The point of observing that people like Josh Hawley are doing faux economic populism is not that they are *sincere*; it's that, because most of the Democratic Party so nakedly disdains working people, such rhetoric effectively launders and masks the GOP's plutocratic extremism

(A little faux populism goes a long way for the GOP, precisely because the Democratic Party spends so much energy fighting off its own left flank.)

If the Democratic party leadership wasn't so vigorously anti-populist, then the Josh Hawley's would get zero mileage out of populism minstrelsy. But... they are, so here we are

tl;dr of this thread: politics are weird when most voters are workers but you have a two party system in which both parties see "rich people" as their constituency