It's in the Code ep 187: “It’s Important Work—As Long As Someone Else Does It”
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.
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Protecting Our Financial Future00:10:29
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code series as part of the podcast, straight white American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lamar 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, Danny Miller swag, Daniel Miller SWAJ at 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, where 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 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 professionals.
Professions are 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 they're 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 refers to, talks about neoliberalism, refers to this notion of what she calls homo economicus.
That 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, no, this isn't neoliberalism.
It's not.
A political ideology.
It's not an economic theory.
This is just the Bible that 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 are not unique to him.
They're not Josh Hawley's views.
He is very much a window into discourses on the contemporary right and 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 as the fault of liberals.
Always.
That's how it always works for Holly.
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 Holly 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 Holly is an elitist and how he's a hypocrite and 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 what Republicans have said about jobs and work for the last 50 years, it would sound pretty good.
He talks a good game about blue collar work and he leans a lot on his family narratives, as he has throughout the book.
So, he's talked about one of his grandfathers who was a homesteading farmer.
That was in an earlier chapter.
So, you know, he's like Adam.
Yay, he's a Farmer, and he's working with his hands and he's productive.
He talks in this chapter about his other grandfather who worked in a storefront, JCPenney's, but also as a line cook in a cafe for a period of time.
And he talks about the value of work.
And more specifically, he talks about and affirms the value of any and all work.
And again, he talks a good game.
It's pitched as all work is valuable.
We shouldn't look down on people who don't do certain kinds of work or whatever.
And that sounds fine.
He insists that work as such, Again, as long as it's blue collar work that produces something tangible, but that all work is inherently virtuous and it gives value to the men who undertake it.
And he mocks those who pass up particular kinds of work because they're too hard or beneath them or so forth.
He mocks them.
Anybody who would not do that kind of work on the grounds that it's not fulfilling enough or it's too difficult or whatever.
And as we discussed in a previous episode, he also mocks the notion of limiting work to a 40 hour work week.
People who would say, that's too much.
I only want to work 40 hours a week or I want work life balance.
He mocks that notion.
So here's the kind of profile that he gives to man's work, to men's work, to masculine work.
It's blue collar or manual in nature.
Men should be willing to do any kind of that work that they are offered.
And men should be willing to do anything necessary to undertake this work, as many hours as it takes, as many days a week as it takes for whatever is offered.
He has mocked the idea that somebody would walk away from that kind of work because the compensation is bad or the days are bad or anything like that.
Nope, he's mocked that.
And here's the real kicker, and this is the first point that I really want to bring up that all of this is leading to about Holly's discourse here.
He presents this vision of work as a vision of men's liberation.
He argues that when men don't work, they're reduced to dependence.
And of course, there's truth to that.
Fine.
And dependence, he tells us, makes men servile and therefore, I guess, less manly.
He says that.
And again, fine.
Servility Disguised As Freedom00:15:24
If you have to be dependent, if you don't have a choice but dependence, if you're reduced to dependence, you're servile.
Okay.
If that's the way you want to do it.
Personal independence, he tells us, is the condition for personal liberty.
So, how do you get personal independence?
You work.
And that's the idea.
He says when men work, they are free.
And if you refuse to work, he always has this assumption that men who aren't working are refusing to work.
Because again, they should take any job that's offered, anything that's on the table.
Sweeping floors for minimum wage, that's the job that's there.
That's the job you should take.
Can't live off of it?
Well, you know, that's too bad.
You should just work harder.
Maybe get two or three jobs.
You'll be fine.
You'll be fine, is the logic.
If you refuse to work, you are refusing freedom.
And that can sound okay.
I get it.
I do.
Like, if you work, you are not servile in the same way, and so on.
And certainly, dependence is servility.
Okay.
Okay.
We could go with that.
But he also says this I want you to listen.
You can't be free if someone else controls your livelihood.
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I'm going to say that again.
You can't be free if someone else controls your livelihood.
See, this is where his ideology really comes out because here's why most of the kinds of work that he's describing, the virtues of which he's extolling, The work that he's saying men should and must do to be real men, the work that he's saying they deny their manhood if they don't do, it's not liberative in the sense he's describing it.
You can't be free if someone else controls your livelihood.
In most of the cases that he's talking about, the kind of work he's saying is real man's work, you don't control your own livelihood.
In true conservative economic fashion, the way he's talking here, he's talking like a factory owner or a stockholder.
Or an upper management person.
He's not talking like a worker.
Now, what do I mean by that?
What I mean is exactly this most of the work he describes is not quote unquote liberative.
Most blue collar workers are wage earners who do not control their own livelihoods.
And anybody listening or anybody familiar with this knows that that is not how most wage earning works.
Only someone who has never actually worked could possibly think something like this.
Only somebody who has never been subject to the whims of markets.
To the whims of only counting as a line item on a business spreadsheet, to the precarity of being a cost to a company that can be cut at any time, could possibly suggest that everyone who undertakes blue collar work is free or controls his livelihood.
It's a myth.
So, one reason for the decline in blue collar manual labor in the US, it's not that men have become less manly, and it isn't that people on the left have told them that they shouldn't do it.
It's that the economic policies championed by people like Holly have reduced so many of these kinds of jobs to a form of wage slavery, far from being liberatory.
You were enslaved by them.
They have ensured that workers who do that kind of work can't earn a living wage, they can't afford health care.
And God forbid, That you have a national health care service, you provide health care for the people in your country.
We can't have that.
Nope.
They have ensured that they can't bargain collectively for their rights, that they can't band together and demand equal rights and better pay and better benefits.
They've ensured that none of that can happen.
