Did you see or read Sen. Josh Hawley’s address to the National Conservatism conference? You can read it here, and I urge you to do so. Only a senior Republican office holder who is in the Millennial generation (Hawley is 39), and who was politically formed after Reagan, could have given this kind of talk. Check out these excerpts:

The great divide of our time is not between Trump supporters and Trump opponents, or between suburban voters and rural ones, or between Red America and Blue America.

No, the great divide of our time is between the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society. And to answer the discontent of our time, we must end that divide. We must forge a new consensus.

We must recover and renew the dream of the republic.

Whoa. This Republican Senator is going to talk about class. More:

For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.

This class lives in the United States, but they identify as “citizens of the world.” They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.

And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.

Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.

On economics, this consensus favors globalization—closer & closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms. The boundaries between America and the rest of the world should fade and eventually vanish.

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And where has this left middle America?

With flat wages, with lost jobs, with declining investment and declining opportunity. We don’t make things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person without a fancy degree can build with his hands.

And small towns like the one where I grew up in middle Missouri struggle and disappear—and a way of life is lost.

And it’s not just the small towns that struggle.

Just about any American worker without a four-year college degree will have a hard time in the cosmopolitan economy.

Maybe that’s one reason why marriage rates among working class Americans are falling, why birth rates are falling, why life expectancy is falling.

All the while an epidemic of suicide and drug addiction ravages every sector, every age group, every geography of the working class.

Theodore Roosevelt once wrote that “the Roman Republic fell” when “the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, [and] who voted without reward according to his own convictions” ceased to exist. Our present-day leaders seem determined to repeat the experiment.

Is it any surprise that in the last half century, as our leaders have pursued a program the American middle does not espouse, does not support, and does not benefit from, that public confidence in American government has collapsed?

Is it any wonder that American voters regularly tells pollsters they feel unheard, disempowered and disrespected?

Because who now listens to the American middle? The cosmopolitan agenda has driven both Left and Right.

The Left champions multiculturalism and degrades our common identity. The Right celebrates hyper-globalization and promises that the market will make everything right in the end, eventually … perhaps.

In truth, neither political party has seemed much interested in the American middle for quite a long time. And neither has seemed much interested in the republic the middle sustains.

But the old political platforms have grown stale. And the old political truisms now ring hollow. The American people are demanding something different, and something better.

Read the whole thing. Marvel that these words were spoken by a Republican US Senator! I’ve been part of a number of private conversations these past three years in which conservatives speculate about who is going to lead conservatism after Trump. Nobody could come up with any names. Well, now we have one.

The liberal columnist Damon Linker is excited. He says that those on the left who picked out Hawley’s use of the word “cosmopolitan” as an anti-Semitic dog whistle are being silly — Hawley is identifying the same thing the left calls “neoliberalism” — and ignoring what is truly remarkable about the speech. Excerpts from Linker’s column:

If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren delivered those lines, no one would have thought twice. But coming from a Republican, it signals a remarkable — and heartening — shift of assumptions and priorities in a small-r republican direction.

Since Reagan, the Republican Party has been ideologically committed to advancing the interests of big business — even as, post-2008, public opinion across the spectrum has shifted in a more populist direction. One reason Trump gained traction in 2016 was that he seemed eager to prioritize the interests of working people, with his defense of entitlements and talk of providing health-care coverage for all, along with his promises to negotiate better trade deals. That turned out to be nonsense, as the clueless, floundering new president ceded control of the administration’s policy agenda to Paul Ryan, who first tried to gut people’s health insurance and then, when that failed, opted to pass a massive corporate tax cut. Once again, plutocrats were calling the shots — and they continue to do so with the administration’s current push to get the Affordable Care Act overturned in the courts.

By contrast, Hawley’s speech points to a post-Trump future in which the economic realignment Trump seemed poised to undertake actually gets going. It is fueled not by anti-Semitism or Trumpian racism and xenophobia but by a series of arguments grounded in the republican tradition going back to Aristotle. This tradition emphasizes the importance of fostering a strong, prosperous, independent, public-spirited middle class — and the danger of allowing a corrupt, oligarchic elite to grab too much political power.

