‘Democrats are in thrall to the idea that corporate consolidation is America’s biggest, and maybe only, problem.…’ (Jonathan Chait via The Atlantic)

Chait, who has had a career as a political reporter at The New Republic, New York and The Atlantic, argues that anti-monopoly thinking has become a dominant force in Democratic economic policy, driven largely by the Open Markets Institute and its central figure, Barry C. Lynn, who sees corporate consolidation as the root of much of America’s social, political, and economic dysfunction. In Chait’s view, this dangerously monocausal worldview moved antitrust politics to the center of the Biden administration, particularly through the influence of Lynn’s protégé Lina Khan, appointed to the Federal Trade Commission. For this movement, antitrust is not merely a narrow matter of consumer prices but part of a broader project to decentralize power and curb corporate dominance.

Chait regards this emphasis as useful but badly overextended. He argues that it neglects other sources of contemporary dysfunction, including inflation, social-media addiction, cultural alienation, political polarization, and the Democratic Party’s loss of working-class support. If allowed to dominate policy, he warns, the anti-monopoly framework would be intellectually erosive, politically divisive, and likely to fail. Its vocabulary of resentment toward concentrated power may be emotionally satisfying, but Chait sees it as risking the rupture of older Democratic coalitions while failing to deliver the salvation it promises.