of the current series, looking forward to a series on questions I was not allowed to ask in church, or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church. Continue to ask your feedback on that. Email me those questions. What were the questions that you asked that, I don't know, that made people uncomfortable, or they got you in trouble, or maybe they're the reason that you left if you did leave, or maybe the reason you're thinking about that, whatever those are, put "questions I wasn't supposed to ask" or "questions I wasn't allowed to ask" or something like that in the subject line. That'll let me know that those are there. Getting some great questions from folks and looking forward to diving into that in due course.
In the meantime, diving into this episode. And this week, we are concluding our discussion of chapter eight of Senator Josh Hawley's book Manhood. And that chapter is focused on the fourth of the roles he believes men are called to play as men. He has this vision that men as men are called to play these uniquely masculine roles where we express and develop the masculine virtues that will save America. And we're looking at the fourth of those roles we have been for a while.
The focus of the chapter and the name of this role is "man as builder." The idea of man as builder—we've talked about this—he's barely had anything to actually say about building. It's a weird thing. I don't know why he doesn't just say worker, because his point throughout has been that men are called to work. And specifically, we've talked about this, that men are called to work in blue collar professions, or sort of related to that, like manual labor, to do things with their hands, to produce things, what have you. And he has said that this kind of work—and he implies that only this kind of work, and that's going to be important—that this kind of work gives men meaning, both for themselves and to society. Our social value as men comes from doing this. Our meaning for ourselves comes from this kind of work, this kind of labor.
And if you've been listening, you know I've given my take on several issues related to this perspective of his. There is the gaslighting by Hawley, and I think the populist wing of the GOP and the broader MAGA movement, but the gaslighting that positions people like him and the MAGA movement and Donald Trump and what have you, positions them as sort of pro-worker, despite the fact that the GOP is the party that has absolutely gutted blue collar America for decades. And in that vein, I've had a lot to say about the so-called neoliberal economic theories that underlie that and are a part of Josh Hawley's worldview, that have been part of the Republican right for decades.
And one of the issues that stands out so far that we've talked about—I haven't used this term, but there's a scholar I really like who talks about neoliberalism, refers to this notion of what she calls homo economicus. In other words, neoliberalism reduces human beings to their productive economic capacity. Their value as humans is not them as humans or the people that they are or anything like that. It is just on their productive value that it reduces us to that. And that is very much the vision of Josh Hawley when he's going to say that work is what gives men value and worth and significance and makes them fit to be fathers and husbands and so forth. Everything about us comes down to work. And as he's done before, he takes that neoliberal capitalist ideology, and he feeds it into the Bible, and then sort of fishes it back out so he can say, "Oh, this isn't neoliberalism. It's not a political ideology. It's not an economic theory. This is just the Bible"—what I've called the sort of biblical laundering that he does for his ideas.
So we've talked about all of that, and that's a lot. Okay, that's a lot. But I have one more overarching issue that I need to get into before we move on from this chapter. And believe me, I am ready to move on from this chapter. But what I want to talk about is the blatant hypocrisy and elitism that Hawley gets to in this chapter and that everyone like him on the right also holds to. I've said from the beginning, we're looking at Hawley precisely because he's not unique. He's not special. The views he puts forward, they're not unique to him. They're not Josh Hawley's views. He is very much a window into discourses on the contemporary right in the contemporary MAGA movement of which he is a card-carrying member. And that is absolutely true here. And I want to highlight this—specifically the hypocrisy and elitism.
So diving into this: in this chapter, Hawley has, as he does for everything, every social ill he identifies is the fault of liberals. Always. That's how it always works for Hawley. So he has laid the blame for the decline of the working classes, the difficulty of making a living by undertaking a working class occupation or a physical labor occupation, the shifts in the American economy that require that and so on—he has blamed all of that on liberals. Okay. But here's the thing: he's also laid it at the feet of the elite liberals and the elite. That's that populist discourse that he has, that he is somehow the voice of the common people.
But here's the thing: Hawley is the elite, and he is the voice of the elite class that benefits from all of these shifts that he decries, from the gutting of blue collar America, from the shifts in the American economy. All of that—he benefits from that. He is part of the elite that benefits from that. And he is also the voice of an elite class that needs more Americans to work in the jobs and occupations that people like him simply won't. They won't do that kind of work, and they need a mass of Americans who will.
