Trump and Monopoly Power — A Note from Barry Lynn
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| Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we look at the lessons of the U.S. presidential election, and some next steps. We also explore how the EU’s AI strategy might concentrate even more power in the hands of Big Tech. |
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Trump and Monopoly Power — A Note from Barry Lynn | |
Dear Friends,
President Trump won Tuesday’s presidential elections, and it’s hard to spin any silver lining from the results. After 40 years of destructive pro-monopoly policy by Democratic and Republican administrations, President Biden radical strengthening of antimonopoly enforcement policy in 2021 put us on track to rebuild our democracy and prosperity. Now it appears likely President-elect Trump will stride back into the Oval Office hand in hand with some of the most powerful corporate lords in history.
As you know, our team at Open Markets pioneered the analysis, strategy, and narrative behind the antimonopoly movement and Biden’s antimonopoly revolution (as I wrote about recently on the cover of Harper’s). We are proud of the many great pro-democracy victories we won over the years. We are proud to have worked closely with people from across the political spectrum and around the world.
I’d be lying if I told you that we have already devised a plan for the next stage in this fight. But we are working on it, and we’ll soon have news to share. Meanwhile, I want to emphasize two points.
First, it’s vital to take the right lessons from this loss. Yes, there are many reasons the Harris campaign fell short. But biggest was their failure to wield their most potent weapon. Over the last four years the Biden-Harris team revolutionized how we regulate corporate power and behavior, in ways designed specifically to make the American economy more fair, open, inclusive, sustainable, and dynamic. This was a great political victory. It was also a great moral victory.
Yet the Harris campaign chose not to sing of these battles on behalf of the American people, even when repeatedly challenged to support the work of one of America’s great defenders of democracy, Lina Khan. This made it a lot harder for the Vice President to connect with voters still outraged by 40 years of being bullied, bankrupted, and belittled by the monopolists who still control vast swaths of America’s political economy.
This is not just me talking. As my friend Frank Foer reported yesterday in The Atlantic, much of President Biden’s team is saying the same thing.
Second, we still have many levers of real power in our hands. This includes our state governments, which is where we and our allies first developed many of the antimonopoly cases now working their way through Federal courts. It also includes the European Union and the nation-states of Europe, where Open Markets has already played a leading role in awakening lawmakers and policymakers to the true threats posed by concentrated power and control.
My hope is that one day soon we’ll look back at these dark days as the time when we relearned the true story of American democracy. In the four years since President Biden took office, the old pro-monopoly wing of the Democratic Party has waged a steady under-the-radar war against his policies. One result is that the party — as a whole — never fully embraced its most important achievement since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And thus we failed to distill Biden’s revolution into a narrative of American purpose and promise simple enough to win the support of most of the American people.
Fix that, and the future is still ours.
For more information and to subscribe to Barry Lynn’s newsletter, go to: Open Markets Institute