For the last few weeks, I’ve been mulling over a question that I think will bedevil all of us in the antimonopoly space for years, perhaps decades. Antimonopoly policy is immensely popular, and there hasn’t been an administration as aggressive on antitrust in our lifetimes as there was under Joe Biden. Yet, voters soundly rejected his successor, Kamala Harris, and thrashed the party in power. And while antimonopoly politics sits uneasily in the Democratic Party, that is where it sits. Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, and Jonathan Kanter will be out of power soon.
So what happened? And why did Democrats lose so badly? I don’t think the answer is simple, nor is it right to characterize the problem as solely one involving the Democratic Party. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, voters have voted against the incumbent party. If you look at the recriminations among Democrats, they reveal, unwittingly, a broad theme that I’ve noticed with roots that go back to the middle of the 20th century. And while these observations are focused on Democrats, people on the right will recognize in their institutions a similar set of challenges.
On a surface level, the recriminations among Democratic Party officials are what you can see by turning on any cable news channel or reading a mainstream media source. There are five main arguments. The first is corruption within the campaigning apparatus. The New York Times had a discussion of how Kamala Harris blew through $1.5 billion in 15 weeks, which includes large payments to Oprah and various celebrities and opaque commissions for media consultants. Another line of thought is Harris’ messaging ignored economics due to wealthy insiders having too much influence over a campaign. A third argument is that socially liberal or centrist nonprofits set an agenda for Democrats that was out of step with the public. Harris should have done more or less on immigration, crime, trans rights, corporate power, et al. A fourth critique is that Biden failed on the economy, and Harris couldn’t have won no matter what she did. And a fifth angle is that Harris herself was a flawed candidate. Some of these implicate competition policy, some don’t.
Elections aren’t my area of expertise, so I won’t speculate, though it’s notable a number of politicians focused on economically populist messaging did win and/or outperform the top of the ticket. “In Western PA, we saw decades of bad trade policy, stuff pushed by Wall Street to strip us for parts,” said Rep. Chris DeLuzio (D-Pa.), who dramatically over-performed in his district.
But as I watch the angry back and forth, and more broadly the institutional actors who were rejected by voters, I find a curious dynamic that explains far more than any tactical mistake. From local field organizers to the most prestigious people in the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, all seem to feel powerless. For instance, most insiders felt Joe Biden was far too old to win reelection, but did not feel able to act or say anything when it mattered. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and Obama indicated they knew Harris was a bad candidate, but holding an open process to find a new one was, in Pelosi’s words, “impossible.”
And it’s not just an electoral problem; it goes back to governing. It’s not that Democrats didn’t know the core problem they faced among voters. The main legislative effort they passed in 2022 was titled “The Inflation Reduction Act.” They knew that people were mad about inflation, hence the title. But did it actually do much about inflation? No. And they knew that too. It was a prebaked set of solutions, and they would have applied it to any problem. They knew they should do something about costs, but, well, there was just no way to do anything but ride off the cliff with everyone else.
In other words, there is a cult of learned helplessness at the core of most American institutions, one that Trump punctured by appearing to be a man of action. And the Democratic Party in 2024, with its associated law firms, think tanks, elected officials, donors, and media outlets, was rejected by voters precisely because the core value on the left, center, and right is about embracing powerlessness. This pervasive belief has an intellectual and political origin and it conflicts directly with the antimonopoly framework.
I’ve seen this learned helplessness in most institutions I’ve dealt with. I was a Congressional staffer during the financial crisis. In late 2008, many of us were eager to see what we could do to fix the banking system and the country, as Obama and the Democrats had immense political capital to reshape the economy. But over the next year, during the crafting of the Dodd-Frank legislation, it became clear that our political leaders didn’t really think solving anything was possible. Fellow Congressional staff would sometimes point out various problems we hadn’t addressed. After a while, a friend of mine started to cynically joke, “Yeah, someone should do something about that.”
Everyone knew, even close advisers to Barney Frank, that our financial reform law, Dodd-Frank, didn’t fix much. It didn’t stop the gruesome foreclosure crisis. It certainly didn’t block bailouts, which was the point of the law. There was 15 years of busywork and compliance nonsense imposed by Dodd-Frank to ensure the banking system was strong enough to stand without bailouts, but of course, in 2023, the Fed immediately bailed out Silicon Valley Bank.
And yet, what was astonishing is no one felt they had any choice but to pass Dodd-Frank and declare victory. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and a small circle of populists made a critique of this approach. But it wasn’t a lefty argument, though it was characterized that way, it was mostly an argument of, “Hey you can do more stuff, you should.” Columnist Ezra Klein, among others, provided the justification for doing nothing, saying that those who thought the President was powerful fell prey to the “Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency,” imagining Obama unrealistically as a superhero who could implement a domestic agenda. It still shocks me that people argued, with a straight face, that Obama’s just the President, what can he do anyway? But that was key to Trump’s appeal, he just appeared to do stuff when no one else can.