So I want to get into this. I want to try to show how Hawley is an elitist and how he's a hypocrite in what he says. So I mean, he talks a good game about blue collar work. If you read him and you didn't know anything about American economic history or the economic history of manufacturing in particular, or the role played by political figures on the right, then maybe what he's saying would be kind of compelling. But if you know any of that history, then it's farcical. It's absolutely insulting. This is gaslighting writ large.
But just think about this: think about Josh Hawley and what you know about him and his life and his family and his kids and so forth. And think about the people in his cabinet that he supported with Donald Trump and continues to do so. It's headed by an oligarchic cabinet full of billionaires who've all made their fortunes on the backs of others and a do-nothing Republican Congress that is happy to not do anything on a daily basis, to not work, to not legislate, to simply abdicate their right and their responsibility to the executive branch.
And let's think about this: Do you think that all of those GOP politicians are directing their kids to take any and every form of work open to them? Do you think that they're telling their kids, their young men, "All work is equal, all work is virtuous, all work defines you as a man. You're only a man if you do hard labor or blue collar work"? You think that? No. Their kids are not going to be wage earners. Their kids are going to get degrees from those fancy colleges that they all just magically get into, no matter what their grades are like, what kind of person they are—they all manage to get in. They're going to run the companies and sit on the boards to collect the money earned by others. That's their lot in life. They will reproduce that elite structure. That's their role. All the while, their parents will stand up and tell the rest of us that we should be happy doing the work that they won't do, for wages they refuse to earn, to give up rights that they demand, and to take our place.
So the work that Hawley promotes, he says is absolutely central to his vision of manhood—again, as long as somebody else does it. As long as it doesn't have to be him or his cronies or all the people on the right. Nope. As long as it's not them. And I recognize there are a lot of people who support Josh Hawley and the MAGA movement who do exactly that kind of labor, and that is a much bigger question—the question of why. And the reason why it's such a motivating question for me is exactly the kind of considerations we have here, that the people preaching to them about the virtues of work are people who will never work and will never appreciate them and whose vision of society is built on their economic exploitation.
As I say, send the emails, come to Office Hours, come to the live events. I'd love to talk about that more. Hawley can say whatever he wants about people on the left, but he's the one who thinks he's too good for men's work as he defines it.
All of which raises a pretty awkward question for Hawley. If I don't think I'm ever going to have the chance to meet Josh Hawley, but if I did, and he wanted to sit and talk about masculinity or work or something, the question I might ask him is: What does it mean that he, who wants to instruct us on manhood, doesn't actually do manly work? What does it say about Josh Hawley's manhood, or manliness within his own frame of reference, if he doesn't do the kind of work that he says gives men value and worth, and that men don't have social value and worth if they're not doing it? I'll let that question hang there. You can fill that in any way you like, but it's a question.
For my part, I'm done with this chapter. This chapter, I've said, gets under my skin in a lot of ways. I'm done with it. There's more we could say, but we're going to move on before I lose my mind, before I make all of you lose your mind. So next episode—before I lose my mind, and then I think about next episode, I'll lose my mind again—we're going to get into Hawley's fifth, it's his second to last role that men play. And wait for it, folks. We've been waiting for it. I've been waiting for it. If you know anything about the discourses of the right and Christianity, you should be waiting for it. Here it is: the second to last role that men are called to play is that of King. So all these workers, they're also kings. So we'll talk about that. We'll find out what Josh Hawley thinks about masculinity and kingship in the next chapter.
I can't wait. Just thrilled, so excited to learn more from Josh Hawley. If you can't pick up on the sarcasm there, please know that it is there.
In the meantime, going to call it a day. I want to thank you again for listening. I say this all the time, and I mean it: I'm aware that every half hour, every hour, every 10 minutes you spend listening to Straight White American Jesus or watching us on YouTube, it's time you could be spending doing something else. We value that so much. Thank you for your support. We do a lot of things trying to continue expanding what we do. We can only do that with your help. So thank you, in particular, to subscribers and others who have helped us financially to do that. Please, if you're in a position to consider doing that, if you find what we do to be important or significant, I would ask you to consider doing that. And if not, just keep listening and tell people and like us and follow us and tell people about us. We want to keep doing this. We want to keep doing what it is that is important and helpful to you at a time that we think it's important to be doing it. So thank you. Please help us do that.
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