Linker points to Hawley’s raving about Chris Arnade’s new book:

Finished Chris Arnade’s new book today. This is a very important, really excellent book. Hope every member of Congress will read it pic.twitter.com/bMaCrIBCFl

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 20, 2019

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Arnade is a political leftist who has endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president. His book is terrific, though. It’s a travelogue through poor and working class America, in which he spends time with people not like himself, and asks them about their troubles, and their hopes. Arnade finds the thing they all have in common — white, black, and Hispanic alike — is a craving for dignity. What makes the book such a powerful challenge to the way we think of politics in this country is that you don’t get to the end of it and think of a ten-point program that will restore what has been lost. Again, Arnade is a leftist, and he supports government intervention to better the lot of the poor. But Arnade is also experienced enough in talking to actual poor people to know that merely redistributing wealth is not going to restore families, communities, and dignity. You can’t buy the caritas that does that. The book is an intense challenge to the American leadership class of both left and right. Arnade doesn’t divide the world into left and right. He divides it into the haves and the have-nots, the “front row kids” and the “back row kids” from high school.

You can see why this left-wing book has captured the imagination of Sen. Hawley. And get this: Dignity was acquired and edited by Bria Sandford, the same Millennial editor who acquired and published The Benedict Option and my forthcoming book about soft totalitarianism for the conservative imprint she runs (n.b., my book will discuss big business, big tech, and elite institutions as being as much of a threat to liberty than big government). She’s got a vision for the next conservatism. Linker thinks this might have something to do with the strange fact that a book about class and poverty written by an Elizabeth Warren supporter has received relatively little attention in the liberal media:

Dignityhas received most of its initial review attention and praise from conservatives. That’s in part because it was published by Sentinel, the conservative imprint of Penguin Books. But to dismiss the laudatory response, including Hawley’s, as an expression of partisanship is to miss what’s most important about it. A conservative publisher, a wide range of conservative writers, and the conservative Republican senator from Missouri are all supporting a book that powerfully indicts economic policies pursued and defended by a long line of Republican presidents and lawmakers. (That many of those policies were also endorsed by Democrats doesn’t soften the point.)

That’s a big deal — and a dramatic shift that could upend the political spectrum as we know it.

Yes, please. And there’s this: Hawley is a social conservative, and that means he understands something that Democratic Party liberals do not and cannot: that a strong republic depends also on strong families and social bonds, not the radical individualism preached by today’s left. It has taken a long time — I wrote a book about this in 2006 — to get a Republican politician who grasped that economic liberalism (that is, free-market fundamentalism) and social liberalism (radical individualism) are two sides of the same coin. But now we have one. And Tucker Carlson, and J.D. Vance.

It’s a great time to be a conservative. Whatever else you can say about Donald Trump, he did his party and his country a service by clearing out all the Reaganite deadwood. As Daniel McCarthy wrote about the Nationalist Conservatism conference:

The point of the conference was not just publicity, and it was not to concoct a manifesto or some bullshit policy agenda — like the fraudulent balanced-budgets plans that movement conservative wonks habitually generate, and which the media pretend to take seriously when they’re fronted by a person like Paul Ryan, even though everyone knows they have no chance at all of being enacted — and that no voter could care less about. The mystique of policy is a religion in Washington, but real policies are not the result of blueprints or manifestos, they are the product of talent (or lack thereof) applied to circumstance. The achievement of this three-day event was to help the nationalist talent of the future coalesce. It’s only a beginning, but that in itself is remarkable at a time when conventional politics is at an end. And if there are no impossibly precise policy demands coming from these National Conservatives, they have made it quite clear what they are going to do in general: they are going to strike at the laws and cultural assumptions that permit the tech companies to amass excessive wealth and power; they are going to strike at the bastions of liberal ideology in higher education; they are going to support American industry for the sake of workers as well as national security; they are even going to adopt a more restrained foreign policy than the US has seen since the end of the Cold War.

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The old, post-Cold War order of weak borders, straitjacketed free-trade ideology, and endless war for utopian ideological objectives is rapidly failing, and what will replace it has already begun to arise. This week’s National Conservatism gathering was both a sign of that and a catalyst for the further transformation of the American right. Pundits who spent the last three days parsing the president’s tweets for racism are living in a bygone age when all the right could beg from the authorities that command our culture was acceptance. National Conservatives are not asking for acceptance, they are marshaling power.