He is, according to the liberal blogger Ed Kilgore of New York magazine, “the face of the post-Trump right”. And the iconoclastic Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley has won the admiration of some American Catholics with his strong stances on big tech, corporate power and economic populism. In June, for instance, Matthew Walther hailed him as “far and away the most interesting Republican elected official in the United States”.
Other commentators have noted that Hawley is the politician that best approximates the post-liberal moment in Catholic intellectual circles. “The closest the post-liberals have to a spokesman in the Senate is freshman Josh Hawley, who attends an Evangelical Presbyterian church,” wrote Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon, after noting that Catholics seem to be Hawley’s natural support base. “Not six months into his term, Hawley has already established himself as a social conservative unafraid of government power.”
