To the surprise of leftist University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Professor Emeritus Harvey Kaye, he found himself concluding that Senator Josh Hawley had "thrown down the gauntlet to politicians, activists, and intellectuals of the left" in "hijacking America's radical-democratic story as he has" in reviewing the senator's The Tyranny of Big Tech. Quote:
I really looked forward to the fun of making sense of a radically titled work by a conservative, no, a reactionary, who not only decries the powers and profits of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Apple, but also proposes breaking them up.
I figured the only hard part would be to fit in all the pieces: Hawley's rightwing politics, his well-known political ambitions, his outrageous efforts to bolster Trump's coup attempt, his book's publishing story, and of course, what he had to say.
I was wrong. It was not fun, it was unnerving. Not simply because I kept encountering sympathetic historical references to strikes and campaigns that I never anticipated in a book by a rightwing politician, but even more so because in Hawley's penultimate chapter I ran right into—boom—paragraphs that truly threw me for a loop. Three paragraphs that rendered both a narrative of America's democratic promise, imperative, and struggles and a call for democratic action which I could readily imagine having written myself.
He writes of a radical-democratic class-struggle narrative that politicians such as socialist Bernie Sanders and progressive Elizabeth Warren, indeed, every self-professed progressive Democrat, should have been articulating and cultivating for years, but, to my persistent exasperation and the left's persistent failings, had not. And yet, hell, here was Josh Hawley doing so.
Consider the paragraphs...
