With Donald Trump back in office, the replacement of Biden-era officials in antitrust, labor, and securities enforcement has signaled a clear shift away from protecting workers and consumers, in favor of employers and corporate political power. At the FTC, for instance, Andrew Ferguson has been busy “ending the DEI plague” and investigating gender-affirming care for transgender minors, but he has been somewhat less concerned with the nation’s consumers and workers. In recent months, the FTC has abandoned its defense of the nationwide non-compete ban and approved a merger that will create the largest advertising holding company in the world. Many understandably worry that the decade-plus antimonopoly movement has been quashed by a reactionary backlash, fueled by conservative ideologies and corporate interests.
Yet antimonopoly politics are not something that can so easily be put back in the bottle. Indeed, based in part on research from my new book, Monopoly Politics, I would say that antimonopoly politics are likely here to stay, at least for now.
In the United States and elsewhere, the forces of monopoly, antitrust, and corporate power tend to follow a certain historical pattern, with long-term swings between strong anti-monopoly policies and pro-business policies. Today’s antimonopoly advocates hearken back to the early Populists and trustbusters of the 1890s and 1900s, or FDR’s late antitrust push that gave way to antitrust’s post-war golden age, when leaders decided to rein in private economic power. But they don’t look back—at least not positively—to the twenty years of corporate-friendly economic policy and politics from the First World War through the New Deal, or from the Reagan era to the current day, times when the state promoted the ascendance of concentrated, private economic power. To understand the future of anti-monopoly politics, we need to understand the dynamic forces that drive this sort of alternating large-scale shift between monopoly and competition.
Taking a broad historical view, governments in the United States and elsewhere establish policy regimes that either prioritize competition, or protection from it, which they believe will lead to a range of economic benefits. Competition creates pressure to make new products, reduce costs, and expand output, but at its extremes it can mean market instability and bankruptcies. At the other end of the spectrum, market power (speaking of monopoly in more technical terms) creates resources and space to invest in new technologies, new equipment, and new ideas, even though at its extremes it means high prices, inequality, and stagnation. When a government is “doing” competition or market power for a long period of time, it can create real economic problems. This is, at the core, why policy shifts back and forth.
Yet despite the fact that each of these regimes has self-undermining properties, they are nonetheless durable for long stretches of time. This is, in part, because policy regimes are institutionalized through cohorts of political and bureaucratic staff who become professionally and personally committed to that approach over time. These committed cohorts of policymakers do not reconsider their views nor adjust policy. Rather, newer actors enter policy circles through everyday turnover—hiring, retirement, promotions, reorganizations, etc.—and they rethink policy with new eyes, eventually persuading others to change. As that balance tips, so does policy.
To illustrate how this plays out in practice, consider post-war France from 1945 through the 1960s. Devastated after World War II, the newly liberated French government sought to rapidly modernize to catch up with the US and USSR, and they sought to do this through competition: liberalizing trade, removing tariff barriers, enforcing anti-cartel policies, and using the monopsony power of state procurement to introduce competition among suppliers. While successful in reducing prices, by the early 1960s, French corporations no longer had the profits to continue investing at the rate that state planners demanded. Following debates within French state, the response was the adoption of the Fifth Plan in 1965: an across-the-board policy to consolidate most industries into just a few firms, to give them the financial power to survive and compete in international markets. The fight of newcomers against the old guard can be seen in classic works like Lionel Stoléru’s The Industrial Imperative or Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge, both of whom castigate the previous generation of French economic managers for being overly committed to competition at the expense of industry and international competitiveness. This national champions policy would prevail for decades, until it too began generating clear economic problems for the country in the 1980s.
Similar processes played out in the Chicago school retrenchment of American antitrust. American antitrust was aggressively pro-competition and anti-concentration through the 1960s. Contrary to popular perception, when Nixon came into office, his administration not only adopted, but expanded these policies by bringing the first conglomerate merger cases and opening a patent unit in the Antitrust Division to go after patent abuses, all over business objections. For years, Nixon staff dragged their feet or opposed business lobbying with respect to antitrust. The administration only reversed course after new-to-government Peter Peterson briefed the cabinet and connected antitrust to broader problems around economic competitiveness and technology sharing with respect to late developers like Japan.
As the administration began to favor business, the antitrust profession shifted towards the Chicago school, even as public opinion never changed. Yes, early Chicago thinkers represented a near-willful misreading of what antitrust law actually said or intended (something I discuss more in the book). But in the face of waning American economic supremacy, industrial decline, and frequent bankruptcies and layoffs from foreign economic competition, the Chicago school’s implicit protectionism towards dominant American firms reflected the perceived needs of the time more than existing policy did. And now, after 40 years of these policies, we live in a world of concentration, stagnation, and higher prices, which the Biden-era enforcers, mostly outsiders to government and the mainstream antitrust profession, began to confront.
What now? The new Trump administration, with some notable exceptions, such as the 2023 merger guidelines, has walked back most of the competition and antitrust agenda as implemented under Biden. One real possibility is that the United States will stagnate, economically withering into a quasi-cartelized, unequal, and hierarchical economy in both economic and political terms, as it may wade deeper into competitive authoritarianism. Yet we should not underestimate the sea change in thought in recent years, itself a response to increasingly glaring economic problems.
The political and policy community around antitrust is an antimonopoly community now. The late 2010s and early 2020s saw many changed minds about the power of large corporations. Beyond a general rise in public fear and discontent with corporate power today, this shift was also driven by economic research about the costs and scale of economic concentration, as well as the damning findings of recent antitrust investigations and cases. Large numbers of current and recent law school graduates—the future policy professionals and bureaucrats of this domain—have already adopted the broad conclusions of the new anti-monopoly movement, with top new graduates in the Biden years enthusiastically rushing to join the FTC, antitrust division, and state AG offices pursuing the most aggressive antitrust cases against big Tech, like Texas with Google. Given these deep roots in personnel and outlook, the antimonopoly movement will prove difficult to dislodge over the short run.
