In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Black Reconstruction,” assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:
“America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”
Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”
What a piece by Barry Lynn in the September Harpers where he quotes from Black Reconstruction (and underscores Du Bois’s wonder-ender). Lynn’s “The Anti-trust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech”—is a sharp yet rangy polemic. Lynn is worried about Trump’s comeback but he suggests a second term for the Don would mean chaos, rather than a “calibrated cosmos of power.” He’s more alarmed by another threat to democracy:
It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to make and unmake’ who they will. It is these corporations that—even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state—have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world.
Lynn zeroes in the how these “manipulation machines” operate. He places big tech’s monopolies within two historical flows. His longue durée starts with James 1 and parliamentary objections to royal absolutism. It takes in the American Constitution—”the greatest anti-monopoly document in history” (but wasn’t it Slavery’s Constitution as well?), The Northwest Ordinance(!)[1], Dubois (and Lincoln), 19th C. trust-busting (but where’s the Populist moment?). Lynn’s annals of anti-monopolism are charmingly progressive, though his grand narrative is pretty iffy historically. Closer to our time, his account of how America—and the Democratic Party, in particular—gave up on the idea of anti-trust action seems less dreamy, more hardcore. Lynn tells how Robert Bork and Richard Posner laid down the template for the new monopolism in the eighties. Bork may have kept off the Supreme Court, but his side won the battle over corporate power. You won’t forget Lynn’s invocation of Bork’s own shock at how liberals gave up on antitrust enforcement…
In the mid-Nineties, he admitted he had been surprised by how easy his “revolution” had been. “For reasons that are not entirely clear,” he wrote, liberals had simply “abandoned this branch of the law” and carried their fights elsewhere. But Bork also made clear that he welcomed the liberals’ intellectual and political collapse. It had made it easier for him and his friends to “downsize” antitrust enforcement, to eliminate its “reckless and primitive egalitarianism.”
A phrase by the right-wing revelator that hammers home how the American people got Borked in the last century.
Lynn’s essay seems untired, unlike most critiques of neo-liberalism. He offers eye-opening angles on Joe Biden’s break with the consensual wisdom that’s shaped mainline political economy since Reagan/Clinton (and Carter?).
You should read Lynn’s entire piece but if your time is tight, here’s the heart of his case for Bidenomics.
What is taking place now in Washington is remarkable. In July 2021, President Biden signed the Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. “Forty years ago,” he said, “we chose the wrong path . . . following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork.” The “experiment,” of “letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power,” clearly “failed,” he said in a speech. The overall result? “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” Biden concluded. “It’s exploitation.”
With the stroke of a pen, President Biden destroyed the intellectual foundations of the system of private monopoly control—of liberty for the masters—first established by Reagan in the Eighties. In place of this arch-libertarian regime, he restored the original American vision of government as a tool to break all concentrations of power and control that threaten individual liberty and democracy. It was the most radical change of political-economic philosophy, in the name of the people, since Louis Brandeis helped President Wilson modernize the American system of liberty for the industrial age.
The past three years have been the greatest period of anti-monopoly enforcement in U.S. history. The DOJ’s cases against Google are but two of the many pioneering antitrust lawsuits Jonathan Kanter’s team has argued, including one against Apple. Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile has sued Amazon and Microsoft, while moving forward a case against Facebook.
Biden has also adopted an entirely new approach to international security and economics. Following his lead, U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai overturned the pro-monopoly, pro-China policies put in place by President Clinton. The result was a vision of rebuilding American factories and protecting U.S. national security from “concentration of production . . . in the People’s Republic of China” that is vastly more effective than anything Donald Trump achieved under the banner of America First.
President Biden has also revived the idea that the state should use direct investments and other forms of industrial policy to achieve specific pro-competition goals. The Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, properly understood, are among the most important anti-monopoly bills ever passed by Congress, providing nearly one trillion dollars to break the monopoly choke points that dangerously restrict global production of semiconductors, electric vehicles, and solar panels.
The Biden White House has also taken a far more aggressive approach than any administration since the Seventies to protecting individuals from the power and misbehavior of large corporations, including by regulating new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light. But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.
Within the context of Biden’s restoration of America’s traditional anti-monopoly vision, the technical solutions to the threats posed by the power and behavior of Google and its peers appear quite simple. One is to reduce the size and power of these corporations by breaking them into smaller pieces. This is what the advertising-technologies lawsuit aims to do, and will likely play a role in the resolution of the search case. But after forty years of radical laissez-faire policy, these actions alone will fall far short of addressing the ultimate threats posed by Google and its peers. Even if the government wins all these cases, Google alone will still control vast realms of our online lives, and will still be largely free to manipulate each of us individually for its own private purposes. None of these cases, for instance, is likely to result in the full restoration of the bright-line rules established with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, rules based in part on the lessons of our battles against authoritarian monarchy in the seventeenth century. None, in short, will require corporations that control essential services to treat every individual the same way.
Today every American who believes in democracy should be scrambling to institutionalize President Biden’s vision for rebuilding the American system of liberty and to carry these fights to their conclusion. This is especially true of the Democratic Party in this moment of sharp transition to a younger generation. Biden has delivered the greatest set of policy wins for regular people since the New Deal, along with the most important actions to protect national security since Truman. And he has cleared the way for dramatic further advance in the years to come. And yet, of this most pragmatic restoration of the basic rules of liberal democracy, most liberals know little if anything. This includes much of Vice President Kamala Harris’s team, which has shown little awareness that in this ongoing effort to protect human liberty and democracy in the digital age, she will be inheriting the most important political challenge of our time.
You’re not all wrong if you suspect Barry Lynd rides a hobbyhorse. But the anti-trust legacy he upholds could amount to more than one-trick pony politics if it’s linked with the American organizing tradition. Biden has been a connector on this score. May Kamala Harris pick up on Lynd’s prompts and Joe’s pro-labor precedent when she becomes President. (Inshallah.)
Notes
1 The beamish patriot in me loved reading this passage:
The Northwest Ordinance, enacted in 1789 as one of the nation’s first laws, demonstrates the founding generation’s commitment to a distribution of property and education radically greater than had been achieved even at the height of the English revolutions a century earlier. Of the almost innumerable ways to organize a settler empire in the lands we now call Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, Congress opted for one of the most extreme democratic visions in history. Not only did Congress outlaw slavery and design rules to push people to build towns and schools, it established a system that divided land into cookie-cutter family-size properties, subsidized its sale, and put limits on speculators. The ordinance also promised voting rights to all men who owned more than fifty acres of land, no matter the color of their skin. And when parents died without a will, it required property to be divided equally among all their children, female as well as male.