And then Holly wants to tell us that those men are actually free.
They're free, again, so long as they're willing to work any hours dictated for them to the detriment of the rest of their lives.
To the detriment of their health, to the detriment of their rights, to the detriment, interestingly, of their families.
You don't have to be a genius to know if you're having to work 80 hours a week to try to get by economically, you don't get to spend a lot of time with your family.
And I can't help but wonder what Josh Holly would do with the contradiction of that reality and the calling of men to be good fathers and husbands.
Remember, those are the first two roles that he plays out.
So, this notion that if you work, you're free.
Don't fit at all with what he's describing as men's labor.
So, who is free?
Who is free in this scenario?
It's not the wage earners.
It's not the workers.
It's the managers.
It's the supervisors.
It's the business or factory owners.
It's the boards of directors.
It's all the white collar people who don't do the work.
They are the ones who stand back and direct the work of others while all of their profits are funneled upwards to them.
Those are the ones.
Who are freed through the labor of others.
That's Josh Hawley's vision of America.
Those are the people who exercise control over their own livelihoods, but not just their own, but all the people working under them.
All the people that Josh Hawley wants us to think are free because they're working, they are subject to the whims of those people who are not blue collar and are not down in the trenches doing physical labor.
Hawley doesn't speak for the workers, he speaks for the elite.
That's who Josh Hawley is.
He speaks for everybody who reaps the profits off the backs of the workers.
And I'm going to circle back around to it.
It's why he and his party and everybody like him have opposed organized labor for decades.
They have opposed any kind of economic model that would say the people who do the work should earn their share of the profits of that work.
That's Josh Hawley.
And again, it's not unique to him.
It's a vision of society that has been championed by the right, often explicitly, for decades.
A vision of a society that is governed by economic elites, served by an economy that benefits them through the exploitation of people who actually work for a living.
That's the ideology of dismantling organized labor and calling it the right to work.
That's the ideology of creating the so called gig economy where people have to work multiple jobs while being denied the status of employees and all the rights of employees.
And I'm looking at you, Uber.
They're being denied that status and you call it work freedom or work flexibility.
I'm sure you've seen them too.
I get so many ads from those kinds of companies talking about, hey, make some extra money, a little work freedom, work freedom, work freedom.
It's not freedom, it's servility.
That's what they're driving.
That's the economy they have built.
And what the right wants is a society that is run by elites and served by workers who have no choice but to work for them, by workers who are reduced to economic dependence upon those elites.
And Josh Hawley wants to call that economic dependence freedom.
That's his vision of society.
And it is masked in all of his talk of freedom, a discourse that is common on the right, as I just said freedom to work, work flexibility, what have you.
It's a society where the masses are reduced to wage slavery and a life of perpetual precarity, where they can lose their livelihood in an instant, serving the elites that people like Holly believe are the true producers in society.
Josh Holly, you want to talk about the crisis of work among American men and why lots of American men aren't seeking work?
It's not that they're lazy, it's not that they're watching pornography, it's not that the left is telling them it's below them, it's because they see.
But there's just no reason to do it.
The costs outweigh the benefits.
They see it, they know it, and you can't hide it.
So, Holly's vision is actually a vision for the economic elites that masquerades as a vision for working men, for men doing manly work.
That's the first point.
It brings me to the second point that stands out to me.
And this is probably obvious to everybody who's been listening.
And I've gotten emails where people are like, what about this?
We're getting there, and here it is.
Holly doesn't do this kind of work.
Next time you hear somebody telling you, so hear me.
I don't predominantly do this kind of work either.
I do have blue collar things that I do in my life.
That's a sort of a side thing for me.
That exists.
But I'm not claiming to have a vision into this life or to live there.
I have nothing but respect for people who do blue collar work.
This is not about saying that people shouldn't do that.
It's about saying that you're only masculine if you do.
That's the story he's telling.
And that makes him a hypocrite because guess what, Josh Hawley?
You don't do that.
For him, it's a vision of masculine work as long as someone else does it.
It's good work, it's real work, it's manly work, as long as I don't have to do it.
That's what Josh Hawley is thinking.
We know why Josh Hawley has to tell us stories about.
His grandparents and his relatives working.
It's because he doesn't have any stories of his own.
He can't tell us about laying concrete or training horses or plowing fields or being a cook or whatever in a cafe because he doesn't have those stories.
He's got all the things about this is what men do, but it's not what Josh Hawley does.
He has the gall to mock liberals who think people need high priced degrees from fancy colleges.
That's what he says.
He's the Yale educated elite who has never produced anything concrete in his life.
The lawyer, later attorney general, later U.S. Senator, he's not a producer, he's not a worker, he's not a manual laborer, he's not blue collar.
And we know that isn't just Holly.
This is one of the great contradictions or ironies that I literally, for reasons we could get into, technical reasons I think will be studied for a long time, is why the MAGA movement has resonated so much with blue collar workers.
It's a movement that loves to tell this story about America and masculinity, but it's a movement headed by a president who has never done a day's work in his life.
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 that 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 Holly 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 Holly 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.
Holly 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 Holly.
I don't think I'm ever going to have the chance to meet Josh Holly, 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 Holly'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?
So, 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, God, it 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 Holly's fifth.
It's his second to last role that men play.
Let The Question Hang00:01:45
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 Holly 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, I'm 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 spent doing something else.
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Please help us do that.
And as always, just again, I'd love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller swag, danielmiller, s w a j at gmail.com.
Let me know what you think.
Give me your ideas, your arguments, your feedback.
And if there were questions you weren't supposed to ask in church, I can't wait to hear them.
As always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.