On a dusty outcrop in front of the Hollywood sign last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched the most significant antitrust case of the Trump era: a 12-state challenge to the Ellison family’s efforts to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and fold its media stable into their Paramount-Skydance empire.

By Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland had issued a two-week temporary restraining order to put the deal on ice. The states, the judge wrote, had presented “compelling evidence” that the combined market share resulting from the proposed merger is “likely to violate antitrust laws.”

It was the latest act in a high-stakes political thriller – as an oligarch backed by an authoritarian seeks to buy his way to the heart of political and economic power.

Twelve states have pooled roughly $20 million to challenge a deal blessed and backed by President Trump, and to take on one of the most powerful families in the country.

The clean, early win signals that Bonta and his fellow AGs may be on track to deliver the biggest setback yet to the American right’s efforts to consolidate political and economic power and take over yet more organs of the American media.

The Ellisons made their fortune through the software giant Oracle. But they have built up holdings across tech, traditional media, social media, and beyond. The $110 billion deal for Warner Bros. is partly financed by sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Ellisons had been hoping to close the deal as soon as this week. If the deal is blocked or delayed much further, they’ll be on the hook for significant financial penalties to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders, per the terms of their agreement.

Larry Ellison – Oracle’s co-founder and one of the richest men alive – is personally guaranteeing the equity through his family trust. The deal itself was struck by his son, Paramount CEO David Ellison. If it doesn’t close by midnight, September 30, Paramount will be on the hook for a $7 million a day “ticking fee” to Warner Bros. shareholders.

If it’s blocked entirely, Paramount owes Warner Bros. Discovery $7 billion – a termination fee they offered themselves.

Executive Producers

Both Ellisons have become close Trump allies, with Larry Ellison donating $45 million to a dark money political group supporting Trump’s 2024 re-election, according to a Wall Street Journal report last month. The Department of Justice greenlit the merger in June, with political leadership reportedly sidelining career officials who had been leaning toward challenging the merger.

A blocked deal will frustrate the family’s efforts to use their Oracle fortune to buy their way into the top tier of America’s corporate oligarchy – alongside names like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Murdoch.

For Trump, it would be both a political embarrassment and a blow to his long-running efforts to project power over publishers, journalists, and the entertainment industry.

The president himself has relished the prospect of the Ellisons’ doing to CNN what they did to CBS: Gutting the newsroom and handing it to ideological allies. There’s reportedly already panic in CNN’s ranks, as staff jostle for position to avoid layoffs and demonstrate political alignment.

While the impact on news is only referenced obliquely in the lawsuit, AG Bonta in his remarks made clear it is a key concern: “This merger will mean fewer journalists informing the electorate,” he said, a process that could eventually sound a “death knell” for US democracy.

For the American public, it is a tale of drama, corruption, and intrigue.

The blockbuster merger – the largest ever in Hollywood – would mark the fusion of big tech, media, and political power into one sprawling empire, concentrated in a single family among America’s ever more naked system of political patronage. It would also further collapse the old distinctions between Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, and Washington into a single network of billionaires, political patrons, and media barons.

“Antitrust enforcement is democracy’s check on oligarchy,” said Attorney General Bonta announcing the case, “a check on the elite few who think they’re above the law.”

Avengers Assemble

Since the start of his second term, Trump has wielded antitrust law as a tool of personal and political power – to punish enemies, pressure newsrooms, and reward donors.

State attorneys general have repeatedly stepped into the breach. Using their own authority to enforce federal antitrust laws, they’ve moved to frustrate the president’s ability to deliver on quid pro quos – and to stall the consolidation of economic, political, and media power in the hands of the increasingly extreme American right.

The cases are mounting.

California is leading a coalition of eight states that has stalled Nexstar’s takeover of Tegna – a media merger Trump himself said would “knock out the fake news.”

Colorado is leading twelve states and DC in an unprecedented bid to have a federal court throw out the Justice Department’s settlement of its case against Hewlett Packard’s $14 billion acquisition of rival Juniper Networks – a deal DOJ political leadership waved through on the eve of trial, over the objections of career staff, and amid allegations that Trump-world lobbyists had brokered the terms.

Then there was New York’s successful challenge to Live Nation–Ticketmaster’s monopoly, after President Trump personally intervened to withdraw DOJ lawyers and attempt to settle the case mid-trial – reportedly following calls from political fixers.

Indeed, state AGs have this year been driving the most consequential antitrust cases in the country. And this is by far the biggest yet.

The Plot Thickens

As with most courtroom dramas, the battle will be fought both inside and outside the courtroom.

Paramount, in making its case for the deal, promised a long-term commitment to release at least 30 films a year. It also delivered a number of sharp political threats aimed at putting pressure on Bonta and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

There was a leak that Warner Bros. and Paramount were weighing an exit from California, which would constitute a colossal blow to jobs and tax revenue. There was a rumor that the Ellisons wanted to spin off CNN anyway. And allies of the Ellisons suggested that taxpayers could end up footing the bill for Paramount’s mounting ticking fees if the states delayed the deal, but failed to block it.

Bonta dismissed the gambits as “a last-ditch effort to try to blackmail my office and the attorneys general into allowing an illegal merger.”

On the surface, the states’ 29-page legal argument is a narrow Clayton Act claim, an argument that the transaction would unlawfully eliminate competition in three markets: the distribution of wide-release theatrical films, the distribution of blockbuster movies, and the licensing of basic cable channels.

According to the complaint, the merger would fuse two of the five major film distributors, leaving just four – Paramount, Disney, Universal, Sony – controlling more than 85% of wide-release films and 93% of blockbusters by box office. It would also leave two of the five major owners of basic cable channels – Paramount and Disney – in control of 59 percent of all basic cable in the United States.

The likely result, according to the suit: Layoffs and production cuts. Higher ticket prices and subscription fees. Fewer stories told and viewpoints represented. Fewer opportunities for actors, directors, writers, and production crews.

Supporting Cast

While the states’ case is the feature event, they aren’t the only ones fighting to stop the deal: A handful of Paramount+ subscribers as well as the Writers Guild of America have also filed suits – the latter arguing that the new studio would become the largest buyer of film and TV writing nationwide, with the power to drive down pay and shrink the number of projects greenlit each year.

The Writers Guild suit contends that decades of consolidation have reshaped Hollywood’s market structure: When studios own the production companies, streaming services and TV networks, getting a rejection doesn’t just mean losing one buyer – it can mean losing access to an entire ecosystem, with limited alternatives.

Michael Schur – the showrunner behind Parks & Recreation and The Good Place – captured the feeling among a number of creators quoted in the complaint: “Something fundamental [has] broken in the market.”

The states and the WGA may soon be the last lines of defense.

In Brussels, the European Commission yesterday greenlit the merger, conditioned on Paramount ending its European distribution joint venture with NBC Universal. Some worry the EU’s reluctance to step in may reflect a growing sense in Europe that the enforcers should reserve actions against high-profile US corporations for instances where European interests are significantly and directly threatened, and not interfere in US domestic fights that may antagonize President Trump.

In Britain, the culture secretary has said she is “minded to intervene” on media-plurality grounds, and a referral to an in-depth probe could stall the deal for months. While many observers initially read her comments as a form of leverage, the states’ case – and a new Prime Minister looking to try a fresh approach – may now strengthen her resolve.

The Story So Far…

The Ellisons’ media empire has been decades in the making.

David Ellison founded Skydance Productions in 2006 at age 23, bankrolled by substantial backing from his father. After 15 years as Paramount’s junior partner, Skydance moved to acquire the much larger company – roughly twice its size – as Paramount struggled with declining revenues, a shrinking TV business, and growing financial pressures. The deal was again made possible by significant financial backing from David Ellison’s father.

The deal first entered the political news cycle in July 2025, when Paramount settled President Trump’s dubious 60 Minutes lawsuit for $16 million – a payment that Stephen Colbert derided as a “big fat bribe.” Days later, CBS canceled the top-rated late-night show, a decision Trump publicly celebrated.

After the merger was blessed by the Trump administration, the Ellisons put CBS News under the leadership of Bari Weiss, a right-wing ideologue with no broadcast news background.

By September 2025, Paramount was circling Warner Bros. Discovery. The junior company again seeking to acquire a larger rival, again backed substantially by Larry Ellison’s fortune.

But Paramount was not alone. Netflix and Comcast were making bids for Warner Bros. film and television studios and HBO streaming assets.

Paramount repeatedly ratcheted up its offer aggressively, increased its termination fee, and ultimately launched a hostile tender offer after Warner’s board backed a competing Netflix deal.

The bidding war took an unexpected turn when Netflix abruptly withdrew from the process just hours after its co-CEO visited the White House, prompting Democratic lawmakers to demand answers about what was said behind closed doors.

By the end of the process, Paramount had raised its initial reported offer from $20 a share to $31 a share – a roughly 55 percent increase – while also agreeing to cover the $2.8 billion termination fee owed to Netflix and offering a $7 billion reverse termination fee if regulators blocked the deal.

What’s Next

The immediate battle will play out over the coming weeks.

Martínez-Olguín has scheduled an August 3 hearing on whether to grant the states a full preliminary injunction, which would essentially keep the deal on ice for months – or years – while litigation moves forward. Such an order will undoubtedly be subject to appeal.

Paramount, meanwhile, is seeking to schedule an emergency three-day hearing in the latter half of August instead, in which it will call witnesses and seek to show that both the Writers Guild case and the states’ case are meritless. That would allow them to sidestep an extended injunction, before the ticking fee accrues, and proceed to close the deal.

If they fail, they will be in a tough position.

Beginning October 1, Paramount faces the $7 million fee for each day the deal does not close – and Judge Martínez-Olguín has hinted that she has little sympathy for the company’s private costs when weighed against the public interest.

Publicly, Paramount has said they intend to fight, suggesting they’re ready to appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court. At the same time, they could also negotiate a settlement with the states, although it’s likely those conversations have already flatlined for the states to have reached this point.

Paramount will not be lacking for legal expertise. Alltogether, the corporations have hired half a dozen law firms – including star lawyer Jeffrey Kessler, who many of the same states had hired to close their Ticketmaster antitrust case after the federal DOJ settled mid-trial.

In addition to the $45 million Larry Ellison paid to back Trump’s re-election, the Ellisons have directed millions more to other Trump projects. The families are now deeply entangled.

The morning after the inauguration, Oracle received top billing in the administration’s $500 billion AI datacenter investment announcement, and went on to play a major role in negotiations over TikTok’s future in the United States. Oracle is also a corporate sponsor of Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned group staging celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday – including the UFC night on the White House lawn, streamed on Paramount+.

It is exactly that form of consolidation of political power – a brew of media, information systems, money and political patronage – that the attorneys general are seeking to challenge, with the far narrower tool of antitrust law as one of the few remaining checks on concentrated power.

This merger must be stopped, Bonta said, because it gives too much power to too few people: “America has no kings, in government or the economy.”

Open Markets Institute has helped lead opposition to the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger in both the United States and Europe. OMI’s Center for Media and Digital Governance lodged a submission to the House Judiciary Subcommittee’s antitrust hearing opposing the deal, a submission to the European Commission urging a full investigation, and joined dozens of European civil society groups outlining the risks of the deal. Open Markets also urged the states to take action, and invited Californian Attorney General Rob Bonta to serve as the opening keynote speaker at a June 24 conference on Capitol Hill titled The Next American Revolution: Breaking Oligarchy and Making a New Democracy.

In barely 18 months, the second Trump presidency has thrown into sharp, painful relief the threats the anti-monopoly movement has warned about for decades: Corporate consolidation and the self-serving political power it buys. Online communications and media platforms of unprecedented reach, controlled by anti-democratic billionaires. The naked fusion of extreme private wealth and brazen authoritarian rule.

Join us Wednesday, June 24, as the Open Markets Institute convenes a day-long conference to help defenders of liberal democracy win the greatest battle of today. We’re calling it ‘The Next American Revolution: Breaking Oligarchy and Building a New Democracy’. You can register to join us here.

We’ll be joined by leaders at the front lines of this fight – including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, and Chris Van Hollen; Representatives Greg Casar and Chris Deluzio; California Attorney General Rob Bonta; Nobel economist Daron Acemoglu; and candidates remaking the map, from independent Dan Osborn in Nebraska to Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania.

We’re also bringing together some of the sharpest political strategists, pollsters, and movement leaders in the country: Veteran pollster Celinda Lake; Joseph Geevarghese of Our Revolution; PCCC co-founder Adam Green; Chris Deluzio’s Chief of Staff Matthew Koos; Adam Carlson of Zenith Research; and Middle Seat Partner Elizabeth Bennett.

And we’re convening the policymakers and experts defining the agenda: Former USTR Katherine Tai; Former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya; Former State Department Senior Advisor Aya Ibrahim; NYT columnist, author, and data scientist Julia Angwin; Journalist, Puck News founder and author Julia Ioffe; legal scholar and author Zephyr Teachout; Kate Brennan of the AI Now Institute; and Center for International Policy’s Matthew Duss.

We’d love to have you with us as well.

The challenge is enormous. So too our central questions: How does the pro-democracy movement break the stranglehold of concentrated power, and win the durable majority needed to deliver the structural reforms this moment demands?

How do we restore the right of everyday Americans to author their own lives and build a future for their families, instead of living inside systems built to extract from them?

And how do we fight back against the capture of the information system itself – as a few mega-billionaires capture control over digital platforms like Google and X, traditional publications including the Washington Post and CBS News, and social media as well – at the very moment we most need journalism to check these concentrations of power?

This conference is built to move from diagnosis to action. Across the day, our panels will help attendees better understand what actually wins:

• How do we tell a bigger story about power, freedom, democracy, and affordability – with a governing agenda to match it?

• What can we learn from America’s anti-monopoly tradition: From the founding to the first Gilded Age to now?

• What does an effective populist playbook look like? What does the polling show, which wedge issues are winning races, and where are campaigns keep leaving votes on the table?

• Whose interests does our foreign policy actually serve, and how to take it back from the oligarchs?

• How do we effectively channel anger and anxiety about AI and its Big Tech owners into action, before a handful of companies write the future for us?

