Illustrations by Matthew Richardson
Listen to an audio version of this article.
In 1609, James I lectured the English people on his rights and responsibilities as king. It was his duty to “make and unmake” them, he said. Kings have the “power of raising and casting down, of life and of death; judges over all their subjects, and in all causes.”
Not even the “general laws” of Parliament constrained him. The king stands “above” all human-made law. Indeed, it is his prerogative to “interpret” and to suspend such laws “upon causes only known to him.” He could also create new laws to whatever end he desired. The king, as James declared, is “accountable to none but God only.” He is the law speaking.
To enforce his personal rule of law, James could censor speech, the press, legal treatises, and the theater. He could imprison anyone, at any time, for any reason. And though the common law prohibited torture, James could use the rack, dungeon, and Skevington’s irons to get his way.
James also controlled a vast system of favoritism. Earldoms and knighthoods, positions in the state and church and universities, licenses to collect taxes or live in a particular house: all were his to grant. James could create offices as he saw fit. To win a vote in Parliament, James sometimes simply established new peerages. He minted licenses to do business and bestowed monopolies to manufacture or import cloth, tin, wine, even playing cards.
The quid pro quo was simple. In exchange for any such “patent” of “power or profit,” the beneficiary was to return funds and favors. After all, what the king could grant he could take away. In 1603, James imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh and stripped him of most of his titles and properties. Some he gave to his own favorite, Robert Carr. Later, James gave many of Carr’s titles to a newer favorite, George Villiers, whom he named Duke of Buckingham.
Thus James sat on his throne, the center of a solar system in which every individual orbited around him, or as satellites of his satellites, a vast Cartesian mechanism propelled by venality and obsequiousness, reaching from the most magnificent of courtiers and intellectuals to the poorest of tenants in the remotest of shires.
Most historians do not believe that Louis XIV ever said, “L’État, c’est moi.” But even if apocryphal, this saying distills the idea of absolute monarchy in the days of James and France’s Sun King. Not that we need look four centuries back to understand how such absolutism works. Hitler, Stalin, Mao—each shaped the perception, thoughts, and truths of an entire people. So too Putin and Xi today.
For the first time since the founding, Americans find themselves debating much this same threat, of unfettered prerogative in the hands of a single man. It was Donald Trump’s success in teaching the Republican Party to scrape and grovel that first raised the specter of an authoritarian presidency. But it was the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision granting Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for most of his official actions as president that put flesh to the fear. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor summed up in her dissent: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
It would be foolish not to take Trump at his word when he says he intends to act as dictator if reelected. But we should also avoid overstating his ability to earn a place alongside Mussolini as a true authoritarian ruler. Justices Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson are absolutely correct to condemn the court’s right-wing majority for removing a core constitutional limit on the presidency. But even after this decision, the executive bears little resemblance to James’s system of power. In a second Trump term, we might reasonably expect chaos, paralysis, and destruction. But a carefully calibrated cosmos of power? Hardly.
Yet there is today a very real threat of a tyranny in the vein of James. It lies, however, in a different place—in the reach, knowledge, interests, and prerogatives enjoyed by the interlocking network of private corporations that control our online communications and commerce. It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to “make and unmake” who they will. It is these corporations that—even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state—have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world.
These are the absolute sovereigns of our age, the masters in the middle of us all.
Here, too, we are in the midst of a historic battle on behalf of liberty. On August 5, 2024, a federal court found Google’s control over search to be an illegal monopoly, in a decision that will have far-reaching effects on how we communicate and do business online. One key fact in the case—which was brought to trial late last year by Department of Justice antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter—was that in 2022 alone Google paid Apple some $20 billion to serve as Apple’s default search engine.1 Then, in September 2024, the DOJ was set to begin arguments in a second and separate antitrust case against Google, this time targeting the corporation’s control over the advertising technologies that mint, manage, and tax the currency and commerce of the online realm. In tandem, if merely because of their potential to radically reduce Google’s power over publishing and advertising, the cases amount to one of the most important defenses of true intellectual and political liberty of the past four centuries.
On the wrong side of this fight we again find the court. But in this instance, it’s the liberals who have mounted as outriders for autocracy. Indeed, on the very day Justices Sotomayor, Jackson, and Kagan stood in opposition to the majority’s efforts to place more rods in the hand of the president, these same three voted to bless Google and other online platforms with nearly unimaginable sovereign powers. They did so in a separate decision, Moody v. NetChoice, which focused on the right of state governments to regulate how Google’s YouTube and Facebook’s News Feed treat the people who rely on them.
