The AFF’s transition to socialism is another step in the antimonopoly tradition that incentivizes coalition building and disrupts market fundamentalism.

Antimonopoly and the Democrats The antimonopoly tradition once contributed to mobilization, coalition building, and sustained reform across the liberal-left spectrum, and it might do so again today. Democrats are waking up to the realities of economic power. Less than a decade ago, the subject was taboo. Even with the economy in ruins, Democratic leadership saw no option beyond neoliberalism. But since the 2016 primaries, a split has opened up in the party. With it has come a resurgence of antimonopoly politics that neoliberal leaders can no longer ignore. At first blush, it looks like antimonopoly heightens the conflict between socialists committed to overcoming capitalism and establishment centrists seeking to save it from populist attacks on the left and right. But antimonopoly once contributed to mobilization, coalition building, and sustained reform across the liberal-left spectrum, and it might do so again today. The Antimonopoly Tradition Democracy and markets are fragile and demanding systems, easily corrupted by formidable concentrations of power. The antimonopoly tradition recognizes this fragility, and it makes no sharp distinction between economic and political power. Excessive concentrations of political power undermine economic prosperity no less than excessive concentrations of economic power corrupt democracy. The problem for law and public policy in a democracy with markets seems simple: how to check the constant tendency to concentrated power. There’s no clear-cut way to do that, because those who seek to attain power and lock in privilege are endlessly inventive. Under the right conditions, institutions designed to check power can be used to opposite ends. As a result, antimonopoly is far more than an ideology. It is a political project that requires vigilance, action, and constant adaptation. Reformers have drawn on the antimonopoly tradition—which is far more wide-ranging than just antitrust, a set of policies designed to prevent predatory competition and break up concentrations of economic power—throughout U.S. history. In the 1830s, Jacksonians used it to authorize privatization, dismantling the Second Bank of the United States because it locked in the privilege of an overweening aristocracy. Abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s drew on the antimonopoly tradition to dismantle the slave power. In the 1880s, populists enacted state antitrust laws to check the growth of corporate power. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Progressives went further, breaking up corporate power and boosting countervailing forces in government, unions, and proprietary enterprise. In the New Deal, the antimonopoly tradition broke the power of banks and industrial corporations and paved the way for regulation, collective bargaining, and welfare provision. In the 1940s, liberals drew on it to outlaw discriminatory pricing and check the predatory power of chain stores. In the 1950s and 1960s, antitrust administrators broke up patent monopolies, opening the way to high technology. The antimonopoly tradition, as this sketch demonstrates, has enabled diverse political projects. In the first Gilded Age, it provided a challenge to laissez-faire constitutionalism—the legal doctrine that markets were autonomous from politics, and that property and contracts always protected individual liberty. In today’s Gilded Age, the antimonopoly tradition confronts market fundamentalism: the belief that liberty is best realized in market transactions insulated from democratic interference; that it is possible to organize markets effectively without government supervision; and that we ought not worry about concentrations of economic power, either because they are efficient or temporary. The turn to market fundamentalism had a major impact on the practice of antitrust, severing it from its roots in the antimonopoly tradition. The University of Chicago–trained lawyer Robert Bork, who published The Antitrust Paradox in 1978, convinced Reagan’s Justice Department that antitrust blocked efficient forms of business organization. Left alone, corporations and capital markets could decide better than government regulators whether mergers, hostile takeovers, outsourcing, or breaking up and selling off corporate assets would serve consumers. If the result was concentrated power, so be it. In time, the Democrats agreed that the only goal of antitrust was to protect consumers. By 1992, antitrust had disappeared from their platform for the first time in a century. The resurgence of the antimonopoly tradition among Democrats indicates a sea change in how they approach economic governance. Rather than limiting debate to after-the-fact redistribution, they have begun to ask how markets and business organizations can be structured to check concentrations of power. Many Democrats are converging on a platform to rebuild a more democratic economy, even as they disagree in fundamental ways over what that means, who should benefit, and how to achieve it. Still, the antimonopoly tradition’s shared appeal could open new possibilities for party politics and reform. This might seem overly optimistic, but a closer look at how the antimonopoly tradition has informed three ideological factions within the Democratic Party—democratic socialists, (neo)liberals, and antimonopolists proper—illustrates the potential for a broader politics focused on challenging concentrated power and building a more democratic economy.