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When Josh Hawley it was the last of the titles, it was for that pioneer January 6 Effort to challenge Joe Biden’s Electoral University certificate of victory General Law theories behind the obstacles were special and contradictory; it was a very cynical effort. And in a year The tyranny of high technology, Hawley has made a very cynical book. The Missouri senator raises valuable concerns about the technology industry and proposes solutions that are worth taking seriously. But he inserts these ideas into a broader argument that is so misleading as to question the whole project.
Hawley’s key critiques of Silicon Valley will be familiar to anyone who has seen them The social dilemma On Netflix: Smartphones are addictive. Behavioral advertising is manipulative. Social media is bad for children’s mental health. The largest tech companies spend tens of millions of dollars together to buy Washington’s influence. Facebook, Google and Twitter have too much power in communication. And he says they use them to discriminate against conservatives. (Also, Simon & Schuster, the book’s original publisher, threw Hawley out after the Capitol riots – Hawley writes evidence of America trying to silence that evidence. Eventually, the book found a home with Regnery Publishing, a conservative remnant).
The moment Hawley’s book deviates from the standard anti-technology treatise tries to link the moment to a major theory of American political history. According to Hawley, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are direct ideological descendants of the barons of the original Golden Age thieves. Their dominance is the culmination of what he calls “corporate liberalism,” and he writes that states and big business conspire to deny ordinary man his independence and self-government. According to Hawley, corporate liberalism entered the two major political parties a century ago, and today, “the Big Tech and the Big Government want to spread their influence to all areas of American life.”
And so Hawley spends a large part of the book recounting these historical roots. The hero of his narrative is Theodore Roosevelt, whom Hawley sees as the champion of the small Republican tradition that has come from the nation’s founding. “He believed that freedom depended on the independence of the common man and his ability to participate in self-government,” Hawley wrote. “He believed that concentrations of wealth and power threatened people’s control and therefore freedom.” Roosevelt established good faith by placing a successful case against JP Morgan’s financial monopoly in 1904. But his Republican outlook saw its tragic demise in the 1912 election, when Roosevelt lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Hawley’s “nation’s first major liberal corporation.” . Instead of Roosevelt defending the common man, Wilson sided with the government with corporate aristocratic elites. Once in office, he put an end to the anti-monopoly movement, instead of achieving friendly cooperation with big business. “This was the settlement of the Wilsonians, who would dominate American politics and political economics in the century, and the triumph of corporate liberalism that would reach its apotheosis with Big Tech,” Hawley wrote.
It’s an interesting story, and Hawley tells it well. The problem is that it distorts almost every important thing. In the 1912 election, it was Roosevelt, not Wilson, who advocated cooperation between the government and business elites. After an accident with Morgan in 1904, Roosevelt decided that “good” trusts were okay while he managed to regulate them. This arrangement was much more pleasing to the magnates. George Perkins, Morgan’s partner in the US Steel Company, was the leader and chief financier of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in the 1912 campaign. Morgan himself give More than $ 4 million in Roosevelt’s 1904 re-election offer today. Hawley does not mention these pleasant relationships.
Wilson, on the other hand, was the real candidate against the monopoly in 1912. His “New Freedom” platform was heavily influenced by Louis Brandeis, who was generally considered the godfather of monopoly; as president, Wilson would raise Brandeis to the Supreme Court (a connection Hawley briefly acknowledges). To represent Wilson as a pro-business candidate, Hawley has taken his words out of context in the opposite direction of their true meaning. He cited a speech, for example, as Wilson said, saying “big business is certainly largely necessary and natural.” But you follow the footnote, you will know that it is part of an argument against monopolies. “What most of us are struggling with is breaking that partnership between big business and the government,” Wilson said. “I fully defend every progressive position, according to the proposal that private monopoly is indefensible and unbearable.”
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