The question was essentially the same one posed by Trump v. United States: Does Google have a right to wield its power over users in an arbitrary fashion? Since the founding, Americans have broadly required both the government and corporations, when providing an essential service, to treat every person the same way. But even though Google and Facebook clearly have monopoly power over certain forms of online communication, Kagan argued that just as the First Amendment gives newspapers the right to edit their articles as they see fit, it empowers Google and Facebook to edit how individuals communicate with one another on their platforms. When the platforms “decide which third-party content those feeds will display,” Kagan wrote for the majority, “they are making expressive choices.” Which means, practically, that Google and Facebook can favor one person over another for whatever reason—and can choose to censor some people completely. The hundreds of millions of Americans who depend on these platforms to speak and deal with one another, by contrast, have no rights whatsoever.
Fortunately, the decision hinged on a technical point, so it did not cast Kagan’s musings into hard law. But the deeply dangerous implications of the liberals’ thinking is clear.
I have tracked such questions of power and prerogative for more than two decades, as both a journalist and the director of the Open Markets Institute. Along with friends including Zephyr Teachout, Tim Wu, and Lina Khan, and allies such as Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Keith Ellison, and David Cicilline, I helped set in motion a revolution that aims to rebuild something like a true liberal democracy in America.
We have won many battles. We convinced enforcers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to embrace our philosophy, goals, and analysis. We transformed how legislators in Washington and the states, including many Republicans, understand the threats posed by concentrated power. We even convinced President Biden to officially renounce much of the neoliberal political-economic ideology put in place in the Eighties and Nineties by Presidents Reagan and Clinton.
Many obstacles stand between us and ultimate victory. Most obvious is that Trump might win in November. Most maddening is that so many people who clearly view themselves as liberal champions—ranging from Kagan to former president Barack Obama—remain under the sway of an antidemocratic, pro-monopoly ideology dating to 1981, in the early days of the Reagan presidency. In America today, we face the most wide-ranging set of threats to liberal democracy since the founding. Gravest of all: liberals’ apparent ignorance of our own history. Hence our blindness both to the full nature of the threat posed by Google and its peers—and to the tools at hand to master it.
Most Americans today fear the power of the tech monopolies. That’s why I assume you’ve read at least a few articles to make sense of the threats these corporations pose. Unfortunately, it’s likely that what you’ve learned understates the magnitude of the crisis. The issue is not mainly that these corporations surveil you, not mainly that they intrude on your privacy. Not mainly even that they wield great political power.
Rather, it is precisely the issue that came before the court in Moody v. NetChoice: these corporations’ unique capacities to manipulate every person and company that depends on them, individually.
To understand how this works, let’s focus a moment on Google. After the corporation introduced the first version of its search engine a quarter century ago, we embraced the service as a marvel. Suddenly, the World Wide Web had a front door, a beautifully simple portal designed to take us seemingly anyplace and everyplace in an instant.
But starting in 2004, coffers full of cash and tradable stock after the company’s IPO, Google’s executives went on a takeover binge. They bought YouTube, Android, DeepMind, ITA Software, Boston Dynamics, Waze, Nest, Looker, and Fitbit, as well as the foundational components of Google Docs, Google Cloud, and Waymo, along with more than two hundred and fifty other companies to date. Of all these purchases, perhaps the smartest was the 2007 deal to acquire DoubleClick, which gave Google direct control over one of the internet’s dominant ad platforms and its networks.
Google executives present their corporation as a great innovator. But their genius has rarely consisted of much more than buying other people’s ideas and assembling them into a vast maze of online corridors designed to enclose as much of our digital lives as possible. This in turn enables them to establish the corporation as the middleman, or gatekeeper, between us and almost anyone who wants to sell us some good or idea.
Thanks to this spree, one or another of Google’s platforms today stands between you and your parents, between you and your children, and between you and your friends. Between you and your doctor, your druggist, and your therapist. Between you and your mayor and your representative in Congress and your president. You and your co-workers and professors. You and your car, electricity, and airlines. You and your movies and sports. And gambling and porn sites.
This position as all-seeing middleman does indeed allow Google to collect vast tranches of information about you. The corporation can gather and store every word you say on or near your phone, and everything you do online—every time you break the speed limit, every massage parlor and weekend fling, even, with increasing accuracy, every cigarette, beer, and Twinkie you consume.
