The future of the American economy is being decided in Washington DC’s District Court, a squat grey building on Constitution Avenue. In May, I followed corporate lawyers in dark suits into Courtroom 22A on the second floor and took a seat. On my left sat Meta’s legal team; on my right were lawyers from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the agency founded in 1914 to break up monopolies and keep the economy competitive. The FTC was suing Meta, Facebook’s parent company, for buying Instagram and WhatsApp in the early 2010s allegedly to smother competition. I then took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Down the corridor on the right, a judge was deciding how to enforce his ruling that Google had an illegal monopoly over search engines.
What is decided inside this nondescript building matters more than most congressional budgets. That’s if you think the structure of the economy is more important than the money which flows around it. This is the front line in the fight against monopolistic power: an insidious but ever-present fact of the US economy.
Since the late-19th century, in various guises, the antitrust movement has challenged this kind of corporate tyranny. The British-born, 36-year-old Lina Khan is now the leading antitrust voice in America. She served as the FTC chair under Joe Biden and relitigated the case against Meta. When we met recently, she told me, “We can’t view these firms as being stewards of the public good, right? They’re looking out for their own interests, and that’s why we need the government to have a real seat at the table.”
Khan’s theory is that these companies have squashed competition and acquired insurmountable market share by absorbing suppliers and competitors. In practice, this has meant that Amazon could own the predominant online marketplace and sell its products there. For years, Google blocked companies from selling adverts next to its search bar, even though it was a player in the very marketplace it controlled. Or consider the false choice that awaits you in supermarkets: a vast variety of brands, all owned by a few huge conglomerates, such as Unilever, Mars and Nestlé. Why is Boeing the only major aircraft manufacturer left in America?
Corporate tyranny used to be seen as much as a threat to democracy as political despotism. On the Senate floor in 1890, senator John Sherman said: “If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.” The Sherman Antitrust Act, named after the Senator, was used to break up robber-baron fiefdoms, such as Standard Oil, marking the end of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. During the New Deal, in the 1930s, Congressman Wright Patman tried to impeach the former treasury secretary Andrew Mellon.
But, as Matt Stoller chronicles in Goliath: The 100-year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, memories of the tyranny of corporate power faded after the war and the antitrust movement was attacked from the left and the right. Neoliberals promoted the financialisation of the economy in the name of the free market, spawning vast conglomerates. Meanwhile, liberal intellectuals such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Richard Hofstadter saw populism as a threat to technocratic rule, scoffing at the idea that small business owners might know more than elites about how the economy should be run. Politics became about distribution and consumerism. As Khan said, “There was an effort to try to place antitrust as a domain outside the reach of members of Congress [and] relegate it much more to the technocrats.”
In 1978, Robert Bork, a professor at Yale Law School published The Antitrust Paradox, which argues that monopolies should only be broken up when consumers are charged higher prices, not merely when competition is threatened. By 1982, the Reagan administration had published rules applying that principle to mergers. A new consensus emerged: regulators stood by as airlines, technology companies and pharmaceuticals went on rampant acquisition sprees. The resulting lower prices were celebrated, while the negative impact on employee rights, wages, offshoring and innovation were ignored.
The economy was removed from the public square and handed to technocrats. Financialisation and corporate power were presented as immutable facts, rather than policy choices that could be contested. “It is part of the vanity of modern man that he can decide the character of his economic system,” Galbraith wrote. Economics became the preserve of economists, certain truths became unquestionable. Why query the power of Silicon Valley when the price to scroll is zero?
This consensus was upended by the great financial crash, progressives’ desire to blame their 2016 loss on Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Donald Trump’s subsequent anti-globalisation crusade. The new scepticism towards corporate power created space for the antitrust movement to reignite. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders said the wall between investment and commercial banks should be restored. Senator Elizabeth Warren called for the Big Tech companies to be broken up. That same year, Warren had dinner in her Senate office with Barry Lynn, a godfather figure in the modern anti-trust movement, and a rising antitrust researcher named Lina Khan.
Khan soon published a paper called Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, a twist on the title of Bork’s influential book. It argued Amazon sustained large losses to gain market share and expand into all areas of its business, from warehousing to delivery vans. Within a year, the paper was read around 150,000 times. When Jon Stewart had her on The Daily Show last year, he said Apple had told him not have her on his podcast. He wasn’t joking.
We met on Capitol Hill in late April for 45 minutes just after she’d got off the train from New York, where she lives. Two members of her staff perched in the corner, anxious to whisk her away to meetings that afternoon. She was reluctant to talk about herself, rarely dropping the lawyer’s predilection for answering in neat, logical and cautious paragraphs. She skirted around partisan attacks and withheld her blows. Her reserved manner seemed more a mark of steeliness than a lack of confidence.
Khan was born in London and grew up in Golders Green before moving to New York at age 11. Her time at Williams College was broken up by a year at Exeter College, Oxford, where she took papers in the politics, philosophy and economics course. When asked by the New Yorker what had politicised her, she replied, “Most kids are aware of bullies, and of who has power and who doesn’t have power.”
What did this British-born antitrust leader think of Labour? In January, Rachel Reeves appointed a former Amazon executive as interim chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Britain’s version of the FTC. The CMA was once seen as a leader in antitrust by populists in Washington. When I suggested Labour was cowing to Big Tech, Khan said: “I think there are a lot of cautionary tales about what happens when you try to hitch national sovereign goals to a private tech company, and what they do with that power.”