This dynamic is also key to really understanding why we allow monopolies to run our society. While there are a bunch of debates about the right standard for antitrust, consumer welfare or otherwise, the real problem has always been much simpler. Inaction. From 1998 to 2020, the Department of Justice didn’t bring a single major monopolization claim. Why not? No one can explain it. Obama-era antitrust economist and current Google consultant Carl Shapiro argued that they simply “found precious few cases that warranted an enforcement action based on the facts and the case law.” In other words, Shapiro argued, absurdly, that there were just no monopolies in the economy. Last week, I asked a panel at the conservative Federalist Society why there hadn’t been any cases, and no one had a good answer.
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So if this attitude has been systemic, where did it come from? One of the major historical actors I discuss is Robert Bork, an antitrust lawyer who made an argument that rolling back corporate power is immoral because it inhibits the liberty of the capitalist. His great book, The Antitrust Paradox, was published in 1978, and key leaders of the New Right, elected that year, often had a copy of it under their arms at important Republican conferences. But while Bork was a revolutionary, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it, every revolution is the kicking of a rotten door. And the counterculture was that rotten door.
I read The Antitrust Paradox about 10 years ago, and the copy I got came out in the early 1990s with a new introduction. In his revised edition, Bork expressed surprise at how swiftly his victory had come. By 1981, most of the radical changes he had put forward in the book just three years earlier had been implemented, and with virtually no dissent.
Why? Well, the counterculture had paved the way, breaking with the fundamental dissenting tradition of America. Prior to the 1960s, Americans largely situated their critique of existing institutions as contesting the meaning of America. This was true even for radicals; in 1939, Communist Party Chair Earl Browder in the Boston Garden gave a speech beneath a huge banner that read “COMMUNISM IS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM.” And the Communists in Spain named themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. As one old lefty MIT professor, Leo Marx, put it, that left “was committed, or so we believed, to the universal, egalitarian values of the Enlightenment represented by Jefferson, Paine, and Lincoln.”
In the 1960s, a set of disillusioning arguments prevailed on the left, particularly in academia. The idea that the American republic was committed to the “political program of the Enlightenment” seemed fraudulent. But dissidents didn’t renounce egalitarianism or elements like liberty for all. Instead, Marx argued, they “disconnected Lincoln’s proposition from the idea of America and reattached it to the aspirations of those subordinate groups of Americans—women, African Americans, the working class—oppressed, victimized, or excluded by an irremediably corrupt nation.”
By 1999, the incoming president of the American Studies Association suggested the organization delete “American” from its name. Leading “Americanists” had come to write with a visceral disdain for the idea of the nation-state itself. Studying American corporate structures, markets, and governance with an eye to reform, or with some larger ideal in mind, seemed absurd.
At the same time, a new vision of political economy emerged that erased the nation-state and the law. In his 1967 bestseller The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith, who thought antitrust law was silly, discussed something called convergence theory, the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States had the same economic system. The U.S. had corporations, and the U.S.S.R. had state-run entities, but the “technostructure” as he called it was virtually identical. “It is part of the vanity of modern man that he can decide the character of his economic system,” he wrote. Man’s “area of decision, in fact, is vanishingly small.” Galbraith’s philosophy eventually morphed into neoliberalism.
Given these intellectual influences, it’s not hard to see why Bork succeeded among a generation of baby boomers in the 1970s and 1980s. If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway.
Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. The New Democrat project of the 1980s, which turned human choices into Gods we called “technology and globalization,” succeeded wildly, because we had been conditioned to believe in them. Markets became monopolies, economists became priests, and cultural attitudes are the only real stakes in elections.
And that brings me back to the learned helplessness of the Democrats. The reason the antimonopoly movement is interesting is because we are a break from this attitude. It’s not that we are fighting Bork, it’s that we are fighting the whole notion of antipolitics itself, the idea that protest and marginalized communities are the only mechanisms for moral legitimacy. We are saying that morality is shaped by politics through the state itself.
Trump built his political persona on this notion, that he’s a guy who — like him or not — does things. That’s why when Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter started bringing cases and doing things, it felt to a lot of antitrust status quo proponents on the Democratic side that they were fairly Trump-y, even though they weren’t. Most of what Khan and Kanter did involves standard antitrust claims, nothing fancy, often just classic cases where the harm is higher prices, though pushing the law in some interesting ways. What was really novel was that someone might actually take it upon themselves to wield power in government. That was either outrageous or inexplicable. A lot of opponents want to frame what happened as some sort of wild shift in antitrust law, but the truth is that it was more a recognition that there is antitrust law.