The existence of an all-seeing middleman is not, in and of itself, new. The postal system a century ago, AT&T fifty years ago, the internet itself twenty-five years ago—each of these old-school platforms also stood between us and the people with whom we wanted to speak and deal. And hence each of these platforms had access to enormous amounts of intimate information. But back then, the law required such entities to provide the same service on the same terms to everyone. Which meant they had few ways to profit from your private information, hence little interest in paying to collect and store it.
What makes Google and its peers unlike any corporation we’ve faced before is our failure to impose similar constraints on them. Unlike AT&T, we have failed at enforcing the laws that would prevent them from treating you differently from your neighbor.
This de facto license to deliver you perfectly personalized versions of the essential services it controls is what allows Google to leverage the full power of the vast array of middleman platforms it has built or bought and to make full use of the intricately detailed profile it has fashioned about you and your life.
It is this combination of power and knowledge that enables Google to arbitrarily manipulate how you drive around town and across the state, where you fly and in what hotels you sleep. To manipulate what you read and watch. To influence what diseases you fear and what drugs you seek. Google then rents this manipulation machine to virtually any corporation or person who wants to get you to buy a particular thing or vote a particular way. And each year it earns hundreds of billions of dollars by doing so.
Google is free, for instance, to use the secrets it collects to help PepsiCo sell you more sugar. And to help your insurance company charge you more for drinking that sugar. And to help Novo Nordisk sell you Wegovy if the sugar puts too much weight on you. And the corporation is free to help powerful actors manipulate your political thinking, by packaging their lies in ways Google knows will most trigger your attention.
And this, at best, is but half the problem. To understand the full power and prerogative of Google and its peers, it helps to recollect that Google manipulates each of us not only as buyers, readers, and listeners, but also in our capacities as creators and speakers. As was true of James I, Google controls the gates to the markets we depend on to sell our work, wares, and wisdom. Our failure to impose traditional rules requiring these platforms to treat everyone the same way means that Google is free to open and close these gates whenever it chooses, for whatever reason.
This gives the corporation arbitrary power over almost every small business. Google can steer customers toward, or away from, any particular author, photographer, or musician. Any restaurant, hair salon, bike shop, or plumber.
It also gives the corporation arbitrary power over almost every other big corporation. Google’s control over advertising, maps, Android, Chrome, email, internet traffic, and many other essential services gives it the ability to inflict real financial pain on almost every major business in America, from General Motors to Uber to Intel.
To begin to understand the political implications of such arbitrary power, consider how Google and its peers treat news publishers, broadcasters, and journalists. At any moment, for whatever reason, these corporations can steer readers and ad revenue to a particular news publisher, journalist, influencer, or article. Or they can steer those readers and dollars away.
Many publishers have banded together to demand that legislators make tech giants stop stealing their ad dollars and treat every publisher the same. When governments in Australia, Canada, and California tried just that, Google and Facebook have sometimes simply shut off the flow of news across their platforms entirely, denying citizens and publishers of this most basic of rights.
By contrast, when an influential news outlet—say, the New York Times or News Corp—agrees to accept a lucrative under-the-table payment from Google or Facebook, it’s hard not to conclude that such a publisher will think twice before joining such a fight or bringing the full weight of its reporting to bear on its online partners.
The same is true of book publishers and film studios and sports leagues and famous musicians. In this, Google et al. have a special deal for absolutely everyone who is anyone: from Penguin Random House and Disney to Beyoncé and the NFL. Or rather, the best deal these masters in the middle choose to give you, so long as you don’t complain about their routine predations.
Reformers have long used lobbying dollars to measure a corporation’s political power. Google and its peers are no slouches. They have built political machines that in some ways dwarf those of Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco.
But what is truly new here—at least in U.S. history—is the centralized system of sycophancy these corporations have constructed. Today Google and its peers choreograph the meting out of personalized punishment and reward in ways designed to ensure that anyone who matters—even the most powerful lords of the realm—not only fears speaking out, but increasingly devotes their days to dreaming up better ways to serve their master.
When James I made his claim to absolute power, the idea of king as despot was something relatively new in Europe. Until then, the king’s role was hardly more than the first among a class of landholders more or less equal in wealth and rights. The king’s prerogative was further restricted by the distribution of power to municipalities, guilds, and the church, and by Parliament’s right to approve most forms of taxation.
But by the early seventeenth century the sovereigns of Britain, France, and elsewhere had begun to erode this medieval constitutionalism in favor of a new absolutism. They did so largely by short-circuiting Parliament’s control over the purse, through methods such as James’s licensing of monopolies in exchange for kickbacks. No longer would the sovereign have to beg for funds. Peers now begged the sovereign for favor.
