The Antitrust Theory of Everything - The Atlantic

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“I helped set in motion a revolution that aims to rebuild something like a true liberal democracy in America,” Barry C. Lynn wrote two years ago in Harper’s.<br>The claim is notable less for being impossibly grandiose than for being more or less correct.<br>Lynn is the intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement, which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States. “It is vital to understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters, “that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our society today.”<br>When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”<br>The movement that he leads has reshaped progressive thought on economics, antitrust enforcement, and political strategy. Lynn and his acolytes run a handful of nonprofit organizations, including the Open Markets Institute, where he serves as executive director. But they also influence liberal magazines, Democratic elected officials, and other key nodes of discourse on the left. Members of his movement held important positions in Joe Biden’s administration, and his followers are waging a vigorous—even vicious—campaign to ensure that they regain their power in the next Democratic administration.<br>I met Lynn in March at his office near the Treasury Department, just around the corner from the White House, where he once made frequent visits to his many allies in the Biden administration. The shelves were lined with books by Lynn and other neo-Brandeisians. A balcony overlooked the Treasury building, and the proximity to the executive branch was an advantage, he said, when “our friends” were in office. Lynn regards his factional triumph as a fait accompli. “We’ve largely won the intellectual debate,” he told me matter-of-factly, allowing that the only remaining liberals who disagree with him are “those who are paid to do so.”<br>Over the past two decades or so, Lynn has revived, modernized, and enlarged on a long-dormant antitrust ideology, spreading its tenets with astonishing energy. He operates in the intellectual and political realms simultaneously, waging both an evangelical crusade and a bare-knuckled factional struggle for power. Lynn’s inside game has worked so well that, even though the average Democrat can barely detect the transformation, many party leaders have adopted his sweeping theory of everything.<br>Lynn has won so much that the Democratic Party may soon be tired of his winning. The effects of his revolution on the party and its ability to govern are far greater than many intellectuals, politicians, and staffers seem to grasp. To attribute all problems to a single cause is to reject every solution but one. It is also to dismiss anyone who thinks differently—that is, anyone who thinks about the world like nearly any Democrat did until very recently—as a corrupt enemy who must be expunged.<br>Lynn began developing his monocausal view of the world when he was a business journalist in the 1990s and early aughts. Walmart’s leverage over its suppliers was a particular fascination. “Wal-Mart and other monopsonists,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s 20 years ago, “are slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal that holds each of us ever more tightly in place, and that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock.” Instead of inexorably taking over the economy, however, Walmart eventually lost market share to Amazon and other competitors without government intervention. If Lynn was perturbed by the failure of his prophecy, he gave no sign, turning his attention to the monopolistic power of Facebook (which has also subsequently lost market share) and Amazon.<br>Like conventional antitrust enforcers, Lynn faulted these corporate behemoths for overcharging consumers, undercutting their competition, and preventing innovation. He went beyond the liberal consensus, however, and argued that large firms were inherently dangerous. The goal he set out for antitrust policy was not merely to prevent firms from blocking competition, but also to reshape the economy to place more economic and political power in the hands of small-business owners.<br>“We may have democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” the Progressive Era jurist Louis Brandeis is supposed to have said, though there is no evidence that he ever actually said it. The...