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This learned helplessness carried into the political realm. In May, I noted that the White House had an informal policy of refusing to talk about fights with corporate power. This piece resonated so widely that the next day the White House started doing a bit of tweeting on their antimonopoly work. But it didn’t last, and Harris never presented any coherent articulation of her views. The result is that Democrats bore the political burden of addressing organized money in the form of angry billionaires, but got little political support for doing so because they never told voters. And in large part, that’s because the operatives thought using power to help people wasn’t part of politics. They knew how to market a politics of learned helplessness, not actually trying to do stuff.
But I don’t know that bad messaging is the whole story. Certainly anti-monopolists did a great deal. And yet, in 2024, we could not actually overcome learned helplessness elsewhere to make that policy truly felt by voters. Partly that’s a matter of resources; having control of a few agencies with a budget of a billion dollars when the government’s discretionary budget is two trillion dollars shows how little the antimonopoly framework was actually prioritized. But even aside from that, whenever anti-monopolists tried to act, a bevy of other bureaucrats and bad pro-monopoly actors in Congress countered it.
For instance, in September of this year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a highly publicized lawsuit against pharmacy benefit managers. Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) have been killing local pharmacies for more than a decade and hiking up the price of medicine. There is no reason for this industry to exist; it’s just a series of spreadsheets with political power. The top three PBMs serve administrative functions, yet they have more revenue than France spends on its entire universal health care system. Anyway, well-trained FTC lawyers had spent years investigating the industry and finally litigation started. After several more years, prices will come down, and independent pharmacies will once again flourish.
On one level, that’s a story of success. But in 2020, we knew about PBMs, and pharmacists were desperate. It’s been four years, and the situation on the ground has worsened. Instead of spending FTC resources and years of litigation, the Department of Health and Human Services could have fixed this problem with the stroke of a pen. But Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra may not know what a PBM is, and it’s not clear that the Domestic Policy Council head Neera Tanden does either. Even worse, the Biden Pentagon renewed its contract with PBM goliath Express Scripts for major government contracts. Meanwhile, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) didn’t see any value in moving anything in Congress.
You can multiply this dynamic across the Biden administration in every important area. Enforcers moved against big meatpackers, the USDA signed contracts with big meatpackers. The Antitrust Division brought antitrust cases against Big Tech to open AI to new entrants, Sen. Schumer killed Big Tech antitrust legislation and brought in Big Tech lobbyists to craft AI policy. When enforcers sued to stop a sugar merger, an employee from the Department of Agriculture, on her own time, volunteered to testify on behalf of the merging parties. We later experienced a sugar shortage, and that employee faced no reprimand.
And this dynamic was pervasive, not just in antitrust, but in every important area of political economy. Industrial policy helped subsidize building factories, the Federal Reserve’s high-interest policy penalized building factories. Despite significant activity among labor regulators, union density under Biden dropped. Trying to run the labor market hot was contravened by cutting social welfare for the poor. New merger guidelines against private equity in health care were countered by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoing a bill restricting private equity in health care, and rule-making on non-competes was countered by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee both vetoing bills restricting them.
This administration was like driving in a car where two different people were trying to steer the wheel in different directions. The result was some very impressive and important legal wins and changes to areas such as monopolization law, but just not enough to lower high costs or inspire confidence. Despite ample evidence in 2022 of a link between inflation and profits, one understood not just by pricing experts like Lindsay Owens and Isabella Weber but by White House officials, other White House officials and economists mocked the point, ghettoizing action so it would become the adorable theoretical wishes of a few silly lefties. Even before that, the failure to see what was happening with COVID, to understand shortages, to overreact and trust people in authority over our lying eyes, was all a matter of learned helplessness. Most arguments about social issues carry this same dynamic, a belief that one must accept a niche weird opinion about something for fear of a shameful reaction by one’s peers. That’s just learned helplessness.
Fortunately, I think this attitude is ebbing. In the Republican Party, Donald Trump has shattered the libertarian consensus. On the Democratic side, there is the start of the rejection of antipolitics. One of the most hopeful signs is that ratings at MSNBC have collapsed, while independent media subscriptions at politically focused outlets are doing well. Meanwhile, book publishers who thrived on a diet of hyperbolical anti-Trump books are giving up. Said one agent, “I talked to a dozen editors last week to check in with them and to see what they were planning to do for political books in a Trump era. They were all exhausted at the thought of doing more anti-Trump books.”
That’s probably good, because it means that opposition can emerge not based on overwrought cultural fear, but based on actual policy disagreements. Now that a whole bunch of new areas have been opened up to critique, from trade to corporate power to mergers to industrial policy to the Federal Reserve, and the expectation among the public is that our political leaders can and should do stuff, well, voters will start to expect our democratic institutions to function. And if we can make the case, that will lead us back to being a society again.