One result was the shuttering of most of Europe’s legislative assemblies: the Estates-General in France, the Cortes Generales in Spain. James himself went seven years without calling a Parliament. As in the years before the Second World War, it was a time when the lights of Europe were flickering out. As one member of the Commons put it: “We are the last monarchy in Christendom that retain our original rights and constitutions. Let us not perish now!”
Another result was subjects’ growing fear to speak out lest the king seize their properties for himself or some favorite. Since the Magna Carta, the English had been proud of their liberties and rule of law. But as Milton later wrote, James and his son Charles transformed English politics into a system of “perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people.”
The threat was not merely political in nature. These years were also ones of popular religious ferment, with battles between the Church of England, Puritans, and Catholics, and between these, the Baptists, and other new spiritual movements. Many of these groups also saw restrictions on free speech as a threat to their liberty of belief—and indeed their liberty to imagine new ways to commune, see, and be.
Parliament’s response to James and then Charles laid much of the intellectual and political foundation for constitutional democracies in the centuries since, especially in America. Parliament pursued two main lines of action. The first was to insist that the king recognize Parliament’s laws. In 1608, Chief Justice Edward Coke, whom James had named to his position, firmly opposed James’s claim that as king he had the right to judge lawsuits in the public courts. Coke insisted that this was a task for the judiciary only, and then went further and said that the king himself is “under God and the law.” Coke avoided punishment only by falling to his knees. But his words resounded.
The effort culminated in 1628, when Coke, now a member of Parliament, led the fight to force James’s successor, his son Charles, to recognize the Petition of Right, a document that clarified and reinforced prohibitions dating to the Magna Carta against arbitrary taxation, imprisonment, seizure of property, and the billeting of soldiers.
Parliament’s second line of action was to attempt to eliminate the sovereign’s ability to arbitrarily grant monopolies and other licenses.
Objections to monopolies were not new. James’s predecessor, Elizabeth I, was a master of the arts of quid pro quo monopoly, and in 1601 Parliament launched a broad assault on her system of control. Members described Elizabeth’s monopolies as “the whirlpool of the prince’s profits” and assailed the monopolists themselves as “bloodsuckers of the commonwealth.” They declared the monopolies to be against both the common law and the will of Parliament. But Elizabeth had charm and tact, and protected her prerogative with timely concessions.
In 1623, however, in the last years of James’s reign, Parliament succeeded in passing the Statute of Monopolies, which sought to abolish the sovereign’s ability to concentrate power and profit in the hands of whomever he might choose. The language is adamantine. “All Monopolies, and all Commissions, Grants, Licenses, Charters and Letters Patent . . . are altogether contrary to the Laws of this Realm, and so are and shall be utterly void and of none effect.”
Parliament’s aim in outlawing all such arbitrary and discriminatory governance of markets was both economic and political in nature. By ensuring that people felt fully secure in their property, Parliament understood that it was also restoring the people’s confidence to speak in public without retribution. As Coke later put it, the goal was that the actions and speech of individuals “be measured by the golden and straight met-wand of the law and not the uncertain and crooked cord of discretion.”
At first, Charles accepted his father’s late-in-life respect for the laws of Parliament. But in 1629, he went back to the old ways, imprisoning members of Parliament who defended the rule of law, sacking a judge who supported the ancient “privilege” of members to speak without retribution, and claiming the right to personally redistribute grants of property established since 1540. It was the beginning of what has been called the Eleven Years’ Tyranny.
When wars in Scotland finally forced Charles to convene Parliament to raise funds for the army, members responded with another bout of constitutional rule-making. The most important came in 1642, when Parliament separated the powers of the office of king from the passions, weaknesses, and interests of the human person on whose head sat the crown, invoking the medieval doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies: “Acts of Justice and Protection are not exercised in [the king’s] own person, nor depend upon his pleasure.” Rather, they are exercised “by his Courts and Ministers” according to set rules.
Ultimately, after Charles chose civil war over submission to the rule of law, Parliament finished the job by ordering his beheading.
For our purposes, the main victory of this forty-year period was the establishment of the first true system of general statutory regulation of the power of the state and the large corporation. Most important, it included limits on the behavior of the king and monopolists over and within the political economy. The key to the new rule of law? No provider of an essential service could discriminate in how it treated the people who depended on it.