This is a moment of American oligarchy – exactly the kind of dominance this country was founded to resist, and the defining political challenge of our time.

A threat this large demands a response just as ambitious. On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, it falls to us to break that grip, return power to the people, and rebuild institutions to stall its recurrence.

If you work in politics, policy, organizing, or journalism, we want you with us. The founders sparked a revolution against rule by the few. Join us to strike that spark once again.

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Minutes later, lawyers for the states emailed Nexstar’s attorneys to repeat a request they had made twice the week prior: Don’t close the deal while the case is pending.

They received no response.

Instead, the filing appears to have triggered a sprint – coordinated between Nexstar, Tegna, and the Trump administration – to close the deal before any court could stop them.

The following afternoon, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission announced it had signed off on the merger, waiving an ownership cap it had never waived before. It was a “rubber stamp” decision made “behind closed doors, ” said the FCC’s sole remaining Democratic commissioner in a terse statement. The same day, Trump’s Department of Justice also blessed the takeover.

Within hours, Nexstar publicly announced it had closed the deal, thanking President Trump for moving approvals forward. (Weeks earlier, Trump had posted that his administration should “get that deal done!” in order to “knock out the Fake News.”)

It was only at 7:45am the next morning that Nexstar finally replied to the states’ email: “The relief sought in your complaint is no longer available.”

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The Nexstar-Tegna courtroom drama – a $6.2 billion battle for control over airwaves reaching 80% of American households – is the latest in a series of high-profile antitrust cases in which states are directly challenging the Trump administration’s ever more blatant use of antitrust enforcement, or lack thereof, as a tool to consolidate authoritarian power and control.

As we reported in a recent Liberty and Power, the President has used these tactics to punish enemies, shape corporate news ownership, and reward financial supporters. He is openly perverting the very antimonopoly laws designed more than a century ago to prevent exactly this – the corruption of democratic governance by concentrated corporate power.

[Missed last week’s piece? Read it here – no paywall.]

This week, we turn to the generals leading the fight: The states’ attorneys general who are acting as a bulwark against Trump’s consolidation of economic, political and media power. Together, they are now leading the biggest and most consequential antitrust cases in the country.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta

Rob Bonta commands the largest state antitrust team in the country – 33 dedicated attorneys plus a healthcare team that has a significant antitrust focus, as well as expert support staff.

Bonta is not only taking the lead on the Nexstar-Tegna TV case, but has strongly hinted that he may also challenge the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger – a deal which would place CNN and CBS under the same pro-Trump ownership.

The proposed $110 billion deal has sent shockwaves across California, with concerns about mass layoffs, the hollowing out of a major Hollywood film studio, and the downstream impact of such unprecedented consolidation. Bonta has pledged a “vigorous” review, and is widely expected to formally challenge the merger.

His team is also running a major case against Amazon. The ongoing lawsuit, originally filed in 2022, alleges that by forcing sellers to agree not to sell products cheaper elsewhere, Amazon is using its dominance to set a price floor for all online goods.

While Bonta is bringing the case under California’s consumer-friendly state laws, Washington DC’s Attorney General Brian Schwalb is leading a similar case under federal law. If either succeeds, it will have major ramifications for Amazon’s entire business model.

There is cause for optimism. Since taking office in 2021, Bonta has notched a series of big wins, including a coalition case with New York, Utah, North Carolina and others, that secured a $700 million settlement against Google for its anticompetitive control of the Android app marketplace.

Bonta’s team also won a $50 million settlement against Vitol and SK Energy for colluding to push up gasoline pump prices. The Attorney General has championed new laws that would outlaw algorithmic price-fixing and stiffen antitrust penalties.

Since his appointment, Rob Bonta has driven a significant expansion in his antitrust team, promoting former NASA engineer Paula Blizzard to run the division after she assisted in a series of major tech cases. Blizzard has sharpened the office’s rhetoric and signaled a willingness to pursue criminal cases – a shift that prompted a flurry of client notes from law firms urging companies to tighten their compliance programs.

In the Nexstar case, the judge appears receptive to Bonta’s arguments.

A week after the merging companies announced their deal was done, Chief Judge Troy Nunley issued a temporary restraining order finding the deal presumptively unlawful. The court is likely to issue a full injunction to enable the case – which has now been joined by Nexstar rival DirecTV – to be heard.

In his initial order, Judge Nunley showed appropriate skepticism for Nexstar’s argument that the merger –  which it chose to rush ahead with while two court cases were pending – was now somehow irreversible.

New York Attorney General Letitia James

When Donald Trump personally intervened in the Live Nation Entertainment/Ticketmaster case mid-trial last month – surprising his own DOJ lawyers by urging a settlement one week into arguments – Letitia James led a coalition of bipartisan state attorneys general to take the case forward.

The coalition hired aggressive private litigator Jeffrey Kessler to deliver a commanding closing to the Manhattan jury – a move aimed at demonstrating the limits of Trump’s power, and showing that making backroom deals with the White House can only take you so far (read more on that case here.)

James’ team – the second-largest state antitrust team – has extensive experience with major national cases, including being part of the effort to secure the $700 million Google app store settlement. Headed by veteran litigator Elinor Hoffmann, the team has also joined cases on generic drug pricing, the NCAA’s anticompetitive rules for college athletes, ‘no-poach’ labor cases, and an anticompetitive deal between Redfin and Zillow, which operates StreetEasy.

Not every effort has succeeded: James co-led a challenge to Trump’s first-term approval of the Sprint–T-Mobile merger and led a state coalition effort to break up Meta’s social media monopoly. Both cases ultimately failed.

Eric Stock, who headed New York’s antitrust unit from 2013 to 2016 and now works in private practice, says that the NY AG office has greatly boosted its national role. “They’re leaders and coalition builders in that office,” he said. “It’s a very professional team with a lot of experienced enforcers.”

The office has also notched several distinctly local wins: That includes busting a Syracuse ski resort that bought and shuttered its only rival; catching two Manhattan hop-on/hop-off bus operators who secretly carved up the market while running each other’s buses to fake competition; and working with the FTC to force the Price Chopper-Tops grocery merger to shed 11 upstate stores in towns that would otherwise have been left with only a single supermarket option.

The jury is currently deliberating its verdict in the Live Nation Entertainment/Ticketmaster case.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser

When a seemingly innocuous case blew apart the Justice Department’s antitrust team last year – and revealed the extent of the political interference at the DOJ – Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser took up the fight.

The drama began just days after Trump’s inauguration, when the DOJ filed a challenge to Hewlett Packard’s $14 billion merger with major rival Juniper Networks on the grounds that it would substantially lessen competition.

As the Wall Street Journal later reported, Hewlett Packard then hired Mike Davis – self-proclaimed “best fixer in Washington” and a close friend of the Trump family – to make the case go away.

According to the Journal, Davis allegedly called Slater and threatened to “destroy your job” if she didn’t settle the case. The DOJ ultimately fired two of Slater’s deputies – Roger Alford and Bill Rinner – and approved the merger. Slater herself was forced out earlier this year.

In a speech to the Tech Policy Institute Aspen Forum, Alford later described the incident as a “pay-to-play” scandal and accused DOJ officials of perverting justice – framing the incident as a battle between “genuine MAGA reformers” and “wealthy and well-connected” lobbyists.

That settlement is now at the center of two interventions led by Weiser – one direct challenge to the HPE-Juniper merger itself, and one intervention into the Tunney Act process, in which courts must examine merger settlements for risks of corruption.

Other state AGs have strongly backed Weiser’s efforts. A spokesperson for Bonta’s office, which is supporting the action, said that the case goes far beyond the merger itself, and “raises serious questions about the integrity of government processes.”

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Weiser came to the role of Attorney General less as an experienced prosecutor and more as – in the words of one admiring practitioner – a “true antitrust nerd.” He previously worked in both the Clinton and Obama DOJ antitrust divisions and taught competition, technology, and telecommunications law at the University of Colorado Law School before running for AG in 2018.

Weiser is now running for governor in a primary against Senator Michael Bennet.

As Attorney General, Weiser has made an outsized impact with a lean team in a midsize state – building enforcement capacity by recruiting former federal officials as volunteer counselors; supporting the rewriting of the state’s antitrust laws; and holding town halls across the state while soliciting thousands of public survey responses on major cases.

The impact has been significant. During the final days of the first Trump Administration, Colorado co-led the case against Google for illegally entrenching its search monopoly by paying device makers like Apple to install it as the default option. Weiser’s team extracted a statewide 5G buildout and 2,000 jobs from T-Mobile as a condition of settling Colorado’s challenge to the Sprint merger. It broke up a private equity-engineered anesthesia monopoly that had cornered Denver’s hospital market and was driving charges up thirty to forty percent above competitive rates. And Weiser’s challenge to the Kroger-Albertsons merger, alongside a similar federal challenge and a suit in Washington state, helped kill the supermarket merger.

Beyond signature victories, Colorado has a consistent record as a coalition partner, taking part in the Ticketmaster, RealPage, GooglePlay, Gilead Sciences and generic drugs cases.

A respected academic who has kept publishing through his term, Weiser has been a critic of courts for under-enforcement – especially in giving dominant firms the benefit of the doubt and being timid with remedies and orders. Even before Trump’s return, he emphasized the role of states as a “check” on federal under-enforcement.

Ones to watch

Many other states attorneys general are also stepping up enforcement efforts –  launching major national cases as well as focusing on high-impact, politically salient cases regionally.

• Connecticut’s William Tong is leading one of the largest antitrust cases in American history. Nearly every state and territory has joined his series of cases against dozens of drug companies and corporate executives for what Tong describes as a “brazen, industrywide conspiracy” to jack up drug prices and rig the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical market.

• DC’s Brian Schwalb leads an office which continues to punch significantly above its weight – it pioneered two of the most consequential recent antitrust cases. The office launched a first-of-its-kind algorithmic price-fixing case against RealPage (and 14 of DC’s largest residential landlords) alleging they created a “housing cartel” by feeding their data into a centralized pricing algorithm which price-fixed on their behalf. DC was also first to challenge Amazon’s price floor strategy under Schwalb’s predecessor. The case was initially dismissed, but Schwalb successfully revived it on appeal and is now carrying it forward.

• Minnesota’s Keith Ellison has built a small but dedicated antitrust team from the ground up – his antitrust chief, Elizabeth Odette, chairs a bipartisan Antitrust Task Force for state AGs. Ellison’s signature case was leading state involvement in the complex and far reaching Agri-Stats lawsuit, which accused the country’s dominant meatpackers of using a shared data service to coordinate prices. Ellison’s focus on the dangers of monopoly power date to his time in Congress, when he headed the Progressive Caucus and founded an Antitrust Caucus that helped tee up some of the most important antitrust hearings in decades.

• Illinois’ Kwame Raoul has focused on wage suppression and agricultural concentration. His cases busting staffing agencies for colluding to fix wages have won millions in settlements for workers. Raoul is also co-leading the John Deere repair monopolization suit with Ellison and the FTC, and helped force concessions in a private equity deal that plaintiffs claimed would have handed a single firm control of more than half the medical device coatings market.

• Michigan’s Dana Nessel is targeting major oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, alleging that they acted “as a cartel, agreeing to reduce the production and distribution of electricity from renewable sources and to restrain the emergence of electric vehicles and renewable primary energy technologies.” Nessel’s suit traces the conspiracy all the way back to 1979, when internal company reports concluded that avoiding catastrophic warming would require a major shift to renewables. According to the Nessel, the corporations responded in a coordinated way to suppress research, abandon their own EV technology, block rivals through patent litigation, and stall renewable investments  “all to further one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history.” The case is in its early stages and will likely be left to Nessel’s successor to complete.

• New Jersey’s Jennifer Davenport – freshly appointed by newly elected Governor Mikie Sherrill – finds herself with high expectations and a clear political mandate: Sherrill placed competition and antitrust enforcement at the center of her affordability campaign. Davenport’s antitrust team, led by respected litigator David Reichenberg, was established just two years ago and is now charged by the Governor with cracking down on corporate forces driving up rents, grocery prices, medical treatments and utility rates.

Several Republican AGs also stand out as consistent coalition allies – including Tennessee’s Jonathan Skrmetti, Ohio’s Dave Yost, Utah’s Derek Brown, Wyoming’s Bridget Hill and Texas’ Ken Paxton. Each of these states is also named as a continuing partner in the Live Nation case, along with Republican AGs in Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana and New Hampshire.

Not that all state-level antitrust enforcement efforts aim to counter the effects of the Trump administration’s retreat – take Florida and Texas, for instance. The two states have the biggest Republican-led antitrust teams, and both have demonstrated a taste for using antitrust law to serve ideological ends, such as opposing DEI and climate change efforts.

Texas is leading a coalition of Republican AGs suing BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard – the three largest asset managers in the world – alleging they colluded to throttle coal production by supporting climate activism and driving up energy prices.

Republican or Democrat, each state is doing it all with limited resources – most states have fewer than 5 antitrust attorneys – and against an unprecedented tidal wave of corporate consolidation both nationally and locally.

In the months ahead, we expect Democratic AGs to press for additional funding as they risk being outgunned: By MAGA lobbyists, a corrupt White House, and the sheer scale of consolidation they’re up against.

More: Antitrust is Becoming a Frontline Battleground for Democracy.

There were dramatic scenes in a Manhattan courthouse last Monday as the case against America’s most despised live entertainment monopoly fractured in two.

Lawyers for the federal government and dozens of states were making the case that Live Nation–Ticketmaster needed to be broken up. The company has built a stranglehold over its industry, taking control of 78% of large amphitheatres and 86% of major concert venue ticket sales nationwide.

Over the first five days of what was expected to be a weeks-long trial, attorneys outlined how the company bought up rivals, bullied venues, and retaliated against those who worked with competitors. The jury heard a recorded call of the CEO threatening a venue owner, read internal messages of staff mocking “stupid” fans and bragging about “robbing them blind,” and were told that Ticketmaster’s meltdown during the Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour shows what happens when one company controls everything and answers to no one.

Then, a shock twist.

The Trump Administration abruptly revealed that it had settled with the $38 billion company – blindsiding the state attorneys general who had joined the case, drawing an angry response from the judge, and sparking criticism within Trump’s own base.

The decision – which came after Live Nation donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration, hired Trump-world lobbyists including Kellyanne Conway, and appointed a Trump ally to its board – is the latest in a string of antitrust scandals which might consume any other administration. 

Since the start of his second term, Trump has turned antitrust enforcement into an instrument of personal and political power – deploying it to punish enemies, gain leverage over news outlets, and reward those who promise favors and support him financially.

Media companies have paid huge settlements to the president and bowed to political pressure over coverage – ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS cancelled The Late Show and handed its newsroom to right-wing operator Bari Weiss, and Paramount pledged “sweeping changes” if it takes over CNN.

The president has fired or forced out several top antitrust enforcers amid pressure to drop cases – those include Biden FTC appointee Alvaro Bedoya and Trump appointee Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, and Trump DOJ appointees Gail Slater, Roger Alford and Bill Rinner.

Indeed, the day the White House pushed out Slater – the respected head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division – Live Nation stocks jumped over 5%.

But there is a check on Trump’s power, if it can hold in the years ahead.

Armed with the independent authority to enforce federal antitrust law, dozens of state attorneys general – Democratic and Republican alike – are stepping up to take on the cases Trump’s DOJ has abandoned.

“We cannot agree to it,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said after the DOJ’s retreat. James is now leading a bipartisan coalition of 37 AGs who are pursuing the Ticketmaster case independently.

Notably among them: Texas AG Ken Paxton, a Trump ally currently locked in a fierce senate primary runoff against four-term incumbent John Cornyn. He’s not the only member of Trump’s coalition to oppose the deal: “Another big win for lobbyists,” lamented MAGA influencer Laura Loomer on X as she reported the settlement.

A New Era for Law Enforcement

The relationship between state and federal antitrust enforcers has historically been cooperative and complementary, insiders say, punctuated by occasional clashes over strategy and settlements.

That relationship held through Trump’s first term and through the first year of his second, even as many of states led high-profile challenges to other Trump policies, such as mass deportations.

But this year, the relationship is rapidly turning adversarial.

The antitrust division with Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul – seen as one of the leading enforcement teams in the country – told Liberty and Power that while their staff-level relationship remains strong, they are “increasingly concerned” about “political interests subverting the institutional knowledge, expertise and decision-making” of DOJ lawyers.

Indeed, in a sharp court filing following the Live Nation settlement last week, dozens of states wrote that they had been deliberately “kept in the dark and excluded” from discussions. “The United States is not handing off a baton to finish a race,” they wrote. “It is leaving a project halfway through construction, while taking the lead crew members, supplies, and designs with it.”

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After decades of joint actions, states are directly challenging other Trump administration decisions on antitrust.

In Sacramento this week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a suit signed by eight states to challenge the merger of the Tegna and Nexstar broadcast stations.

The DOJ cleared the deal even though it clearly breaches FCC ownership limits and required a federal waiver – Trump had demanded that the department “get that deal done” in order to “knock out the fake news.” Nexstar, perhaps not incidentally, was one of the first stations to block Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the administration blasted the late-night host for comments following the Charlie Kirk assassination.

In Denver, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser recently took up another abandoned federal case – challenging a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and a major rival that had also been settled by the Trump administration amid charges of back room dealing.

Last week, Weiser sought to block the “corrupted” settlement itself, alleging that throughout the federal merger review, “threats were made against the head of the antitrust division, Gail Slater, and her top deputies, who were sidelined from the decisive round of negotiations and eventually ousted from the Justice Department.”

One of those deputies, Roger Alford, has since accused senior officials of having “perverted justice” in what he called a “pay-to-play” scandal.

Then, there’s the biggest and most politically charged case: The Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

The $110 billion deal would place both CBS and CNN under the control of David Ellison, a Trump ally who’s already pressed the famously independent CBS to toe a pro-Trump line. Rival bidder Netflix dropped out of the running hours after its co-CEO visited the White House, prompting Democratic lawmakers to demand answers about what was said behind closed doors.

California Attorney General Bonta has confirmed he and other states may seek to challenge the deal, setting up what may be the starkest state-federal conflict yet.

A Bulwark Against Corruption

Even before Trump returned to office, states had been stepping up enforcement amid a wave of unprecedented corporate consolidation and growing public concern. Indeed, states have taken on some of the biggest cases against some of America’s largest monopolies.

In 2019, fifty attorneys general announced a joint, bipartisan investigation into Google’s monopolies – going on to play leading roles in two cases against Google and one against Facebook. A coalition of 50 states and territories is currently pursuing what may be the largest pharmaceutical price-fixing cartel in American history.

The cases are breaking through. Christy Matelis, a former Assistant Attorney General in Utah’s antitrust division, recalls that after telling her plumber what she did for work, he immediately asked what she was doing to take on Big Tech.

“People should not underestimate the states,” Matelis says. Now in private practice, she describes state enforcers as experienced, sharp litigators – boots on the ground who know their markets best. “I expect we’ll see a significant amount of state‑level antitrust enforcement over the next several years.”

Eric Stock, the former head of New York’s antitrust team who now also works in private practice, says the combination of state AGs, class actions and private litigants ensures compliance is taken seriously in boardrooms “no matter who’s in the White House.”

“Both Democratic and Republican AGs see this as a way of showing to the public that they’re fighting the big fights and returning money to people’s pockets,” says Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has made corporate accountability a key plank of his current run for governor. Washington Attorney General turned Governor Bob Ferguson ran with a strong record of tackling corporate interests. Kamala Harris, whose top performing 2024 ad was a pledge to ban price gouging, touted her wins against Big Pharma as Attorney General.

Many other state AGs have also made names for themselves taking on corporate interests, including Tom Miller in Iowa, Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut, Josh Hawley in Missouri, and Eliot Spitzer in New York

Indeed, it was state legislators across the Midwest and Texas who pioneered American antitrust law in the late 1800s. Riding a wave of agrarian populism, their targets were monopolists who’d seized control of oil, railroads, and agriculture. Wielding new state and federal laws at the turn of the century, prosecutors broke up monopolies and prosecuted price-fixers.

In 1976, Congress gave state AGs explicit power to challenge mergers under federal laws. States then shifted into higher gear under the corporate-friendly Reagan administration, says Professor Harry First, who led New York’s Antitrust Bureau from 1999 to 2001. “That’s when they emerged more as a counterweight to the federal government.”

When the Bush administration settled the prior Clinton administration’s efforts to break up Microsoft’s monopoly, the states pursued the case without them. “One of the byproducts of the Microsoft era is the infrastructure and continuity of multistate enforcement,” First said.

Reinforcements Required

Both current and former state enforcers told Liberty and Power that the increase in activity in recent years has left them stretched thin. Stepping up as a firewall against Trump’s efforts to concentrate media, economic, and political power may push them to breaking point.

While the federal DOJ Antitrust Division employs several hundred antitrust attorneys, a 2020 Yale study found that states employ roughly 150 between them. Some states have a single dedicated antitrust practitioner. Some have none at all.

Kwame Raoul’s office in Illinois says the long-running issue of resource constraints has become “more acute” in the past year, “as the federal government appears to be backing away from merit-based antitrust enforcement in favor of cutting deals with lobbyists at the public’s expense.”

“It’s often a small team of attorneys managing a case against corporations who have dozens on their side,” Vaheesan says. New York and California’s determination to continue the Live Nation case is significant: They have the two biggest antitrust teams in the country, and other states will rely heavily on their resources as the case goes forward.

“If our democracy is going to survive this, states need to recognize that this wave of politicized media and corporate consolidation is a real frontline fight,” Vaheesan said. “The DOJ is hemorrhaging top-tier enforcers – states should be snapping them up. You can fight Trump’s consolidation of power and deliver on the affordability agenda. That’s an extraordinary return on investment.”

One attorney general who has been focused on building capacity is Rob Bonta, who secured $7.96 million from the California legislature in 2023 to fund a major expansion to his antitrust team. In the wake of the DOJ’s sudden retreat on Live Nation, there’s also now talk of California drawing on its $50 million ‘anti-Trump’ litigation fund to support antitrust enforcement.

In the longer term, Congress should consider ways to permanently fund state enforcement. That was the case that 45 state AGs made in a letter to Congress in 2021, without success.

The Live Nation trial resumed Monday, with the states hiring veteran antitrust litigator Jeffrey Kessler to step into the shoes of federal attorneys. What the jury will make of the abrupt switch in representation is unclear. The case is expected to last another four weeks.

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“Under Destruction” was the official title of this year’s Munich Security Conference – a nod to the wrecking-ball politics of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping.

But as commentators fixated on the return of great-power rivalry, America’s most well-known congresswoman stepped onto the global stage with a different warning – one that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to grapple with.

For weeks now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Munich appearance has been intensely picked over by critics. Less closely examined has been her warning about an increasingly powerful force in international security: Private corporate empires with the power to undermine democratic decision-making, fuel inequality and unrest, and reshape core national security calculations – led by figures increasingly willing and able to impose their will on elected officials.

“Antitrust in the United States has historically been a foundational democratic principle – not only because monopolies abuse consumers and workers, but because excessive market concentration creates private power that can rival the power of nation-states,” Ocasio-Cortez warned.

“We’re already seeing members of the billionaire class throw their weight around in domestic and global politics,” she said. “When economic power becomes this concentrated, it inevitably spills into political power.”

Describing it as an “under-discussed” national security issue, the New York Democrat also warned that around the world, the extreme wealth inequality “fuels social unrest, authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and increasingly dangerous domestic politics.”

Matt Duss, Executive Vice President of the Center for International Policy, has been regularly briefing Ocasio-Cortez on foreign policy. “I think rightly, she sees this as a major national security threat – to our country, to fellow democracies, and to the world,” he said.

Duss said her concerns echo those of John Maynard Keynes who, in 1926, warned that unregulated capitalism would generate inequality faster than democratic institutions could absorb it. Watching the political upheaval in Germany’s Weimar Republic, Keynes worried that austerity, mass unemployment, and working-class humiliation were the political kindling for fascism.

Senator Chris Murphy, who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee and is seen as a potential Democratic nominee or future Secretary of State, describes the concentration of economic power as a “crisis” that US foreign policy must come to terms with.

Economic power has become dangerously concentrated in the hands of a small group of corporate oligarchs on the one hand, and state-run economies in China and Russia on the other, he says.

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The most recent example of this undermining national security: The Trump administration’s decision to bow to Big Tech lobbying and greenlight the sale of advanced AI chips to developers in China – a move Murphy says was purchased rather than reasoned.

“Trump has put the fate of our national security in the hands of profit-hungry billionaires and mega-corporations,” he told Liberty and Power. “His administration won’t hesitate to put America’s security at risk if it helps the billionaires in charge get richer.”

Corporate Battlefields

The entanglement of corporate power and national security is something both sides of the Atlantic are grappling with, fueled by a series of flashing warning signs. The most prominent in Europe: The ongoing tussle for access to SpaceX’s Starlink internet service in Ukraine.

The satellite service has become a lifeline for Kyiv’s military and civilian communications, and a flashpoint over who ultimately controls battlefield connectivity. SpaceX founder Elon Musk, never shy about inserting himself into political debates, has been at the center of repeated, heated disputes over coverage, costs, and access.

The specter of superpowers courting Musk like a de facto head of state is “absurd,” said Duss. “No one voted for Musk.”

This year, following pressure from Ukraine, the company instituted a whitelisting policy to ensure that unregistered Russian terminals were blocked from the service, halting Russia’s ability to use it for drone piloting and instant messaging.

They “lost their ability to control the field,” one Ukrainian drone operator told the BBC, estimating that they lost 50% of their offensive capacity. “Fewer assaults, fewer enemy drones, fewer everything.” The move has contributed to Ukraine’s fastest battlefield advances in years, after months of grinding retreats.

The episode shines a light on how Musk’s enforcement decisions first allowed Russia to access significant grey market capabilities, and then suddenly shifted momentum in the other direction. “It’s a very uncomfortable situation for a private individual to have power like that,” one NATO official who declined to be identified told Liberty and Power.

National security strategists fluent in the language of treaties, alliances and foreign influence are far less well versed in the dynamics of corporate influence.

Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a security analyst with over 35 years of service in US and NATO defense, has described the new Big Tech goliaths as ‘empires of technology.’ “The Big Tech companies with their very unique capabilities, it’s almost like an ally you must have,” he said.

“You don’t negotiate with them the way you negotiate with a company in your country, you negotiate with them as though they’re a foreign power,” he said, comparing their dominance to that of the British East India Company and the United Fruit Company in previous centuries. “We’ve seen it before, only now it’s much more insidious.”

It’s a blind-spot that will only grow as the AI industry, and the handful of mercurial CEOs who lead it, push deeper into the national security apparatus. “I think it’s not being taken seriously enough at the Pentagon yet,” Duss said.

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In the more traditional sense, however, the impacts of competition and market concentration in the defense sector have long been a concern for the Pentagon.

In 1993, a year and a half after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Les Aspin invited defense industry executives to a dinner that later became known as “the last supper.” There, Pentagon leadership explicitly advised contractors that, given reduced demand for their services, they should merge and consolidate to strengthen their positions.

The warning set off what the Washington Post later described as “one of the fastest transformations of any modern US industry.”

Over the next few years, more than 50 aerospace and defense prime contractors consolidated into just five. The wave only hit a roadblock in 1998, when the administration blocked a merger between two of the biggest behemoths – Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman – fearing it would concentrate too much power. At the time, it was the single largest merger ever challenged by federal officials.

Kremidas-Courtney recalls being at the Department of Defense when decision-makers were – in parallel – embracing a wave of outsourcing, privatization and restructuring following the end of the Cold War. “We privatized a lot of key infrastructure,” he said. “We’ve given corporations control of a lot of things vital to national security.”

Late in the Obama Administration, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall warned that market concentration had the potential to affect innovation, limit the supply base, and reduce competition. By the Biden administration, the Pentagon was warning that it had become overly “reliant on a small number of contractors for critical defense capabilities.”

The fear has become more acute since the COVID pandemic exposed supply chain vulnerabilities, and since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the challenges in getting monopolistic corporations to ramp up production of munitions and other weapons.

“Decades of corporate consolidation and globalization has left us with some really far-flung defense supply chains with concentrations in places that our geopolitical rivals dominate,” said Beth Baltzan, a Senior Advisor for Trade and Investment under President Biden. “It makes our whole ability to get things done sluggish and lacking in innovation, with cost overruns – the things you expect when you have a highly concentrated industry.”

A Biden-era report recommended the Pentagon block anti-competitive mergers aggressively, assert intellectual property rights more robustly, incentivize tenders from small businesses and new entrants, and diversify concentrated supply chains.

As the primary purchaser of US military equipment, the Department of Defense wields extraordinary leverage in shaping how corporate mergers are evaluated by traditional antitrust enforcers like the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. It should use that leverage far more proactively – and preference small, medium and independent contractors where possible – Open Markets Institute Senior Legal Analyst Daniel Hanley has argued.

Aiding the effort to bring new competitors online has been the improvisational innovation continuing to play out in Ukraine. With limited access to prestige “exquisite assets” like stealth bombers, Kyiv has turned to smaller, cheaper, autonomous technology – almost munitions-like in its disposability – reducing reliance on the major western defense contractors

A bipartisan group in Congress is also hoping to prevent a repeat of extreme concentration in markets for new technology. Led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Eric Schmitt, the Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act would mandate competitive procurement processes, prevent single vendor lock-in, and ensure government data remains under government control.

Beyond the Battlefield

Progressives have long warned that moneyed interests have sought to capture and drive foreign policy for their own ends. In recent years, however, those warnings have been echoed by establishment national security officials on both sides of the aisle.

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s National Security Advisor, warned that decades of corporate-driven trade liberalization have hollowed out America’s military industrial capacity – leaving the US with the dangers of overdependence after being sold the benefits of interdependence.

H.R. McMaster, Trump’s first-term National Security Advisor, argued that Silicon Valley and Wall Street made themselves willing vehicles for the transfer of US technology, data and know-how directly to China’s military and intelligence apparatus.

Jamieson Greer, Trump’s current US Trade Representative, has accused giant multinationals of sacrificing American workers and national security for profits.

Baltzan, who served as a counselor to Biden Trade Representative Katherine Tai, says both government officials and corporations too often confuse corporate interests for the national interest. She recalls shocked responses when she made a similar point on an industry call, noting the administration would prioritize the latter. “People freaked out,” she said.

The backlash intensified when the administration put principle into practice.

When Biden’s team withdrew from trade negotiations that may have made it harder for the US government to regulate US tech giants and restrict cross-border data transfers – particularly to China and Russia – the industry response was explosive.

“The companies had a meltdown. The Chamber of Commerce had a meltdown. This ended up getting us investigated by Congress,” Baltzan said. “The fact that it involved China and Russia put a really fine point on how this is a national security issue.”

A similar battle played out over access to COVID vaccines. The US and other Western democracies had a clear national security interest in lowering the global viral load and reducing the emergence of dangerous variants. But when low-income nations proposed suspending WTO patent rules to allow generic production of vaccines, tests, and treatments, Big Pharma mobilized massive lobbying teams in the US, UK, and Europe to frustrate negotiations.

When a deal finally came through in June 2022 – after two years, an estimated 15 million deaths and the emergence of Delta in India and Omicron in southern Africa – the agreement covered only vaccines and was so limited that not a single country invoked it. “But the pharmaceutical companies were still furious,” Baltzan said.

“These mega corporations play a role in designing trade agreements, essentially as forms of corporate protectionism,” Duss said. Indeed, massive multinationals loom so large over negotiations that they’re often a shadow force behind multiple negotiating partners around the table. Baltzan recalls negotiations where it became clear that a majority of her interlocutors were reading from the same corporate talking points.

“You drill three questions in and it’s clear they can’t think beyond the talking points,” she said. “To me, that was really disturbing.”

It’s not a new dynamic. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned that corporate monopolists had “begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.” A concentrated economy was a sign of strategic vulnerability, he argued, and allowing CEOs to have more power than democratic leaders was, “in essence, fascism.”

Liberté. Autonomie. Souveraineté.

In Europe too, leaders are looking to reduce their reliance on foreign multinationals.

The Starlink saga has sharpened concerns, voiced most forcefully by French President Emmanuel Macron, that Europe remains dangerously dependent on a handful of highly concentrated Chinese and US multinationals – including Google, Microsoft, Visa, and Amazon – for critical cloud, communications and payments infrastructure.

France has led efforts to duplicate US systems and services for use in Ukraine. Macron has characterized dependence on Silicon Valley as an issue of digital sovereignty. European officials warn of the danger of their data being subject to ‘kill switches’ hosted in foreign countries.

As if to drive the point home, the Trump administration has not only wielded tariff threats against Europe to curb its digital regulations, but has imposed travel bans directly on European advocates for Big Tech oversight. Officials at the International Criminal Court have endured more substantial sanctions in response to investigations the US opposes, losing access to email, cloud and financial services.

The aggressive approach has accelerated French-led efforts to fund and build competing, EU-based digital services companies –  and to integrate national security and resilience imperatives more deeply into antitrust and regulatory decisionmaking at the European Commission

“Leaders here are waking up to the fact that this goes far beyond traditional antitrust concerns of competition, privacy and online safety, but actually constitutes a direct threat to freedom, sovereignty and European security,” said Max von Thun, Director of Open Markets Institute in Europe. “They’re threading a needle in trying not to antagonize Washington as they accelerate efforts to develop local alternatives. Most people recognize this is a problem that will outlast Trump. The dependency is the problem, and that’s what they’ve got to fix.”

In the 1930s and 40s, FDR confronted runaway corporate power by breaking up dangerous monopolies, imposing more robust regulations, and calling out the corrosive influence of private power on democratic governance.

Pressure is now building for a 21st Century reckoning.

With Musk and others inserting themselves into battlefield decisions and diplomatic affairs, European governments racing to build their own digital infrastructure, and more and more bipartisan voices in Washington sounding the alarm, AOC’s warning about the dangers of corporate power is fast-emerging as a defining fault line in 21st-century geopolitics.

“These companies are so big and powerful, they function essentially as states – states that operate outside of any meaningful democratic control. They make decisions that have enormous consequences on the lives of everyday people. They need to be brought under control,” Duss said. “And we need politicians to have the courage to do that.”

Dive Deeper:

• Open Markets Institute has continued to warn that Trump administration policies have enabled Elon Musk to establish a risky and growing monopoly over low earth orbit communications. “The Trump administration’s aggressive advocacy for Starlink illustrates the need for more urgency from lawmakers and regulators wary of Musk’s growing power over the world’s communications networks,” writes Austin Ahlman.

• In The New China Syndrome, Executive Director of Open Markets Institute Barry Lynn traces America’s trading entanglement with China back to the Clinton era for Harper’s Magazine: “We, along with our allies, are now caught in the grasp of one of the most sophisticated, resilient, and forward-looking autocracies in the history of the world,” he writes.

• For more on the Department of Defense’s history on antitrust engagement, dive into OMI’s 2022 report on administrative policy: “The department has a unique level of importance in providing information to other more traditional antitrust enforcers,” writes Daniel Hanley.

• Read the Biden Administration’s full report into the State of Competition within the Defense Industrial Base.

In a political landscape defined by anti-status-quo sentiment, DC centrism is no viable. This week, OMI’s Austin Ahlman and Ben Winsor joined Marshall Kosloff on The Realignment to dismantle the conventional wisdom that has paralyzed Democratic strategy.

Breaking down their recent analysis, Ahlman and Winsor argue that true economic populism isn’t just a rhetorical aesthetic—it is a structural necessity for survival.

Key Takeaways:

• The “DC Centrist” Trap: Why retreating to the middle fails when voters are demanding a radical break from the status quo.

• Beyond the “Abundance Agenda”: Why supply-side liberalism and “a liberalism that builds” will fail if they ignore the corporate bottlenecks and monopolies that control the market—especially in context of the looming AI revolution.

• The Limits of Polling: A critique of governing by public opinion polls rather than shaping public opinion through bold leadership that draws direct lessons from FDR’s campaigns.

• Operationalizing Populism: Moving beyond vague grievances to concrete policy battles that confront corporate power head-on.

Why it Matters: As the parties undergo a historic realignment, the tools of the last twenty years—technocratic fixes and message-testing—are obsolete. This conversation offers a roadmap for how to wield political power to break market power.

Listen to the full episode here.

A long-simmering factional debate among liberals over the Abundance movement burst into public view this week, with progressive champion Elizabeth Warren taking sharp aim at a movement she warns has gone far beyond truisms about efficiency and good governance.

In a blistering National Press Club speech Monday, Warren warned Democrats that the Abundance movement had become a billionaire-backed rebrand of deregulation—one designed to serve major donors and corporate interests while neutering the party’s ability to win over swing-voters angry at a political and economic system rigged against them.

Warren followed up the speech with a sharp letter to Senate colleagues co-signed by Senators Chris Murphy, Adam Schiff, and Tina Smith.

“Billionaires and corporate interests have captured our political system, but our party’s anemic response to the rigging of our democracy and economy in favor of the ultra-wealthy has eroded our credibility with working people,” the letter said. “Bland policy proposals” will fail, and leaders must call out “who is getting screwed and who is doing the screwing.”

Warren’s broadside against Abundance called out what many Democrats have missed: The rapid growth of a billionaire-backed echo chamber of think-tanks and advocacy groups rallying under the ‘Abundance’ moniker to push their deregulatory agenda, while diluting the economic populism the party’s own pollsters, labor allies, and many candidates say is needed to win.

“When this agenda is about making government more effective, count me in,” Warren said, name checking her work on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a free IRS tax filing system the Trump administration scuttled, and efforts to streamline hearing aid regulations—all of which faced strong corporate opposition.

“But many in the Abundance movement are doing little to call out corporate culpability and billionaire influence in creating and defending those very inefficiencies,” Warren said. “Instead, Abundance has become a rallying cry—not just for a few policy wonks worried about zoning—but for wealthy donors and other corporate-aligned Democrats who are putting big-time muscle behind making Democrats more favorable to big businesses.”

Open Markets Institute and The Revolving Door Project have tracked millions in shadow advocacy from Big Tech, Big Oil and other corporate interests aimed at influencing the party, including hundreds of millions of dollars from tech and finance interests for a deregulatory push under the Abundance banner. Those efforts include standing up cutouts like the Abundance Institute, seeded by the Koch network, which is focused on clearing a path for AI data centers.

“Abundance advocates who care about fixing our government and streamlining regulations should divorce themselves from the billionaire-backed ‘faux-bundance’ agenda,” says Open Markets Institute Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan, who’s argued the party would be better served by rediscovering the trust-busting and nation-building lessons of the New Deal. “Corporate power and short-termism are big parts of what got us into this mess in the first place. Reheated Reagan-era deregulation is both bad policy and bad politics.”

Warren’s not the only one who worries that embracing Abundance will be an electoral disaster.

When we asked veteran pollster Celinda Lake whether she’s tested Abundance against economic populism with swing-voters, she was emphatic: “We have. It loses.” Warren herself pointed to polling from Harris campaign veterans which showed much the same thing.

Lake, who served as Biden’s lead pollster in 2020 and has previously helped win tough senate races in Michigan, Montana and Alaska, lauded Warren’s speech as outlining “a winning narrative that gets the most populist independent voters and motivates our voters and activists.” While Abundance might feel right in the beltway, she says, it’s the “wrong answer” for swing voters who feel a loss of political and economic control.

Democratic messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio strongly agreed. “My view on Abundance is that it’s embarrassing,” she said. “Distraction is the kindest possible thing I can say.”

“You know the canard about rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic?,” Shenker-Osorio added. “Abundance is shopping for fabric swatches for the upholstery on the deckchairs on the Titanic.”

Pulling Back the Curtain on Abundance

That Warren devoted roughly a quarter of a major speech on the urgency of economic populism to dissecting the Abundance debate is significant. In her view, the Abundance movement is a central obstacle to embracing a populist platform and cuts to the core of whether Democrats can rebuild durable election-winning coalitions in 2026 and beyond.

In Abundance, Warren fears, “it looks like the corporate tycoons have found one more way to stop the Democratic Party from tackling a rigged system.”

But while the Abundance debate has gained a foothold on X and newspaper opinion pages, few if any candidates running in tough races have made it a centerpiece of their campaign. Populist frontline incumbents and challengers like Mary Peltola, Pat Ryan, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez might have used the word but are mostly opting for localist, populist, anti-corporate rhetoric and policies

There’s good reason for that: In polling Lake shared, Abundance massaging ranked dead last in a battery of message tests on the “missing” voters the party needed in 2024. Candidates understand swing-voter dynamics better than those in the DC beltway, Lake said.

Warren’s concern, then, appears to be that the Abundance movement has its sights aimed at party elites, big donors, and high-level decisionmakers. “A tepid nibble-around-the-edges approach,” she said, “has been a good way to appeal to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as they decide which primary candidates they will support. But it doesn’t take a political genius to conclude that in a democracy when the choice is between making the rich richer and helping everybody else, winning elections is about choosing everybody else.”

Clearly aiming to kick off an intra-party fight, Warren took direct aim at some of the party’s biggest donors by name, including Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman.

These tech-titans who have poured money into the Abundance movement epitomize, in Warren’s telling, a group which “might align with Democrats on some social issues” and “certainly are not MAGA Republicans,” but are also intent on neutering the party’s economic platform “in exchange for their financial support.”

Warren Delivers the Autopsy the DNC Wouldn’t

In recent years, these donors have pushed the party to curb populist attacks, to pursue deregulation and tax breaks, and to stack courts and agencies with corporate lawyers reluctant to enforce the law against big-business—actions that both undermine democracy and harm the party’s credibility with swing-voters.

It also comes at a cost to the credibility of the true believers within the Abundance movement. As Open Markets has argued, the influence of Big Tech donors helps explain the movement’s curious silence on Silicon Valley’s impact on innovation, competition and the health of our democracy. Other corporate interests, likewise left unchallenged, have distorted housing and energy markets to restrict supply and limit abundance.

For a case study on how donor power threatens the party’s electoral prospects, Warren singled out Reid Hoffman: The billionaire donor pressed the Harris campaign to fire FTC Chair Lina Khan, even as her crackdown on corporate abuse enjoyed broad public support, and has been advocating for the party to take a laissez faire approach to AI data centers and energy costs. In the face of soaring electricity bills, donors like Hoffman are pushing “Democratic candidates to stand with the billionaires for higher costs,” Warren warned.

She called out donors who pushed the Harris campaign to retreat from its centerpiece price-gouging policy—even though it was one of their top testing messages among the alienated voters they needed to win.

She also took aim at former President Joe Biden and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer for failing to rein in pro-corporate saboteurs like Kyrsten Sinema, who “faced no consequences from her president or her leaders in Washington” for tanking the minimum wage increase—a key plank of the party’s economic platform. Sinema went on to an unceremonious exit from the Senate after a single term, declining to run for reelection after her support collapsed across the political spectrum.

Instead of arguing the party needs to be more like Sinema, Warren’s diagnosis—strikingly similar to what pollsters told us just weeks ago—was that donor influence and gun-shy politics have, over time, eroded the party’s trust with working-class voters and their belief that the party is capable of taking on the wealthy and well-connected.

How Team Abundance Misread Warren

While few have embraced it outright, many mainstream liberals and progressives have nodded toward Abundance—dropping the term into speeches or triangulating it with economically populist rhetoric. But Warren’s warning marks the most direct acknowledgement and challenge to the campaign yet.

The intervention from such a widely respected party elder signals that aligning with the Abundance movement, and accepting support from the rapidly growing network of super PACs its billionaire proponents are funding, risks becoming a political liability in the upcoming primary season.

That Warren in particular would fire an opening shot seems to have caught many off guard.

Many Abundance proponents—quick to claim validation from any favorable mention by a progressive lawmaker—had chalked her up as a supporter. In part because Warren is seen as a ‘policy nerd worried about zoning’ in much the same vein as Ezra Klein himself.

Just last year, Warren’s Build Now Act formed a key plank of the Scott-Warren ROAD to Housing Act, a rare bipartisan supply-focused package designed to increase housing construction and cut regulatory bottlenecks. Abundance proponents hailed it as “the first comprehensive bid to tackle the roots of America’s affordability crisis in a generation.”

But Warren’s persona as a policy wonk, Senate conciliator, and the party’s pragmatic insider progressive is only half the story. A former Republican radicalized by the corporate capture of control over US market systems, Warren has long been preoccupied with the power of big-money—building her career taking on Wall Street and calling out how corporate America rigs markets, jacks up prices, writes its own rules, and distorts political incentives. As Warren regularly reminds audiences, she isn’t anti-capitalism, she just wants capitalism with sensible rules.

Given Warren’s credibility with both progressives and many liberal Abundance advocates, this moment could be an opportunity for some in the Abundance movement to pivot away from a billionaire-backed deregulatory push and towards a program of smart regulatory reform.

That’s not how it’s generally landed online, where Warren’s intervention has been met with bewilderment, annoyance and dismissal. Abundance cheerleader Matt Yglesias, who recently wrote a post titled ‘Let’s all practice billionaire positivity,’ argued that it would be a mistake to kick out tech and finance elites out of the party’s “big tent.”

For their part, those in constant contact with swing voters strongly agree with Warren that a strong, populist economic platform that enrages some in the donor class instead of catering to them is the best path forward.

“This entire idea that you need to deliver some kind of milquetoast platform that’s blandly inoffensive to everyone is just tone deaf to people’s struggles. It doesn’t really matter what you say because it just won’t break through,” Shenker-Osorio said.

“For a big tent to actually stand you need a pole,” she added. “Otherwise, it’s just a tarp that smothers you.”

Over the last year, the second Trump administration has launched a broad and sustained assault on the institutional structures of America’s liberal democracy, markedly more aggressive than anything in President Trump’s first term. One key feature has been an unprecedented series of attacks on free speech and the free press. Another is political support for these policies from the world’s most powerful technology corporations – including Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, X, and Google.

At first, the ferocity of the attacks knocked many American liberals off balance. In recent months, growing numbers have taken their protests to the courts, the halls of Congress, and the streets. But even among the most aggressive fighters, a critical blind spot persists. Most American liberals have paid little attention to the international dimension of Trump’s war on democracy, especially the administration’s attacks on European efforts to protect free speech and the free press by imposing stronger regulations on the tech corporations that control online communications and commerce.

The problem is not merely traditional American parochial failure to stand up for others. It also demonstrates an inability to understand how to protect our own democracy. Over the last decade, Americans have benefited enormously from dozens of new laws and regulatory actions in Europe, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere – as well as home-grown legislation and lawsuits in individual U.S. states. In tandem with actions by Biden-era regulators, this world-wide net of interlinking regulatory actions both slowed the growth of dominant tech corporations and mapped new ways to rein in their power. These foreign laws and actions, in short, helped make Americans both safer and freer.

Democrats have finally awakened to the fact that the Trump White House has all but destroyed federal antitrust enforcement – transforming agencies from defenders of rule of law to instruments of rule by one man. And many Democrats and Republicans have assailed recent Trump efforts to block individual U.S. states from even attempting to regulate AI.

But when it comes to cooperating with defenders of liberal democracy around the world, most Democrats have allowed Trump to divide us from our closest allies in ways that make it easier to conquer us all. And as the muted Democratic response to the brazen abduction of a foreign head of state this weekend demonstrates, Democrats are not yet ready to ready to join—let alone lead—a global fight for the future of democracy.

The path back from the brink starts with reforging our oldest and strongest alliances with the democracies of Europe. The release of the administration’s National Security Strategy in December provides Democrats with a new opportunity to learn and act. The document clearly states that the ultimate objective of the Trump White House is to replace liberal democracy in the U.S. and around the world with a form of Christian-infused authoritarianism. Or as the NSS put it, “We want Europe to remain European [and] to regain its civilizational self-confidence,” which in turn requires Europeans to “abandon [their] failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

To achieve this, the NSS says, the administration will actively “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

Democracy has always been a cross-border project. In the 18^th century European soldiers like Lafayette and Kościuszko joined America’s revolutionaries in founding a government to serve as a beacon of freedom for the world. In the 20^th century, the American people fought to destroy fascism, then invested immense effort in rebuilding Europe’s democratic institutions and industries after the war. The reasoning was simple; we are all safer when we stand and fight as one.

If Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, or Kennedy were to behold the silence of today’s liberals in the face of Trump’s war against European democracy, it’s hard to imagine the shame they would feel.

From the start, it was clear the second Trump Administration’s approach to Europe would differ radically from his first term. It was also clear that – despite its claim to be countering “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” by European governments – the exact opposite was true. The administration’s practical goal was to exploit the power of the U.S. state, often in direct alliance with dominant communications platforms like Facebook and X, to interfere in free political debate in these democracies.

Vice President J.D. Vance signaled this new posture at the 2025 Munich Security Conference in February, suggesting a new approach to alliances based on economic quid pro quo rather than shared democratic values. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”

At the Paris AI Summit that same month, Vance emphasized the administration’s commitment to secure the dominance of America’s technology corporations through aggressive deregulation at home and by imposing high tariffs on any nation that dared to regulate U.S. corporations, no matter how blatantly those corporations violated that nation’s law.

“The Trump Administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints,” Vance said. “America cannot and will not accept that,”

Those threats became reality with the announcement of the “Independence Day Tariffs” in April. The administration explicitly tied the tariffs to one of Europe’s landmark tech laws, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to increase platform accountability for illegal and harmful content.

The effort was soon taken up across the executive branch. Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked to reframe Europe’s tech regulations as a direct assault on American free speech, and in May announced visa restrictions on foreign officials he accused of “censoring” Americans.

That same month, the hard right ideological underpinnings of this policy shift were made explicit in a State Department memo outlining its intention to redefine the transatlantic alliance as a “bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.”

The administration’s congressional allies meanwhile worked hard to enforce these threats. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan in late summer led a congressional delegation to Brussels and London and held hearings to portray the DSA as a “foreign censorship” regime. In announcing an August hearing on the topic, Jordan warned that the DSA “compels Big Tech to censor user content” and that “this foreign censorship threat... risks chilling the speech of Americans online.”

As if to eliminate any lingering doubt, Trump himself wrote in late August of his intent to retaliate against any efforts to “attack our incredible American Tech Companies.” This included any law, regulation, or tax that he felt was “designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology.

Finally, last month the State Department blocked former European commissioner Thierry Breton and four academics from traveling to the United States. The charge? Serving as “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”

The outlines of this attack on European democracy and regulatory sovereignty were first sketched out during Trump’s first administration. They are largely the result of an effort by Hungary’s autocratic prime minister Viktor Orban to curry friendships with key Trump allies, especially Steve Bannon, and to enlist their support for his own efforts to swing European politics from the liberalism of the last 80 years towards tribalism and authoritarianism.

During those years, Trump’s misleading antimonopoly messaging in the U.S. helped to obscure the increasingly anti-democratic nature of his policies in Europe. During the 2016 campaign, for instance, Trump repeatedly attacked Amazon and other large corporations for predatory behavior in the U.S. Once in power, his law enforcers helped to bring groundbreaking lawsuits against Google and Facebook.

All the while, however, Orban was perfecting his playbook for subverting liberal democracy. As detailed in Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy, this centered on eroding judicial independence, helping friendly oligarchs to purchase independent news outlets, cracking down on civil society and academia, and rewriting the constitution to entrench his party’s rule.

Internationally, Orban positioned himself as the intellectual leader of a global movement, hosting conferences and building networks to export his brand of illiberalism. In a now-famous 2018 speech, he declared his goal was to replace “the shipwrecked liberal democracy” with “a 21st-century Christian democracy.” To this end, Orbán and his allies also invested in key regional news outlets like Euronews and established a powerful think tank named MCC Brussels.

But it was Steve Bannon who, beginning in 2017, worked hardest to connect Orbanism with Trumpism. Bannon’s goal was to forge an international network of hard-right nationalist parties that could work together to undermine and ultimately destroy the European Union from within. Or as Politico put it in a March 2017 feature, Bannon’s goal was to “unmake the West.”

Bannon did so by helping to anoint far-right parties in other European nations, in ways that transformed Orban from a somewhat powerless outsider within the European Union to a leader of a broad movement. This included early contacts with the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) and Nigel Farage, then head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

The ideological project was supported by influential conservative organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which have helped export American-style culture wars and legal strategies to attack LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and secularism. A multi-year investigation by the nonprofit openDemocracy found that the ADF had spent over $20 million in Europe. The project has also been supported by leading right-wing Catholic writers such as Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher.

The result is a network that today provides the connective tissue for a global movement that shares tactics, funding, and personnel. Or as the journalist and researcher Martin Gak put it in 2021, Bannon has “crafted one of the most successful recipe books for the construction of völkisch conservatism in the past 70 years.”

The political economic policies that serve as a foundation for European democracy and political union date to the end of the Second World War. Largely modeled on antimonopoly thinking and laws first developed in the U.S., they aim at the careful distribution and neutralization of power, in ways designed to promote human liberty and to protect democratic institutions and balances of economic power.

In the case of Germany, the Post-War antimonopoly laws and industrial structures were directly imposed by U.S. military governors during the Occupation, based on the belief that German monopolists had helped to make and sustain the Nazi government. In the case of the European Union, Americans worked closely with French leaders to internationalize control over industries vital to arms production, such as steel and coal, and to use American-style antitrust rules to prevent dangerous concentrations of power and control.

That’s why in the initial months of the Trump administration’s assault on Europe’s regulatory regime, many Europeans appeared caught off guard by the administration’s demands, which they viewed not merely as unprecedented but Orwellian in nature.

Fortunately, European leaders mostly responded with a unified and measured defense of their policies, careful not to further provoke an already hostile administration but unafraid of guarding their sovereignty. In February, while Vance was previewing the administration’s aggression, French Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot pushed back against American pressure, stating in his own remarks in Munich that “freedom of speech is guaranteed in Europe,” and that “no one is required to adopt our model, but no one can impose theirs on us.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has also repeatedly affirmed the EU’s commitment to democratic rules for the digital space, framing it as a model for the world. She has also rejected attempts to trade deregulation of the tech monopolies for the relaxation of tariffs. “These are not in the packages of negotiation,” she told the Financial Times in April, “because these are our sovereign decisions.”

New champions like Alexandra Geese, a German Green Member of the European Parliament, have also stood to protect Europe’s regulatory regime from “autocrats and tech billionaires [who] use narratives about protecting freedom of speech to entrench their illiberal policies through misinformation, lies, and hate.”

Encouragingly, the EU’s powerful antimonopoly enforcement agency, DG Competition, has also continued its work despite U.S. pressure. This includes a major decision targeting Google’s anti-competitive adtech practices that mirrored the recent US court finding that that the corporation has illegally maintained a monopoly over this crucial piece of digital infrastructure.

Then in December, the Commission fined social media platform X $140 million due to lack of transparency in advertising. This followed Commission decisions to open broad investigations into Big Tech’s dominance of cloud computing services in Europe, and of Meta’s efforts to restrict how other AI providers access WhatsApp.

Europe also opened a second front in the fight against U.S. tech giants, promoting the building of European-owned and controlled digital infrastructure. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it in a recent summit in Berlin, Europe’s dependency on U.S. and Chinese suppliers is being exploited for “power politics.” As a result, Europeans must “work together toward one goal: that is European digital sovereignty.”

And French President Macron, at that same summit, presented a newly concise and practical defense of Europe’s approach to protecting free speech from the power of the dominant tech platforms.

Despite such resolve, Europe remains highly vulnerable to attacks by the Trump Administration and the dominant tech corporations. Macron’s government is the weakest French administration in decades, and the hold of Merz’s Christian Democratic party in Germany is not much stronger. With far-right populist parties continuing to rise across the continent there is ample reason to fear that without strong displays of solidarity from American allies, European leaders will feel forced to retreat, including in ways that will also make Americans less safe and free.

Nowhere has the insularity of American liberals been more obvious than on the subject of tariffs. Since the White House imposed massive “Liberation Day” levies even on close allies, Democrats have responded mainly by condemning the tariffs as a tax on consumers, hence another threat to the “affordability” of basic goods. A smaller group has narrowly – and in some cases correctly – embraced some of the tariffs as a way to protect key industries and shift factories and jobs from locations abroad back to U.S. communities.

But neither group has addressed the administration’s ultimate political goal – which is to force European governments and other democracies to abandon their efforts to protect the basic liberties of their citizens, including freedom of speech, the press, and debate. Worse, some Democrats have actually aided Trump’s attacks against Europe’s public interest regulations, as a way to protect the dominance of American tech corporations.

Luckily, as we recently wrote in Liberty + Power, Trump’s war on free speech in America seems to have finally started to open liberal eyes. The temporary cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, for instance, appears to have been an inflection point in understanding the threat posed by Trump’s authoritarian actions and the closely related threat posed by concentrated corporate control over speech and communications.

But liberals must move faster to view these threats in a global context. If we are to actually counter the threat posed by Trump and the oligarchs, one foundation must be a renewed commitment to solidarity with democratic allies around the world.

Champions on our side of the Atlantic are beginning to emerge. Congressman Jamie Raskin argued in a recent address in London that the world is witnessing the rise of an “authoritarian axis” that requires a unified response. “We need a new and robust global alliance of democracies,” Raskin said, “founded on democratic solidarity and a passionate commitment to human rights and the rule of law.”

And at Open Market’s own two-day conference in Brussels in October, Raskin and Senator Cory Booker (NJ) joined key European leaders like former EU Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager in calling to renew the transatlantic liberal democratic alliance. Vestager emphasized the need for a rejuvenation of competition policy to prevent “concentrated powers” from seizing control of western democracies. “And of course we need to do that with American friends,” she said. “We need to work together.”

Booker echoed those remarks. “The fate of liberty, the ideal of freedom in America, is inseparably bound to the fate of those same ideals around the world,” he proclaimed. “We must ensure that AI and emerging technologies serve humanity and not dominate it… That our technologies remain instruments of liberty, not control.”

The time has come for every other leader who believes in liberal democracy to recognize that the Trump administration’s campaign against European tech regulation is not a sideshow about trade policy, nor simply a smart opportunity to win points on affordability, but a central front in an international war to protect democracy and human liberty. A war we have no choice but to win.

This edition of Liberty & Power was written and edited by: Barry Lynn, Austin Ahlman, Max von Thun, Ben Winsor, and Anita Jain.

In the closing weeks of 2025, Liberty and Power conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-section of leading Democratic pollsters and messaging experts on the party’s best path forward. The conversations included veterans and newcomers spanning the ideological spectrum —including Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners, Anat Shenker-Osorio of ASO Communications, Evan Roth Smith of Slingshot Strategies, Adam Carlson of ZenithPolls, and Lakshya Jain of The Argument.

Despite some past differences, these analysts are now strikingly aligned on the economic messaging strategy required to defeat Trumpism. Their collective diagnosis is blunt: The Democratic Party has too often resisted the economic populism that—as its own data has shown for years—wins elections. Instead of heeding the large swathes of angry, idiosyncratic swing voters Democrats need to take and hold power, the party has repeatedly retreated into an outdated vision of centrism designed to win over traditional Republicans uneasy with Trump. The result—corporate-friendly policies and small-target politics packaged as smart moderation—has eroded the Party’s working-class brand and electoral prospects.

The experts we spoke to warn that Democrats risk repeating these errors again in 2026 and 2028. Bloodless language about “affordability” or “lowering costs” is not in itself sufficient. To win big, Democrats must be willing to embrace breakthrough economic policies, ignore the neoliberal policy wonks, and make actual enemies out of the billionaires, Big Tech leaders and other corporate oligarchs that too many politicians and operatives have deferred to for so long.

When an old-school party centrist like James Carville calls on Democrats to present a “sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage” the question for every party leader, candidate, and campaign operative should be “how?” What follows is the unfiltered answers of a few of the experts who have studied this question more closely than most.

1. Real Life Voters Don’t Want DC Centrism

The most dangerous misconception plaguing Democratic strategy is the belief that the swing-voters the party needs are moderate in any traditional sense. As Evan Roth Smith explains, “Independents can hold very, very radical views. And some of their most radical views are on the economy.”

Anat Shenker-Osorio recalls focus groups she conducted following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thomson in late 2024. When asked how to get the country back on track, swing voters frequently volunteered that “Mangione was a good start.”

While not a literal endorsement of violence, the sentiment revealed a core understanding among voters: “that there are a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people and corporations that have basically vacuumed up all of the wealth that [other peoples’] work creates.”

In Washington, centrism typically implies a moderation of tone, a respect for institutional norms, a business-friendly economic posture, and quiet stability. But outside the Beltway, swing voters tend to view the status quo as rigged against them. Adam Carlson, for example, reports hearing countless eye-opening remarks from working-class Trump Republicans in focus groups who essentially believe that “we need a complete overhaul of the economy.”

The strategists paint a picture of a swing electorate that is deeply cynical, struggling to pay bills, reflexively anti-elite, angry at big business for gaming the system, and resentful toward establishment figures of both parties who they see as corrupt. Lakshya Jain notes that these voters "don't trust anyone on the political spectrum" and "don't really think anyone has their interests at heart."

When Democrats retreat to the comfortable, outdated DC conception of moderation—valorized as sensible by the both-sides DC pundits who dominate legacy media, and designed to appeal to wealthy, college-educated elites—they leave the potent lane of economic populism wide open for the right.

2. Pick Fights that Get People’s Attention

A critical failure of the Biden administration, and the 2024 Harris campaign, was failing to break through to voters. As Evan Roth Smith explains, “They did plenty of things that affected prices, like prescription drug negotiation.” But “people were totally unaware of it.” Because the policies were technocratic in design and the communications strategy around their passage was crafted to avoid loud confrontation, they failed to penetrate our fractured information environment.

The problem extends throughout the party. In recent decades, Democrats have gravitated toward “80-20” issues: policies that are broadly popular but often low-impact or invisible to the average voter. Roth Smith believes that a “60-40” issue—one that is opposed by more people but generates real controversy and dominates the news cycle—is often a far bigger political winner.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is a master at championing charged, symbolic policies that viscerally signal to voters whose side he is on. A prime example is the “Build the Wall” message from 2016. Polls showed only tepid support for the specific policy. But by making it the centerpiece of his campaign, Trump shifted the entire election onto his winning issue of immigration without spending a cent.

When Biden’s administration did pick big fights with elites—like when Lina Khan filed major cases against leading monopolists in tech, healthcare, and groceries—Biden and his communications team never spoke about it. Worse still, Harris actively distanced herself from those fights during her run.

For Democrats, the lesson is to stop trying to avoid being attacked and instead start choosing how to be attacked. As Shenker-Osorio advises, “Task number one of any campaign is to make the campaign about the thing that privileges you.” Given that every candidate will be attacked on some issue, choose a fight that advantages your campaign and clarifies your values. Backlash to bold economic policies from billionaires and their apologists is a feature, not a bug. It signals to voters that you are doing something significant enough to anger the powers that be.

3. Name Enemies—And Show How You’ll Beat Them

Voters do not believe that economic hardship is an inevitable fact of life; they believe it’s the result of big business and political elites rigging the system against them.

But Democrats too often rely on the passive voice in their messaging, describing the economy as if it operates based on natural forces, rather than human agency and political decisions. Wages ‘fall,’ as if they are autumn leaves. Jobs ‘drift’ overseas, as if they were clouds. Prices ‘rise’ like sourdough. Shenker-Osorio warns that, “when you don’t establish at the outset that a problem is person-made, it becomes implausible that it could be person-fixed.”

“We need to provide an explanation of why we got here,” as Celinda Lake puts it. “Republicans are quite good about providing an explanation. So if we leave a vacuum, they fill it with handouts and undocumented immigrants.”

To earn credibility, Democrats must name specific villains and commit to fighting them – the more specific and localized the better. Message testing reveals that voters see solutions as more credible when leaders identify exactly who is responsible for the problem. Overperforming swing seat Representative Pat Ryan, for example, pioneered the practice of making a foil out of local energy monopolies during his initial run for Congress. According to Roth Smith, whose firm advises Ryan, this signals to voters, “The names that you suspect are bad faith actors, I know those names, and I’m willing to say them out loud.”

This principle applies nationally as well. Carlson says voters already know who many of the bad guys are: dominant grocery chains, insurance companies, big pharma, and tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Bashing these figures polls “off the charts,” he says. “Even Republicans are on board with that in a lot of ways.”

But naming the enemy is only half the battle; the proposed solution must match the scale of the problem. This was a key missed opportunity for the Harris campaign. Early in the 2024 race, Roth Smith’s team tested bombastic, norm-breaking policies to see just how far voters were willing to go. The results were clear: “Trials for grocery store executives!” and “Universal price controls!” were top-testing policies. Voters wanted to see a fight.

While Lake says candidates must choose policies right for their district, those who play it safe and reject big ideas as "unrealistic" or “too expensive” sound foolish to voters who have watched Trump repeatedly do unimaginable things. Democrats, in short, must stop fearing accusations of class warfare and start proving they will actually protect America’s middle and working classes.

4. Defending Democracy Means Fixing the Economy

For years, Democrats have treated protecting democracy and fixing the economy as separate, competing lines of policy and messaging. One is high-minded and institutional; the other is kitchen-table practicality. But the pollsters we spoke to argue this distinction is false. Voters intuitively understand that concentration of economic power and massive hoards of wealth threaten our democracy and undermine our liberty.

“I’ve been surprised by the degree to which people understand that our political problem—the authoritarianism problem—is actually an economic problem,” says Shenker-Osorio. “Too much wealth is in far too few hands.”

“People pretty consistently say: ‘If you wanted to actually deal with this anti-democratic force that has overtaken us, you would have to deal with the consolidation of wealth.” And they see the Trump Administration as “the product of that.”

Lake put it in slightly different terms: “If this were truly a democracy, if people really had their say,” voters believe, “our prescriptions would not cost more than Canada. We would not have unregulated AI. We would not be relaxing the rules on corporate mergers of everything.”

The most effective way to campaign on democracy, Lake adds, is to tie it to the economic narrative and to campaign against the billionaire class who have hijacked our democracy. By framing economic populism as the mechanism for restoring democratic control, Democrats can unite their arguments into a single, coherent narrative that resonates with voters and breaks through their cynicism.

5. Don’t Take the Bait on Culture War Attacks

When leaders fail to provide a strong, confrontational economic message, opponents will inevitably try to make the race about culture war controversies.

This was the trap the Harris campaign fell into in 2024. Harris started strong, with an ad that said that “Big corporations are gouging families” but that “Kamala Harris is focused on you.”

But after the campaign abandoned the messaging it created an opening for the Trump campaign to fill the vacuum with culture war attacks, such as the infamous anti-trans and anti-immigrant ad that declared that “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You.”

Lake says the data consistently shows that strong economic messaging is the most effective shield against cultural attacks. Her research in factory towns, for example, found that while 61% of voters initially thought Democrats were “obsessed with transgender issues,” the party was able to neutralize these attacks on “wokeness” much more effectively with a bold economic message rather than cultural defenses.

“You have to actually have something you stand for, otherwise you’re going to get defined as something you’re not,” says Lakshya Jain. “If you’re always talking about fighting price gouging or a populist platform, you can weather a lot of hits.” When a candidate is unbothered and stays relentlessly on message—for example, pivoting from a culture war attack to a promise to deliver universal healthcare and crackdown on grocery monopolies—they project strength.

Roth Smith argues that the Democratic Party needs to center their core identity around “the economic wellbeing of the working and middle class and the defense of that wellbeing by standing up to concentrated money and power.” All other issues “must be allowed to float based on electoral necessity and political reality.”

6. Get Out Ahead of the AI Backlash

All the strategists agreed that voters today are increasingly fearful of Big Tech’s aggressive push on artificial intelligence and want political leaders to challenge both the power of the corporations and of the oligarchs who control them.

This means being willing to speak honestly about the dangers posed by AI, not merely the benefits. Liberals must be ready to address fears of AI destroying jobs and businesses, and of AI harming children. Concerningly, far right actors like Steve Bannon are rushing to take the lead on these and other issues, and Democrats have to be prepared to take the initiative, a point recently made in the opinion pages of the New York Times.

Democrats should “absolutely” be willing to go for it on AI regulation, Roth Smith says. “That is a fight worth picking, even if there’s a lot of money on the other side of it.”

Adam Carlson agrees. Democrats need to “get out ahead of this issue,” he says. “People are terrified” and “they realize data centers are only the beginning.”

Lakshya Jain is even more blunt: “AI is going to splinter a lot of our political coalitions as we know it.”

Data centers are already providing an excellent populist line of attack against some of the more overt harms of AI, both locally and nationally. The issue combines economic anxiety experienced everywhere with tangible local disruptions in the form of higher electricity prices and the construction of massive resource-intensive data centers.

“It’s much more of a political liability than when Big Tech just lived on your phone,” says Roth Smith. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh shit, they’re, like, building a new power plant down the block from me.’ You can build a political coalition around that.”

Jain agrees. “I think data centers are already causing a big spike in electricity. I think it’s a very convenient, very easy, and very obvious target for Democrats. And I think they’ve got to take advantage of it.”

Pieces of this winning strategy were present in Democrats’ impressive performances in the November 2025 elections. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger made local utility monopolies who were raising rates to facilitate the AI buildout their number one enemies in their campaigns for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. In Georgia, Democrats won two seats on the state’s Public Services Commission for the first time in a generation running on similar themes.

Here again, as we noted in Hard Lesson 3, it’s vital to call out specific villains and to propose real, bold fixes. This means going against the biggest corporations driving both the AI and data center bubbles – especially Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google – and proposing fixes that would actually strike at their present concentrations of power and control.

7. “Welcome the Hatred” of Elites

In October 1936 at Madison Square Garden in New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped win reelection by declaring of the economic elites and monopolists who opposed his populist policies: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

For a brief moment in 2024, Kamala Harris seemed poised to adopt this mantle. Her early ads attacking price gouging and corporate speculators tested exceptionally well. The reaction from the right was immediate and furious, with cutting op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post screaming “Kamunism,” and corporate leaders condemning the policy.

Crucially, the strategists we spoke with all argued that this backlash was actually good. It was the exact response a party should desire to prove its bona fides to a skeptical electorate. Instead, many Democrats panicked, especially after big donors, neoliberal policy wonks, and established liberal pundits echoed the right’s criticisms. “Everyone in the Democratic Party knew it was a good idea and the data supported it,” Roth Smith laments. “Then as soon as they experienced contact, they shrank away.”

Jain agrees. Harris “was up three and a half points on Trump… when she was going hard,” he says. But after the campaign lost its nerve, “it all started going down.”

The retreat was fatal. Adam Carlson argues that by catering to “big donors” and “Never-Trump Republicans” who threatened to pull support if the party went “super lefty socialist,” Democrats protected their war chests but bled support in every demographic group aside from a narrow slice of upper-class, college educated voters.

The lesson is clear: Conflict with economic and media elites is not a side effect of a winning strategy; it’s a core part of the strategy itself. Essentially, as the old adage goes, “it’s not what you say about policy, it’s what your policy says about you.”

If Wall Street loves your economic plan, chances are the working class likely won’t trust it. Instead, Democrats should relish on-air meltdowns from figures like CNBC’s Jim Cramer and revel in angry tweet storms or indignant Substack posts from “very serious” commentators like Matthew Yglesias and Josh Barro. They must learn to welcome the ire of the few to win the votes of the many.

This week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on media censorship under Donald Trump delivered plenty of what Americans have come to expect from Washington: partisan sparring, selective outrage, and well-worn whataboutism. Republicans warned of liberal bias and Biden-era “jawboning.” Democrats pressed on Trump’s hostility toward the press and the FCC’s conduct during his presidency. Much of the exchange resembled a proxy fight over which side has been treated more unfairly.

But beneath the political theater, something far more important emerged. Lawmakers from both parties implicitly acknowledged the same underlying truth: America’s media system has become dangerously concentrated, and that consolidation poses a serious threat to press freedom and democratic accountability.

That recognition—not the partisan sound bites—is the hearing’s most important takeaway. And it demands action.

The hearing focused on the Federal Communications Commission and its role during the Trump administration, particularly under Chair Brendan Carr. Senators questioned whether the FCC has used its regulatory authority to intimidate media outlets, chill speech, or reward political loyalty. Carr was asked repeatedly to affirm the FCC’s independence, to acknowledge that broadcast licensees are protected by the First Amendment, and to explain whether it is appropriate for an FCC chair to publicly threaten or investigate outlets based on their content. He offered deflections rather than answers.

Republicans framed their concerns primarily around allegations of censorship by social media companies and pressure from the Biden administration during the pandemic and debates over election interference. Democrats focused on Trump’s open contempt for the press, his calls to “open up” libel laws, and the FCC’s scrutiny of certain broadcasters during his presidency. Both sides accused the other of hypocrisy.

This kind of whataboutism is useless. Government intimidation of speech is unconstitutional regardless of which party does it. The First Amendment is not a partisan weapon, and independent regulators do not get to bend constitutional limits to settle political scores.

Yet the hearing’s most revealing moments came when senators moved beyond individual grievances and turned their attention to the structure of the media system itself. Over and over, lawmakers raised concerns about media consolidation—particularly its devastating impact on local journalism and civic life.

On this point, there was striking bipartisan agreement. Senators acknowledged that local news is essential to communities, especially during emergencies and natural disasters. They recognized that democracy suffers when newsrooms are stripped for parts, centralized, or replaced with homogenized content produced far from the communities it purports to serve. They agreed that concentrated ownership erodes public trust and weakens accountability. When control over information flows is concentrated in too few hands, press freedom becomes fragile—no matter the ideology of the owners.

That insight is not new. It is the original justification for broadcast regulation and media ownership limits. A democratic society cannot function when a small number of powerful corporations and individuals dominate the channels through which people receive news and information, especially when those corporations are deeply entangled with political and economic power.

For decades, however, Congress and regulators have allowed consolidation to accelerate, weakening antitrust enforcement and dismantling public-interest safeguards. The result is a media environment in which journalists face mounting pressure, corporate gatekeepers wield enormous influence, and regulators possess wide discretion that can be abused for political ends.

This brings us back to the FCC. Even a more diverse ownership landscape cannot protect press freedom if regulators themselves are politicized or unwilling to draw clear constitutional lines. When FCC leadership refuses to affirm basic First Amendment principles, evades questions about independence, or signals that regulatory decisions may hinge on political favor, it invites self-censorship. That chilling effect is not hypothetical. Broadcasters across the country have raised exactly these concerns.

Meaningful oversight of the FCC is therefore essential. Congress must reassert that the Commission exists to serve the public interest—not presidential vendettas or partisan agendas. That oversight should begin with accountability for leadership that appears unwilling or unable to uphold those principles. Forcing Brendan Carr out of his position would be an appropriate first step, though it cannot be the last.

Oversight is just one part of the solution. If lawmakers truly understand the danger consolidation poses—as this week’s hearing suggests they do—then they must act decisively to reverse it. That means enforcing antitrust laws with urgency and ambition. It means breaking up media conglomerates and dominant information platforms whose scale distorts journalism, suppresses competition, and makes political capture easier. And it means restoring structural protections that reduce the stakes of regulatory intimidation by ensuring no single entity wields outsized power over the public square. And it means finding new ways to fund independent journalism in an era when internet platforms have taken newsrooms’ advertising revenue.

The lesson of this week’s hearing is not that one party is right and the other wrong. It is that both have been distracted by partisan skirmishes while the foundations of press freedom erode beneath them. Congress briefly glimpsed the real threat. Now it must prove it has the courage to confront it.

If lawmakers fail to move beyond theater and toward structural reform, future hearings will sound much the same—only with fewer independent journalists left to cover them.

On opposite sides of the Hudson – and opposite ends of their party – two very different Democrats surged to victory this week on a very similar platform: bringing down prices by tackling corporate power.

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani promised to tax billionaires, freeze stabilized rents, and force big business to lower prices in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

But it was former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor Mikie Sherrill who explicitly pledged to freeze utility rates, prosecute corporate colluders, rein in monopoly pricing, bulldoze barriers to competition, and level the playing field for small business – a sweeping anti-monopoly platform.

Together, their victories offer a bridge between the party’s left and center: A populist fight against corporate power at the heart of a renewed fairness and affordability agenda.

Their success is an example of what polling and message testing has demonstrated again and again – that voters are more likely to believe a promise to cut prices when a politician is willing to take direct aim at the corporations and special interests responsible for ripping them off.

It’s backed up by policy research too, which continues to show that robust anti-monopoly enforcement is essential for actually bringing prices down. It gives leaders a clear suite of day-one tools that allow them to sidestep political gridlock and take immediate, visible action.

Mamdani’s appointment of antitrust champion and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan as transition co-chair indicates just how deeply he intends to integrate anti-monopoly, pro-consumer, and pro-small business policy into his administration. So too his months of close coordination with long-time anti-corporate crusader Zephyr Teachout.

But while it was missed by much of the media, the anti-monopoly messaging in the race just across the Hudson was perhaps even more wide ranging, forceful and well-thought-out. Expectations may be even higher too; from the governor’s mansion, Sherrill will wield more authority to actually turn her words into action.

Branded “Moderate Mikie” by fans and detractors alike, she blasted past expectations to cinch a sweeping early victory against former state legislator Jack Ciattarelli.

Sherrill’s platform breaks the corporate-friendly mold of many New Jersey Democrats. Taking on corporate power and exploitation was front and center in her affordability message – embedded in virtually every policy area, from healthcare and housing to groceries and utility bills.

On healthcare, Sherrill pledged to “drive prices down through increased competition” and direct her Attorney General “to investigate price gouging, monopolies and high rates of denying coverage.”

On groceries, she railed against “large corporations who jack up food prices” and promised to lower the barriers to entry for small businesses, “which will add more local options, create stronger competition, lower prices, and address food deserts.”

On utilities, she railed against corporate utilities and grid operator PJM for being “controlled by big oil and gas CEOs,” promised to fill in regulatory gaps opened up by the Trump administration, and even pledged to declare a “day one” emergency to freeze utility price hikes.

And on housing, she promised to take on those “who buy up rental properties and jack up prices” and “collude to rig rents above market levels.”

“I’m taking on those landlords who are colluding to drive up your rental prices,” she said in one widely circulated clip, referring to the use of price-fixing corporation RealPage’s algorithms. “At every single level I have been willing to take on this fight and I will fight anyone, when it comes to fighting for the people of New Jersey.“

The key to Sherrill’s victory was a “relentless” focus on affordability, said campaign manager Alex Ball in her post-game analysis, combined with a credible, trustworthy messenger.

“A laser focus on an affordability crisis,” answered senior Mamdani advisor Morris Katz in the same conversation, “and also a real willingness to name the real villains who are responsible for creating this moment of gross income inequality.”

As a battle rages about the path forward for Democrats – on abundance and affordability and culture wars and corporate influence – Sherrill and Mamdani just showed how a strong anti-monopoly, pro–small business, pro-consumer platform, with clear protagonists and antagonists, can unify progressives and moderates and win back voters.

The party’s biggest corporate, big-tech and real estate donors will no doubt try to water down this message – or quietly block the kind of post-election enforcement needed to make it real. But caving to those interests would be a catastrophic mistake for a party that needs to rebuild its credibility, show it’s willing to fight for the working class and prove it can deliver where Trump has failed.

Last week’s victories add to a growing body of evidence that – as Democrats search for a message that can unite their big tent – there’s a resonant platform hidden in plain sight: An economic agenda that sidesteps culture wars and rallies voters around a shared fight for liberty, opportunity and fairness against concentrated corporate power.

The test is whether the party can carry that message forward, and deliver on it in office.

Ben Winsor served as Digital Director on Sherrill’s first campaign, which earned a similar early election-night celebration in the biggest red-to-blue swing of the 2018 Blue Wave. He currently serves as a Special Advisor for Strategic Communications at J Street.

Sir Keir Starmer won a historic landslide just over a year ago, sweeping into office with a parliamentary supermajority the likes of which the United Kingdom had not seen since the years of Tony Blair. In his victory speech on the steps of 10 Downing Street, he promised to use that majority to “end the chaos of 14 years under the Conservatives” and deliver sweeping and immediate “change.”

During the campaign, Labour called the election, “a moment where we can turn the page on a set of ideas that, over 14 years, have consistently left us more vulnerable in an increasingly volatile world.” It was exactly what the British public, reeling from two decades of recession, austerity, and a chaotic exit from the European Union, were demanding.

Then something went wrong. Many voters believed the logical first step would be for Starmer to renounce the neoliberal policies that had gutted the country’s once vaunted health and social services, as well as vast swaths of the UK technology and industrial sectors. Instead, he and his team doubled down on the old thinking, to devastating effect. Rather than reverse the austerity of his predecessors, he pursued new cuts. Instead of directly challenging concentrated corporate power, he promoted deregulation.

Perhaps most galling for many of his supporters, Starmer has pursued a far more corporate-friendly agenda than even the Tories, in a quixotic bid to court American tech oligarchs and the Trump Administration.

Today, Starmer’s once sweeping mandate has completely evaporated. His personal net favorability rating is -47, which places him among the most unpopular leaders in the world. The Labour Party, which got 37.5% of the vote last year, now polls below 20% — level with the shell of the Conservative party that they just vanquished and the newly ascendant Liberal Democrats and Greens. The resulting political vacuum is now being filled by the party that precipitated Brexit, the nativist and reactionary Reform UK, which now clearly leads in many public polls.

Rumors that Starmer’s disastrous tenure might soon end grow louder each week, with some members of Labour, like MP Clive Lewis, saying openly that: “He doesn’t seem up to the job.”

Since the days of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, many in the Democratic Party have felt a kinship for Labour and have often coordinated broadly on policy and messaging. Consider, for instance, a recent high-profile conference in London co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress.

This relationship is exactly why U.S. liberals should take the right lessons from Starmer’s implosion. Like British voters, most Democrats – and indeed most U.S. voters – are enraged at the state of society – and an economy that seems to work only for the few – and are looking for leaders able to channel that anger into transformative change. What they don’t want is the warmed-over, pro-corporate laissez faire policies that got us into this mess, yet which Starmer and many mainstream pundits in the Democratic Party continue to push.

It should have been clear from the depth and multifaceted nature of Britain’s economic crisis that the Starmer government needed to offer more than minor tweaks to the radical pro-monopoly and pro-financier policies Blair imported from Larry Summers’s 1990s Washington policy machine. Not only did that thinking result in a well-documented series of economic and political catastrophes – including the worldwide financial crash of 2008, the transfer of vital industrial capacity to China, and the rise to power of increasingly autocratic and anti-democratic tech corporations – but millions in the UK and U.S. have been in rebellion against these policies for a full decade now.

In the case of the UK, the country’s economic decline was accelerated by a brutal anti-working class and anti-poor austerity campaign by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron starting in 2010. Some estimates suggest those cuts _— which chainsawed social spending by more than 25% in some years — lopped as much as half-a-percent off annual GDP growth each year since they went into effect, with the result compounding over time.

The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 – driven by the racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric of radical right politician Nigel Farage and amplified by foreign exploitation of the manipulation mechanisms in social media – only deepened the country’s crises by raising barriers to trade with the UK’s main economic partner. The global inflation spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK harder than most other large democracies — peaking at an eye-watering 11% in October 2022. This led the Bank of England to keep UK interest rates higher than most European nations, putting a further drag on growth.

When voters finally cast aside the Tories, it was a call for a dramatic break from that status quo, and a demand to hold self-dealing elites and predatory corporations accountable for the country’s sharp and largely preventable economic decline.

Once in power, however, Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, appear to have concluded British voters would settle for a more predictable version of Tory rule. Rather than take swift action, Starmer began to talk of a “calm and patient rebuilding.” Instead of transforming government, he promised that the state would “tread more lightly on your lives.” Starmer and Reeves stopped presenting the UK’s economic and political crisis as a result of bad economic ideas and instead framed it as a case of poor management.

