"including proposals in the Better Deal to address consolidation, however light on details, could end up being a turning point. It marked the party’s first unified attempt to grapple with the structural economic barriers holding so many people back. Unlike Trump’s racio-economic populism, the story of monopolization isn’t a hoax, and it doesn’t pit ethnic groups against each other...
The idea that something’s got to be done about monopolies seemed to go from fringe argument to a pillar of the Democrats’ economic plan, at least rhetorically, overnight. But it didn’t really come out of nowhere. The Better Deal announcement, the New America dust-up—these were the bubblings of a movement that had been brewing for nearly a decade. The story of the Democrats becoming—maybe—the anti-monopoly party, the party of small business, is not just a politics story. It’s a story about how ideas win and lose and then, maybe, win again. And it’s the story of how a small group of political outsiders got the party establishment to adopt an idea that was essentially left for dead in 1978...
By the 1960s, it was understood that the federal government would intervene to keep firms from getting too big, period. In the 1961 case Brown Shoe Company v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a merger giving one company control over 2 percent of the nation’s shoe outlets violated the Clayton Act. But, perhaps because the movement was so successful, antitrust eventually came to lose its political cachet. It became “one of the faded passions of American reform,” wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964. Historians, he wrote, had come to “ignore antitrust for the same reason the public ignores it: it has become complex, difficult, and boring...
After the Reagan administration, following Bork’s lead, kicked off the era of lax antitrust enforcement and rampant mergers, the economy would begin a steady climb to levels of concentration not seen since before the original Progressive Era. The most intense wave of mergers has taken place in the years since the 2008 financial crash. According to an analysis by the Economist last year, two-thirds of all corporate sectors grew more concentrated between 1997 and 2012. Today, for example, three chains—Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid—control 99 percent of the nation’s pharmacies, and two of them tried to merge last year...
That shout-out from Krugman, the first of several, was essentially an invitation to other economists to do research to test the hypothesis. Over the next few years, they would begin supplying the numbers to back up Lynn and Longman’s observations. But apart from Krugman, the reaction from prominent thinkers and writers was mostly silence. The dominant liberal worldview was still better captured by a 2005 paper written by a then up-and-coming liberal economist named Jason Furman. The title was “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” and it argued that liberals should celebrate Walmart for providing such cheap goods to poor people...
Voters in 2016, unlike in 1936, weren’t used to hearing and thinking about the perils of monopoly. A recent piece in the Atlantic by Stacy Mitchell showed that use of the word “monopoly” in books peaked in 1949 and has since plummeted to 1880s—pre–Sherman Act—levels. Although Harper’s and the Washington Monthly had been raising the issue for years, more prominent elite media like the Economist and the Atlantic didn’t catch on until the 2016 primaries were under way. The mainstream press—major newspapers and network TV—still hasn’t. It’s a lot to ask of a political candidate, in the midst of a campaign, to simultaneously run on an issue and teach voters what it is.
“One of the things the Chicago School stole from us is the language,” said Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and member of Lynn’s post–New America group, the Open Markets Institute. “It sounds technical, but it’s actually deeply political, deeply moral. The loss of language was a central loss.”...
But the pocketbook paradigm could be a trap. Voting is more an expression of tribal identity than a rational bet on the practical effects of policy. Promising to help voters’ bottom line only works if they trust you in the first place. And focusing just on prices ignores the issue of small business and regional competition. Cheap consumer goods can’t make up for the lost jobs and wages in the large swaths of the country denuded of local businesses by behemoths on the coasts...
This will require angering some of the Democrats’ most important and deep-pocketed donors, something the party has not yet revealed an appetite for. The Better Deal, like the party platform before it, didn’t say a mumbling word about the new tech giants."
FB: This is long but enormously educational about not just monopolies but how political ideas develop and get turned into platforms "More broadly, an anti-monopoly, pro-competition agenda offers Democrats a way to make sense of what has gone so deeply wrong in our political and economic system without embracing either the revolutionary anti-capitalism of the far left or the anti-government nihilism of the right. Another way to say this is that anti-monopoly politics is a traditional American position—“the middle ground,” as Republican Senator Orrin Hatch recently put it, “between intrusive public management and corrosive private conduct.” "
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