The founding generation in America strove to complete the work left undone by the English revolutions of the previous century.
British aristocrats of the time could look back with pride at having broken the king’s system, diffusing power among a broader upper class and reinforcing many fundamental rights. But for anyone outside the British elite, the constitutional monarchism that emerged after the civil wars did not look much like democracy or true liberty. Parliament was dominated by great landlords and a rising class of merchants and financiers. Most colonies were run by planters or all-powerful governors.
The East India Company provided daily proof that the aristocracy had failed to update Britain’s anti-monopoly laws for the new era of empire, leaving even their limited democracy at risk. Not only had the corporation imposed an economically and socially destructive dictatorship in India; it had concentrated control over commerce in the Americas, and had begun to disrupt the balances of power in Parliament itself.
Even the crown continued to enjoy a few legacy prerogatives, including those over the hierarchies of the church and the universities. To Americans such as John Adams, the structure of power in the 1770s did not seem much better than James’s personal rule. It was still a system of “insolent Domination [by] a few, a very few opulent, monopolizing families” with an “Exuberance of Pride” unconstrained by “Reason and Moderation.” It is in this context that the full anti-monopoly nature of the American system becomes clear.
The Declaration of Independence, in this light, is a simple statement of the ideal that is to guide the new society: independence, not merely of nation from nation, but of person from person. It is to be a world without central authority—freedom from the arbitrary power of any sovereign, aristocrat, or company boss.
The Constitution, in this light, is the greatest anti-monopoly document in history, a blueprint for an intricate structure of walls and dikes designed to enable people to prevent any ultimate concentration of power in any one office, corporation, church, clique, or person.
The postal system, as designed by America’s First Congress, made centralized control almost impossible and subsidized the carrying of news from any one person to any other person. A goal here was to free the individual to fully participate both in political debate and the sharing of ideas.
The Northwest Ordinance, enacted in 1789 as one of the nation’s first laws, demonstrates the founding generation’s commitment to a distribution of property and education radically greater than had been achieved even at the height of the English revolutions a century earlier. Of the almost innumerable ways to organize a settler empire in the lands we now call Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, Congress opted for one of the most extreme democratic visions in history. Not only did Congress outlaw slavery and design rules to push people to build towns and schools, it established a system that divided land into cookie-cutter family-size properties, subsidized its sale, and put limits on speculators. The ordinance also promised voting rights to all men who owned more than fifty acres of land, no matter the color of their skin. And when parents died without a will, it required property to be divided equally among all their children, female as well as male.
In recent years, Americans have been taught to view anti-monopoly law and policy as technical, esoteric regulation. But the founding generation saw anti-monopoly principles more as a philosophy for achieving their full political-economic vision. They provided the intellectual foundation for controlling the power of the presidency and preventing the concentration of power in either church or corporation. And they provided the principles and tools for regulating the competition inherent in all human societies, in ways that empowered citizens to protect their personal liberty and prosperity. Indeed, although we barely remember it today, for two centuries this included extensive efforts to protect the system of small independent farms and businesses created by the Northwest Ordinance.
For obvious reasons, Americans celebrate the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which we used to split sprawling empires like Standard Oil. But as in James’s day, the most important anti-monopoly rules were those designed to regulate the behavior of any monopoly that could not be reasonably broken into pieces, by ensuring that such powers are never used to favor any one person or business over another. Of the many such laws, most important was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, a precursor to the Sherman Act that was designed to neutralize the monopoly power of the great railroads. Congress then extended these rules to any essential monopoly, including communications networks, thus establishing a regulatory system that gave citizens the ability to use law to shape the economic, intellectual, and spiritual life of the individual.
Walt Whitman captured this idea in Democratic Vistas. The purpose of the American system, he wrote, was to “train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.” The aim was to make of each citizen “a separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift and happiness, and for a fair chance for growth.”
It is a vision fundamentally progressive in nature. This is true materially; for more than two centuries, this American system of liberty provided individuals with a simple set of rules that empowered them to take full advantage of the economic benefits of every new network technology while also regulating these networks in ways that protected their full liberty as individuals.
More important yet, the American system of liberty provided individuals with the potential for moral progress. The idea here was that if we combine the radical ideal enshrined in the Declaration with anti-monopoly tools to preserve true political, and hence intellectual, independence, the human being—individually and in community—might stumble toward the light.
In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:
America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.
Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”
For some, it is an exercise in liberty to get an abortion; for others, to carry a gun. We fight for the liberty to love and perhaps marry whom we wish, or to fully express our gender (or genders). And for liberty from masks and vaccines, and from having to read certain books or listen to certain speakers. In the United States of the twenty-first century, our demands for liberty roar through every city, town, and truck stop. Yet somehow, we the American people missed the most radical change in political-economic policy in our history. This was the overthrow of the system of liberty we had constructed with such care and struggle over the course of four centuries to ensure the independence of the individual. In short, a counterrevolution.
By now you may have read something about how the Reagan Administration radically changed the way we enforce antitrust law. The effort centered on the ideas of the legal scholars Robert Bork and Richard Posner. You may also be familiar with how the Clinton Administration applied this antidemocratic thinking to how we regulate banking, energy, defense procurement, trade, telecommunications, and the news media.
What is still missing from this broad narrative is a full understanding of how this neoliberal counterrevolution succeeded in changing everything. Not merely the distribution of wealth and power. Not merely the relation of the individual to the private corporation. But how we live and see and dream.
In 1864, President Lincoln, speaking of the slave masters, distilled the American vision of liberty to the simplest of terms:
We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.
At the most basic level, what the Reagan and Clinton Administrations did was restore liberty for today’s corporate masters to rule over us as they alone see fit.
The phenomenal success of this counterrevolution was due to a simple insight. Bork and Posner and their backers understood that there was no need to overturn America’s anti-monopoly statutes or the hundreds of more focused competition laws and policies. Instead, they could achieve the same effect much faster by changing the philosophical frame through which regulators, judges, legislators, and the public viewed this whole body of law. And so, early in the Reagan Administration, they issued enforcement “guidelines” stating that the purpose of anti-monopoly policy was not to protect the liberties of the citizen but rather the material welfare of the “consumer.” This in turn allowed them to claim that we should no longer view these laws as tools for mastering power but only as ways to promote what Bork called “productive efficiency.”
In doing so, they simultaneously cleared the way for private monopolies to govern vast portions of our society, and established a false science of economic efficiency that made it much harder for citizens to see and understand the power thus concentrated.
By the Nineties, this counterrevolution had already resulted in a radical restructuring of almost every industrial and market system in the world. Manufacturing arts and capacities that in 1980 had been distributed among a dozen or more businesses in the United States were concentrated first in the hands of one or two corporations in America, and then often in one or two corporations abroad.
This counterrevolution also overturned social balances established at the founding. Today we still loudly lament how the pro-monopoly and pro-China policies of Reagan and Clinton destroyed the jobs of millions of U.S. factory workers. The pro-monopolists also destroyed the country’s system of independent farms and businesses, dispossessing millions of Americans of their properties.
It is hard to overstate the effects of these changes. Look at almost every crisis in America today and down the chain of causation we will find a monopolist. Inflation, shortages of drugs, the breakdown of supply chains, our industrial dependence on China. The cost of buying or renting a home or a car. How far we must drive to a hospital or to find fresh produce. The cost of medicine, milk, and chicken. 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. In every instance, the concentration of control has played a big role or even the main role.
It is harder still to overstate the intellectual effects. On their way to making the world safe for the master, Bork, Posner, and the other neoliberals also radically altered how we understand the purpose of the law, which they reconceptualized as an economic “science.” And the nature of the scientist, who they reconceptualized as an advocate for hire in the tradition of the lawyer. And the role of metaphysics in our legal thinking, through their contention that law itself is “shaped” by “economic forces.”
All of that is before we attempt to catalogue the effects of their successful effort to suspend enforcement of the laws we put in place to force all-powerful corporations to treat every person the same.
Here, too, the origins trace to Bork. In a passage toward the end of his book The Antitrust Paradox, Bork admits that price discrimination is a “difficult question.” Then, in the same sentence, he dismisses the issue entirely without bothering to argue a case for doing so. “The better guess, it seems to me, is that antitrust policy would do well to ignore price discrimination.”
It was on this wisp of whimsical reasoning that the Reagan White House decided to stop enforcing the Robinson–Patman Act, which generally prevented corporations from engaging in price discrimination against small businesses and was long a cornerstone of independent family enterprise. It was on this wisp of whimsical reasoning that the Clinton Administration in 1996 first freed online communications platforms from laws requiring them not to manipulate how people speak and share information online, long a main strut of democracy.
And it was with this wisp that political operators in the Reagan and Clinton Administrations overturned one of the two great achievements of the English Parliament’s seventeenth-century battles against royal prerogative: the requirement that powerful corporations never favor one person over another. Thus we freed the corporations that were supposed to serve us—by helping us read what we want and speak with whomever we will—to subject each of us separately to the full concentrated force of their interests and appetites.
