In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":

faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/…

3/

The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:

> Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose.

4/

Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.

And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job.

5/

They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.

More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens.

6/

On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):

pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/der…

7/

By contrast, the richest 10% own *94%* of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens.

8/

After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the *reason* they do it is *money*):

markets.businessinsider.com/ne…

9/

Top 10% of Americans own a record 93% of the stock market

America's richest have never owned so much of the country's stock market, according to Federal Reserve data.

^{Jennifer Sor (Markets Insider)}

Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small firms, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.

That means that the antitrust surge is *amazing*. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist *at all*.

10/

It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.

11/

Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon - it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only *three* merger challenges, and won *zero* of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:

parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1…

12/

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies...and they did so under a succession of shambolic *Conservative* governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/aut…

13/

We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action *all over the world*: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.

It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end.

14/

The *reason* the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell - if anything, it only makes people madder.

It's hard to overstate just how *weird* the antitrust surge is.

15/

We've been fighting for decades for even *tiny* concessions to the interests of working people - a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.

16/

But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust - again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy - is *the most successful* popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth *trillions* of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.

17/

Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it - rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies.

18/

Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:

salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden…

Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?

prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-…

19/

The Corporate Wishcasting Attack on Lina Khan

Billionaires are hopeful that Kamala Harris will break from the FTC chair. But she’s part of an entire network of policymakers who are actually governing in Washington.

^{David Dayen (The American Prospect)}