TAKING ON BIG TECH: "Winning the culture war against Big Tech lies within the power of families and communities; winning the political-economic war is in the province of government.".

• Author: Fischer, Carolyn
• Position: SOCIAL MEDIA

EARLY THIS YEAR, Sen. Josh Hawley (R.-Mo.) authored The Tyranny of Big Tech, which major tech corporations "did not want you to read"; in fact, their influence persuaded one of the nation's largest publishing houses to cancel publication of the book.

References to Sen. Hawley's concern about Big Tech's pervasive intrusion into private lives began to appear during his tenure as Missouri's attorney general: "Why Google Should Be Afraid of a Missouri Republican's Google Probe" appeared in Technica on Nov. 14,

2017, and "Hawley Launches Investigation into Facebook as Fallout over User Data Continues" in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 2,

2018. Shortly after Hawley entered the Senate in 2019, he and Sen. Edward Markey (D.-Mass.) introduced bipartisan legislation "To Stop Internet Companies from Spying on Children."

A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, Hawley had clerked for Judge Michael McConnell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts before serving Missouri as attorney general. Intensely dedicated to the study of antitrust litigation, Hawley authored Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness and dedicated a chapter in his latest book to Roosevelt's "war against the capitalist chieftains."

Hawley wants to succeed "where [Roosevelt's] generation of trust-busters failed." Hawley's fight to free his countrymen from Big Tech tyranny also has paternalistic motivation: he and his wife have three young children, a "homegrown laboratory" in which he has identified and, in his family, precluded negative effects of Big Tech on children.

In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley recounts that our nation's Founders were right to distrust and even fear the concentration of power--a "death sentence for the republic." They believed strength of the nation depended on common people who shared in self-government according to the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson considered working men and women the "most virtuous of citizens"; they celebrated hard work, independent enterprise, participation in government, and the pursuit of ordinary life. "This is what liberty was," Hawley stresses.

This ordinary life began to change abruptly at the beginning of the last century, when the wealthy elite of the Gilded Age gained unprecedented power with their vision of corporate liberalism, the precursor of Big Tech. These corporate giants, whom the press termed robber barons (suggesting both "opulence and rapacity"), sought to create massive personal fortunes to "improve" the republic with a new kind of economy and a "new ideology to go with it." They believed "economic concentration was inevitable . . . even necessary for progress"; independent production of the laboring class was "outmoded." They fostered an ideology that "bless[ed] business and concentrated power in the economy and government." To robber barons, liberty defined the "private space" they and the government they ran would leave to the common people.

On Feb. 19, 1902, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against John Pierpont Morgan Sr., the nation's most powerful, aggressive financier/industrialist. The government was challenging the...