After a stint at the Open Markets Foundation under Barry Lynn, she had to choose between a reporting job at the Wall Street Journal and a law degree at Yale. She chose the latter. In her classroom, a portrait of Robert Bork watched over her, and the main antitrust professor was George L Priest, an old friend of the price-theory proponent. The paucity of antitrust acolytes at Yale did not stop her from eventually acceding to the FTC chair.
At the FTC, she had started to undo the “extreme consolidation crisis” which had festered for decades. But she thinks she has only dented the well-armoured status quo. “There is only so much you can undo in three and a half years against a 40-year backdrop,” she said between bites of her Cava salad.
“There is generally an effort right now to privatise what had previously been public,” she warned, “and people’s personal data is a core part of that. Some of what we’re seeing with AI is certainly going to accelerate it.”
At times like these, when technology sprints forward, tech evangelists speak of an “inevitable march of progress”. But Khan thinks this is a “real misconception”. Progress, she argues, is not inevitable – “we as a public have the ability to actually steer what direction we go in.” Concentrating control of core technologies in the hands of a few means “you are effectively going to have a handful of companies, if not a handful of individual executives, with outsized power”.
Antitrust now marks a core dividing line within the Democratic Party. On one side are the “abundantists”; on the other, the left populists who champion curtailing monopolies. The abundantists’ manifesto is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, which argues that over-regulation – especially by Democrats – has made building infrastructure, including housing, nearly impossible. One claims state overreach blocks economic fairness; the other sees growth-choking monopolies as the true culprit.
Khan thinks any analysis of the economy that “entirely omits a diagnosis of the role of unchecked corporate power is pretty surprising, striking, and at odds with the reality of what’s happening.”
That corporate power is excessive and the state has created a web of impassable regulations are not mutually incompatible. But the factions have taken root. Broadly speaking, left populists are more likely to think woke was a mistake, immigration was too high under Biden and the rich should contribute more to state coffers. The abundance bros are more likely to dream of an Obama third term that builds high-speed rail lines.
Antitrust is an obscure and technical facet of left populism, but it is also one of the most powerful tools for dismantling the neoliberal scaffolding that has directed wealth to the top and concentrated economic power in the hands of a few. Khan’s appearance on The Daily Show speaks to her rising influence within the party. Her presence at Zohran Mamdani’s victory party after he won the Democratic nomination for New York mayor points to her sympathies. (Mamdani has promised to challenge the market power of New York’s major utility provider, Con Edison.)
The split, she believes, is not irreconcilable. “Antitrust is entirely pro-growth, right? It is identifying what are the private choke points and bottlenecks to greater production.” She said a string of lawsuits had shown cartels formed in the housing supply chain led to fixed prices, for instance. “People across the full spectrum of the party are identifying specific ways that unchecked corporate power is making life worse for people.”
The movement has supporters on both sides of the aisle. Populist nationalists such as Steve Bannon see antitrust as a key tool to break up the “globalist” economic establishment. Khan and Bannon were photographed together at a conference in April. She was careful to distance herself from Bannon, albeit with a dose of intrigue. “Well, look, he clearly has views that I fiercely disagree with,” she told me, adding that he’s “calling out the oligarchs and what he sees as potential corruption, which is interesting”.
When I profiled Bannon back in February we argued about whether Trump would back antitrust legislation. The phalanx of tech billionaires over Trump’s shoulder at the inauguration, his decades-long affection for the wealthy and his amenability to flattery gave me pause. Bannon, a nationalist populist who accused Silicon Valley of presiding over an “apartheid state”, thought Trump would prise open monopolists’ hold on America. He had been encouraged by Trump’s appointment of Gail Slater, a monopoly sceptic at the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, and Andrew Ferguson, whose previous critique of Big Tech pivoted around censorship, at the FTC. Bannon would be sorely disappointed.
In July, two senior antitrust lawyers were fired after the Department of Justice allowed the large technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy a major competitor, Juniper Networks, fusing the second and third largest providers of wireless networking. The Wall Street Journal reported that Slater did not support the final deal. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team pushed it through after aggressive lobbying.
Trump’s deal-making style means that corporations are splurging on lobbyists to cultivate relationships with senior administration officials. He was elected by a working-class coalition in order to rebalance the economy away from the oligarchs. But antitrust, which requires a strong Congress and independent federal agencies, is impossible under Trump’s power grab. On 13 August, Trump revoked a Biden-era executive order instructing the federal government to make the economy more competitive. For now, the oligarchs are winning.
The hope for breaking up corporate power therefore lies with the Democrats. The abundantists’ increasing grip on the party should worry anyone who wants power to be dispersed. The question, as Stoller suggests, is not whether a market is regulated or not. The question is whether markets are regulated by the government or by big business. Abundantism is an easy way out for corporatist Democrats who don’t want to stand up to their donors. Kamala Harris surrounded herself with billionaires during her 2024 presidential campaign. Under pressure from her donors, she refused to say whether she would keep Khan on as FTC chair, opting for a substanceless campaign centred around identity politics and what she called the “opportunity economy”. That did not work.
The risk now is that Trump’s assault on democracy means Democrats forget that old truth that political tyranny has a corporate twin. As Khan said, Trump’s attack on the rule of law and federal agencies is “totally antithetical” to the government holding “private power to account”. Forgetting the connection between the two would mean, once again, that the Democrats become the defenders of the status quo.
[See also: The Bedouins exiled in Palestine]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap
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