Over the past two decades, I have issued a series of warnings about the threats posed by the new monopolists, often in these pages. Readers of Harper’s Magazine were the first to learn about the fragility of America’s supply chains. The first to learn about the antidemocratic effects of the new monopolization and its centrality to the neoliberal project. The first to understand how monopolists imposed systems of fear on our society, often while simultaneously exposing themselves to the arbitrary power of the Chinese Communist Party. The first to understand how the business models of Google and Amazon were designed to engage in mass automated extortion.
Over these same years, I also spent much of my time arguing with people who proudly see themselves as liberals in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. The question I kept asking in these conversations was how we had failed to predict that such a radical concentration of capacity and control might threaten our security and our democracy. Then, once it happened, how we had failed to see the threats and move to fix them.
It was here that I began to understand the single most dangerous effect of the neoliberal philosophy. This was to blind most of our leading economic and legal scholars to the power structures of the production and communications systems on which we all depend. And further, to destroy our understanding that liberalism is not an attitude, not a form of tolerance, but rather the political art of structuring power and behavior in ways that promote our political and spiritual liberties.
Time and again, I tried to reason with America’s leading economic thinkers. I marshaled facts I had discovered, as a business reporter, as I traced the assembly lines of Dell, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and Toyota from factory floor to the streets of Hsinchu and Ishinomaki and Chongqing. Facts I had gathered from the CEOs and editors and writers of the book publishers and news organizations that found themselves under the power of Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Time and again, I shared useful analogies I had discovered in my reading of the history of political-economic regulation, the hard-won wisdom of Coke, Madison, Douglass, Anthony, Brandeis, Du Bois, Acheson.
I cornered Fed chairs at the conference coffee table, interrogated Nobel-winning economists in their pieds-à-terre, nabbed the empty seat next to the president’s consigliere. I overstayed my welcome in dozens of congressional offices and blocked Cabinet secretaries from stumbling from Capitol Hill cocktails to the black cars idling at the curb. I cajoled bankers and insurers to share their deepest fears. I spent a small fortune on drinks for those whose job, it seemed, was to know something, anything. I pushed friendships and acquaintanceships to the edge and beyond.
Time and again, these “experts” informed me that the threats I was reporting could not actually exist. The “market,” they said, would never allow that to happen.
The economists were the worst, especially the most famous. These brightest and best of the sons of the morning, who can bully presidents and newspaper editors into exhausted submission, often as not were completely unable to comprehend—or in some cases to admit—the logical outcomes of gearing every economic system to promote the concentration of wealth and power. In response to irrefutable proof, they would mumble a few incoherent words before vanishing behind a mist of esoterica back into the ocean trenches of deep theory.
Sometimes it seemed the only person who understood my bafflement was Bork himself. In the mid-Nineties, he admitted he had been surprised by how easy his “revolution” had been. “For reasons that are not entirely clear,” he wrote, liberals had simply “abandoned this branch of the law” and carried their fights elsewhere. But Bork also made clear that he welcomed the liberals’ intellectual and political collapse. It had made it easier for him and his friends to “downsize” antitrust enforcement, to eliminate its “reckless and primitive egalitarianism.”
What is taking place now in Washington is remarkable. In July 2021, President Biden signed the Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. “Forty years ago,” he said, “we chose the wrong path . . . following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork.” The “experiment,” of “letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power,” clearly “failed,” he said in a speech. The overall result? “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” Biden concluded. “It’s exploitation.”
With the stroke of a pen, President Biden destroyed the intellectual foundations of the system of private monopoly control—of liberty for the masters—first established by Reagan in the Eighties. In place of this arch-libertarian regime, he restored the original American vision of government as a tool to break all concentrations of power and control that threaten individual liberty and democracy. It was the most radical change of political-economic philosophy, in the name of the people, since Louis Brandeis helped President Wilson modernize the American system of liberty for the industrial age.
The past three years have been the greatest period of anti-monopoly enforcement in U.S. history. The DOJ’s cases against Google are but two of the many pioneering antitrust lawsuits Jonathan Kanter’s team has argued, including one against Apple. Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile has sued Amazon and Microsoft, while moving forward a case against Facebook.
Biden has also adopted an entirely new approach to international security and economics. Following his lead, U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai overturned the pro-monopoly, pro-China policies put in place by President Clinton. The result was a vision of rebuilding American factories and protecting U.S. national security from “concentration of production . . . in the People’s Republic of China” that is vastly more effective than anything Donald Trump achieved under the banner of America First.
President Biden has also revived the idea that the state should use direct investments and other forms of industrial policy to achieve specific pro-competition goals. The Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, properly understood, are among the most important anti-monopoly bills ever passed by Congress, providing nearly one trillion dollars to break the monopoly choke points that dangerously restrict global production of semiconductors, electric vehicles, and solar panels.
The Biden White House has also taken a far more aggressive approach than any administration since the Seventies to protecting individuals from the power and misbehavior of large corporations, including by regulating new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light. But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.
Within the context of Biden’s restoration of America’s traditional anti-monopoly vision, the technical solutions to the threats posed by the power and behavior of Google and its peers appear quite simple. One is to reduce the size and power of these corporations by breaking them into smaller pieces. This is what the advertising-technologies lawsuit aims to do, and will likely play a role in the resolution of the search case. But after forty years of radical laissez-faire policy, these actions alone will fall far short of addressing the ultimate threats posed by Google and its peers. Even if the government wins all these cases, Google alone will still control vast realms of our online lives, and will still be largely free to manipulate each of us individually for its own private purposes. None of these cases, for instance, is likely to result in the full restoration of the bright-line rules established with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, rules based in part on the lessons of our battles against authoritarian monarchy in the seventeenth century. None, in short, will require corporations that control essential services to treat every individual the same way.
Today every American who believes in democracy should be scrambling to institutionalize President Biden’s vision for rebuilding the American system of liberty and to carry these fights to their conclusion. This is especially true of the Democratic Party in this moment of sharp transition to a younger generation. Biden has delivered the greatest set of policy wins for regular people since the New Deal, along with the most important actions to protect national security since Truman. And he has cleared the way for dramatic further advance in the years to come. And yet, of this most pragmatic restoration of the basic rules of liberal democracy, most liberals know little if anything. This includes much of Vice President Kamala Harris’s team, which has shown little awareness that in this ongoing effort to protect human liberty and democracy in the digital age, she will be inheriting the most important political challenge of our time.
This brings us back to the Supreme Court on July 1, 2024. The two questions—of former president Trump’s immunity for actions he took to overturn a democratic election, and of whether Google and its peers enjoy a license to manipulate the speech and thought of every American—are essentially the same. In each, the court was asked to bless an institution with the prerogative to act as arbitrary judge “over all their subjects, and in all causes.”
In their twin decisions that day, the nine justices reduced our future to a choice between two forms of autocracy.
In one, some future U.S. president—for simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine Donald Trump, with Stephen Miller at his side—will figure out how to use the office’s new immunities to bend Google and its peers to the president’s own ends, capturing all the power of those corporations.
The other? That the bosses of these corporations will easily slip any such snare. That even if Trump wins in November, they will tolerate him only until he stops serving as their sock puppet in chief. And that all of us, every American of every political stripe, will find ourselves equally subject to Google’s personal system of law.
At the Republican National Convention in July, we saw these two rival visions of ultimate power in a tense embrace. The broker of peace was J. D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president. Vance sometimes poses as a critic of Big Tech, which helps Trump present his ticket as populist in nature. But Vance’s real value derives from his background in Silicon Valley and the connections he made there before he turned to politics. This gives him the ability to raise huge amounts of money and other forms of support from such enemies of democracy as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
It’s hard to imagine any balance of power that would work for both Trump and the corporations. After all, in the end only one actor gets to be the master in the middle. So perhaps we should regard what we witnessed in Milwaukee as a sort of Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact for our times, an agreement to put off the final battle for supremacy to some future moment.
There is a third path, and it lies right in front of us. In 2018, Patrick Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed, in which he blames virtually every evil on liberalism, or rather the selfishness he contends is unleashed by liberalism. Many liberals—led by former president Barack Obama—praised Deneen’s project.
The time has come for liberals to recognize that we’ve been living in a post-liberal world since the Reagan Administration overturned the American system of liberty in 1981. And that Deneen’s contention that liberalism failed us is backward. Liberalism did not fail us; we failed liberalism.
For the first time in decades, we know how to beat back the vision of the autocrats and how to complete our renewal of liberal democracy. Relearn the martial arts of liberalism—relearn how to shape the laws to structure our own political and spiritual liberty—and we’ll soon discover entirely new ways to master our own society and master our own selves. The future is ours to make.
