Josh Hawley Takes ‘Aristocratic Elite’ To Task in Maiden Senate Speech

Missouri’s new US Senator Josh Hawley used his first speech on the floor of the U.S Senate to take the plutocratic political elite to task, offering a vision for populists and nationalists in the Republican Party to take up the mantle of working and middle class Americans.

Hawley’s speech called out America’s corrupt political elites- pointing out the shameless disloyalty of America’s ruling economic and political class towards the broader American people.

“Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite. Big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world.”

The former Missouri Attorney General brought up the example of struggling communities his home state, pointing out the broader trend of well-paying jobs moving out of the country and to the coasts as traditional working-class industry has declined in the American heartland. As wealth and opportunities for a decent career have been siphoned to big cities and sent out of the country, many Americans from states like Missouri have found it increasingly difficult to sustain a quality of life their parents and grandparents had enjoyed.

Hawley’s remarks represent a populist viewpoint rarely heard from in the U.S Senate, previously reiterated by Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions and Arkansas’ Tom Cotton. Hawley’s vision of a people’s conservatism- which places American communities, ways of life, and people as the most precious resources worthy of conservation- stands in stark contrast to the “free market” fundamentalism of the GOP establishment, which places the interests of massive global corporations, shareholders, and the neoliberal elite over that of the American people.

“The message that Washington has sent our society is loud and clear- our elites are the people who matter, and those who aspire to join them. Everyone else is unimportant and backwards. And millions of American are left with the sense that the people who run this country view them with nothing but contempt, and value them as nothing but consumers.”

Watch Senator Hawley’s speech here: