How Antitrust Became Mainstream, Part 3: The Antimonopoly Political Revolution
In this third and final part of this series, I’m going to discuss the return of monopoly as an increasingly central political question in American and global politics. Why are so many political and business figures suddenly talking about monopoly power, not just in presidential debates, but all over the world?
In Part 1, I discussed the strange utopian vision animating the 1990s and early 2000s. That era was framed by the End of History, with Google as magic, Alan Greenspan as the Oracle, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman setting up a sophisticated rule of foreign policy which posited that countries with McDonald’s don’t go to war with one another. Blinded by utopian fervor, policymakers just stopped respecting the importance of making and distributing things. They set many time bombs in that moment without even realizing it (like the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, which I discuss here).
Yet, by the end of last year, that same Tom Friedman called for the break-up of Facebook and the redefinition of monopoly, as well as a more confrontational approach to China. In other words, the network of hedge fund managers, tech executives, politicians, bankers, and imaginary cab drivers with which Friedman socializes have altered their thinking. Why? What happened?
In Part 2 of this series, I described the crack-up. The war in Iraq generated profound distrust in American institutions, including the media, leading to the first modern social movement for an antimonopoly pricing rule: net neutrality. Then the financial crisis and the response by Bush and Obama crushed the legitimacy of the End of History narrative, sparking the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, as well as driving the Chinese to become far more aggressive in opposing Western liberalism. I also described how a small group at the Open Markets Institute began researching the impact of systemic monopolization that had occurred over the past forty years. But even so, at the end of the Obama era, the explosion of antimonopoly sentiment into the mainstream had not quite happened.
The key to understanding what came next is to get that antimonopolism is not a left-wing or right-wing type of politics—it is business reformism. It’s not some lefty crusade or right-wing attempt to seize power. Perhaps the strongest media voice on behalf of the new antimonopoly movement, for instance, has been The Economist, with the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times doing substantial amounts of journalism and commentary around concentrated power. But everyone, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to the left-wing The American Prospect, has become quite assertive on the policy. Many activists today assume they’ve always been stridently opposed to monopoly, which is weird because it’s a pretty new area.
The most important political figures in the return of antimonopoly politics are Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump. There are many people in Europe, India, and Australia making critical policy choices, but in terms of setting the boundaries of what is possible, it is Warren and Trump who have re-politicized this area.