Capitol Reflecting Pool – Prior to Grant Memorial Restoration. January 30, 2012. Photo courtesy of the US Capitol
In his maiden speech in the Senate, Missouri’s Josh Hawley took a hard stand for the people of Main Street, America. Hawley laid out his vision of a society that would allow America’s heartland to thrive, with strong families, decent work, and flourishing small towns. He said (abridged):
I come from a town called Lexington, Missouri. It’s a small place, but a proud one. It’s a place where people wake early and work late to make a life for themselves and their children. It’s a place where people value honesty and gumption and life’s simple pleasures: a fine morning in a deer stand, reading to the kids before bed, Sunday dinner at Mom’s.
The United States is unique in history as a republic governed not by a select elite, but by the working man and woman
It’s time to face the facts. Over the last forty years, our economy has worked best for those at the top: the wealthy, the well-educated. If you have a job in Silicon Valley or an expensive and prestigious degree, this economy has worked for you.
And Washington has focused on how to get more people to join this elite.
But if you want a life built around the place where you grew up, if your ambition is not to start a tech business but to join the family business, to serve in the PTA or in your local church, well, you’re told that you’re not a success. And you’re told that you’re on your own.
But in places like the one where I grew up, in middle Missouri, good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on are going away.
The jobs go overseas or south of the border or to cities on the coasts. And once-vibrant towns decline, taking with them the network of schools and neighborhoods and churches that make up middle class life.
Fewer young people are getting married or starting families.
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.
They operate businesses or run universities here, but their primary loyalty is to their own agenda for a more unified, progressive—and profitable—global order.
We need a society that offers rewarding work for every worker who wants it, wherever she is from, whatever degree he might have, whether their ambition is to start a business or to start a family.
We need a society that will allow towns and neighborhoods to flourish across the great heartland of this country, not just in the mega-cities of the coasts.
We need a society that puts American workers first, that prioritizes them over cheap goods from abroad, and offers them the chance to better their station.
We need a politics that prioritizes strong marriages and encourages strong families.
We need strong schools and churches and co-ops.
That’s the promise of the American revolution. And we will renew it for our day.
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