They made their first major mistake within weeks of taking power, announcing plans to means-test the UK’s winter fuel allowance, a universal benefit that helps pensioners keep warm. They claimed the action would save £1.3 billion—a rounding error in the nearly £400 billion social services budget. What it also did was eliminate a longstanding benefit to some 9.3 million pensioners.

That misstep has become symbolic of the Starmer government’s neo-Tory approach. Promises to bring key industries like rail transportation and mail delivery back under state control have been cast aside in favor of new “public-private” partnerships that mainly favor the private investor. Even more concerning is that they installed more business figures in key regulatory bodies than the Conservatives, leading to fears that they will continue to underinvest in public enterprises, and perhaps even sell off additional vital infrastructure.

The lesson here is not that state control of industry is in any way superior to state regulation of privately owned industry. It’s that whichever of these paths a government chooses, it must carefully structure both external competition and internal governance of the corporation to prevent dangerous concentrations of power and control, the highest quality of service at the best possible price, and incentive for true technological innovation.

This points directly to another Starmer failure. The one area where the outgoing Tory party had actually improved on its predecessors was in pursuing competition policy that protected UK markets from being further monopolized and colonized by international tech and finance giants. Under Prime Minister Theresa May, the United Kingdom had begun revitalizing its approach to corporate concentration. For a few years, the nation’s top regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, was one of the global leaders on competition policy, taking on giants like Microsoft, Facebook, and Adobe.

It was a pivot birthed from both economic and political necessity. During the initial period of the 14-year Tory rule, the UK government stood aside as foreign corporations snatched up many of the country’s most prized firms. Superstar artificial intelligence firm DeepMind, for example, was acquired by Google in 2014, and world-leading British chip designer ARM was scooped up in 2016 by Japan’s SoftBank. But under the approach pioneered by May, when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission moved to block the sale of ARM to Nvidia in 2022, the CMA was ready to join the effort.

Much of the energy behind May’s reforms can be traced to the Brexit vote in 2016. After the final result veered widely from pre-referendum polling, both the Government and House of Lords launched investigations into the structure and behaviors of social media platforms and dominant tech platforms generally. These led to passage of the ambitious Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.

Six years later, in a symbol of just how dramatically Starmer has reversed May’s approach, his government fired the chair of the CMA for being too tough on U.S. tech platforms and replaced him with a former Amazon executive.

The irony is that the Starmer government is currently on the verge of one truly popular achievement: a Workers’ Bill of Rights. This bill would ban most exploitative gig contracts, end the practice of “fire and rehire,” and grant workers fundamental rights from day one. Polls show the reforms enjoy overwhelming support across the political spectrum, especially among the voters Labour is losing to Reform UK.

But few voters have heard about the Bill of Rights. That’s because Starmer and Reeves barely mentioned the idea—a damning rebuke of their messaging as well as their priorities.

To fully grasp the tragedy of today’s Labour government, it helps to go back seven years to when the party – then in opposition – actually attempted to identify policies and narratives designed to address the anger revealed by the Brexit vote, as well as the practical challenges posed by the sudden separation from the European Union.

In 2018, then Shadow Chancellor Reeves detailed in the clearest possible terms the political and economic harms created by extreme concentration of power and control.

“Civic life, the ethos of public service and the social virtues that govern our behaviour toward one another have all been subjected to market forces and thus weakened. Nature, knowledge, social relationships and vast swathes of our personal data have been captured by corporations and commodified. None have been more voracious than the new monopolies of platform capitalism like Google, Facebook and Amazon, all three of which exert a monopoly power over knowledge and information. They block competitive markets, avoid taxation and impose oppressive control over their employees. And they use their monopoly power to extract and commodify information about the personal lives of consumers.

Britain needs to restore its national economy and build institutions that improve wealth creation, social security, and quality goods and services. Old and new monopolies need to be broken up to ensure that markets are competitive.”

In September of that year, the Labour-connected think tank IPPR released a comprehensive report calling for the UK’s “data and digital infrastructure” to be “organised as collective goods” and regulated in the public interest. The report was covered in depth by almost all Britain’s main newspapers and broadcasters.

These ideas remained very much part of the intellectual and policy discussion in 2024 and in the days after Labour finally won power, promoted not only by IPPR but – less forcefully – by a policy group directly connected with Starmer, Labour Together. Which only sharpens the question of why Starmer and Reeves then chose to impose such a retrograde, pro-corporate, pro-Big Tech agenda.

Much of the answer appears to lead directly to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a policy shop called the Tony Blair Institute. Although Blair founded TBI in 2016, its influence began to swell in 2021, thanks to an enormous infusion of funding from Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who has donated or promised more than £257 million (equal to some $343 million).

Blair has used this shop not only to repackage his disastrous pro-corporate “Third Way” policies of the 1990s, but to promote an even more extreme vision of regulatory laissez- faire, especially vis-à-vis the dominant tech corporations. This includes a plan to transfer vast caches of government data on individual citizens – including their most private health information – to Oracle and Palantir.

Practically, the vast infusion of cash into TBI has warped debate within the broader Labour community. Thanks to Ellison’s support, TBI has been able to hire hundreds of up-and-coming policy experts and Labour-friendly business executives in the UK, and train them in the delusional orthodoxies of neoliberal thinking. Even combined, the budget of groups like IPPR and Labour Together are but a tiny fraction of TBI’s annual $150 million+ budget. As a result, once in power, Starmer and Reeves found they had little choice other than to staff much of their government with TBI operatives and trainees.

Starmer has attempted to reframe his full-on embrace of Third-Way laissez-faire as an exciting new opportunity for growth and progress. His line is simple: the core problem of Western society isn’t corporate power or inequality, but self-imposed scarcity. Decades of burdensome regulation, particularly in sectors like housing and energy, have created a bureaucratic morass that chokes off economic vibrancy. The solution is a government designed to cut through red tape and usher in a new era of supply-side growth.

If this all sounds similar to the core message of the “Abundance” campaign in the United States, you would not be wrong. In fact, in the late September conference with the Center for American Progress, Starmer used exactly that word to describe his thinking.

The obvious question is whether Starmer and Reeves can recover their footing and reputation. And if they can’t, can the leaders who replace them?

In mid-September, Elon Musk provided them with one opportunity for a second chance, by sponsoring a rally by tribalist provocateur Tommy Robinson, whose actions are so extreme even Nigel Farage has denounced him. The rally, which attracted as many as 150,000 marchers, featured a call by Musk for a new UK government with the warning: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.”

Musk had drawn little backlash for his role in fomenting violence in places like Southport. But this overt interference in UK politics, combined with violence by rally-goers that left 26 police officers injured, sparked a new level of reaction against Musk and tech oligarchs broadly, with calls for action by leaders in both the Liberal Democrat and Tory parties. But, although Starmer criticized Musk for inciting violence, thus far he has said nothing about how he might actually regulate the behavior of platforms to prevent similar or worse abuse of power in the future.

For U.S. liberals, two lessons stand out from Starmer’s political and moral collapse. First, it is absolutely vital not to align with Starmer and Reeves until they demonstrate a clear commitment to fighting oligarchy and autocracy and protecting British democracy and sovereignty.

The second? Democrats should make sure to steer clear of almost every one of Starmer’s signature policies, at least until he and Reeves demonstrate they understand what this moment of crisis demands.

As Starmer’s freefall demonstrates, trying to simply manage neoliberalism towards progressive ends is a good way to destroy not merely your own legitimacy and that of your party, but of the democratic state you have been entrusted to lead. The dominant fact of modern life is people’s deep sense of powerlessness in a political economy controlled by a few increasingly lawless corporations and oligarchs. Voters don’t want lectures about process. They want bold action.

This edition was written and edited by: Austin Ahlman, Barry Lynn, Max von Thun, George Colville, and Anita Jain

Last month’s suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” by Disney, following pressure from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr and President Trump himself, starkly illustrates the urgent need for liberals to do everything in their power to fight the Administration’s threats to free speech and the free press. Kimmel’s reinstatement—a rare and welcome victory for defenders of liberal democracy—is a testament to what is possible when people are awakened to the threat posed when control over the news media and the internet is concentrated in the hands of a few immensely powerful corporations. But it would be dangerous for liberals to move past the Kimmel saga without an understanding of how we got into this crisis and a theory of how to rebuild a truly independent and robust system of free speech and free press in America.

Trump has targeted free speech much more directly in his second term than he did in his first. Even before the inauguration, Trump targeted the press through a series of lawsuits aimed at punishing and extorting news publications he perceived as overly critical of his campaign or insufficiently critical of his opponents. Once in power, he launched a series of attacks on universities to force them gut their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and stifle the speech of students protesting Israel’s devastation of Gaza.

Recently, a new and even more disturbing pattern has emerged, as the administration increasingly exploits regulatory authorities to force news and entertainment corporations to refrain from criticizing the president. The first concerning action came when CBS in July suddenly announced plans to cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show next May. Colbert has been a persistent critic of the new administration, and CBS’s parent company Paramount had long sought government approval to merge with Skydance, which is controlled by the far-right family of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the richest men in the world.

After the announcement, there was widespread speculation that the corporation did so to curry favor with the administration. But there was no smoking gun to prove such a connection.

The administration’s attack on Kimmel and Disney, by contrast, took place fully in public. Following Kimmel’s monologue criticizing the “MAGA gang’s” response to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, FCC Chair Carr appeared on a right-wing podcast and issued a direct threat to the Disney subsidiary ABC and its broadcast affiliates: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, warning that if the corporation didn’t take action, there would be “additional work for the FCC ahead.”

The brazen nature of the FCC Chair’s intervention in the Kimmel controversy has, in some ways, proven a boon to the critics who have been sounding the alarm about the threats to freedom of speech posed by a combination of corporate consolidation and an increasingly aggressive campaign by right-wing conservatives to silence liberals. It both reawakened those who had become numb to the administration’s increasingly authoritarian tactics and jolted many who had not fully grasped the magnitude of the threat. And it revitalized interest in how to regulate media and the sprawling technology platforms that dominate communications today to prevent them from becoming tools of suppression.

In the aftermath of the Kimmel saga, it is vital that liberals and centrists recognize how our own actions—and naivety— helped set the stage for today’s information crisis. And further, that liberals rediscover and sharpen the tools we have long used to defend people’s freedom to hear and convey speech without censorship or manipulation. There is no task more fundamental in a liberal democracy than crafting a resilient and diverse information system, and liberal policymakers must begin immediately to use every power and tool at hand to protect people’s right to credible and diverse sources of information in the modern age.

The first step is understanding just how extreme the concentration of power over our communications and news systems has become and the history of how we got to this point.

Carr’s authoritarian power play against Disney, for instance, is less a reflection of traditional television’s importance than of that industry’s woes. Once a bedrock of American media, broadcast and cable television are today in a steep and likely irreversible decline. The rise of streaming services has led to a mass exodus of viewers and advertisers from traditional television, a phenomenon known as cord-cutting. This has created a vicious cycle: as revenue dwindles, networks are forced to cut costs, leading to a decline in the quality and diversity of programming, which in turn drives more viewers to streaming platforms.

But it’s important to understand that streaming is simply the most recent in a long series of blows to the industry, many of them delivered by Democrats.

The establishment of the FCC in the 1930s came during a similar upheaval in the ways people received information brought about by the increasing dominance of radio and the advent of television. For most of the remainder of the 20^th century, the FCC was a robust regulator that worked effectively to limit the threats concentrated power pose to people’s right to hear and convey speech, news, and entertainment. The commission operated under the principle that the airwaves are a public resource and that broadcasters have a responsibility to serve the public interest. This meant promoting a diversity of viewpoints, ensuring access to local news and information, and preventing the concentration of media ownership. Regulations like the Fairness Doctrine, must-carry provisions for news, and rules limiting cross-ownership of media outlets were designed to foster a vibrant and competitive marketplace of ideas.

While these regulations were not without their flaws—the “public interest” standard, for example, was never adequately defined in law—they were rooted in a fundamentally democratic vision of the media’s role in society, including a belief that local communities be served by locally owned newspapers and broadcasters. Our current regulatory framework has not only failed to adapt these principles to the digital age—it has slowly chipped away at their applicability even to legacy information systems.

Most of this damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s, as Republicans and Democrats alike embraced a libertarian view of economics and power that celebrated efficiency at all costs and discounted the threats of concentrated corporate control. The most devastating blow came during a Democratic administration, when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That legislation dismantled many of the rules that had historically promoted competition and diversity in the media landscape, such a strict ownership cap that limited conglomerates from owning stations that reached more than 25% of the national audience. (That 25%, which was implemented under Reagan in 1985, was itself a large departure from the FCC’s original approach, which put hard numerical limits on the number of stations one corporation could own.)

More importantly, the 1996 Act enshrined a hands-off approach to governing the digital age by drawing an arbitrary distinction between traditional telecommunications services and a new category of “information services” that included internet providers and digital platforms. It capped that regulatory mishap with Section 230, a provision that in theory protects speech by insulating corporations from liability for content disseminated by their users. In practice, that provision has allowed dominant platforms to exercise total control over online speech with no legal liabilities or democratic oversight.

Following the passage of the 1996 bill, the FCC has generally embraced that hands-off approach to governing online corporations—no matter how big and powerful they have grown. At the same time, the commission completely failed to protect the traditional broadcasters from the power of the new Big Tech monopolists, even as these corporations used their power to unfairly strip ad revenue and viewers from broadcasters. This one-two punch set up a dangerous dynamic that has played out over the last three decades. Tech monopolies like Google have exploited the lack of democratic accountability to systematically monopolize the advertising market, giving them ever more power to starve traditional broadcasters and other publishers of high-quality information of their key source of revenue. Simultaneously, the new monopolists also worked to lock individual customers into their services.

Meanwhile, corporations like Nexstar and Sinclair took advantage of the laxer FCC regulations to slowly accumulate every greater power over the news and entertainment distributed by the legacy broadcast networks, which include NBC and FOX in addition to ABC and CBS. Despite the long-running decline of the broadcasters and of analog television generally, millions of Americans—especially in older and more rural segments of the population—still turn to these outlets for much or most of their news. Importantly, these new broadcasting conglomerates tend to promote far more conservative viewpoints than earlier generations of broadcasters.

To compound the problem, these same powerful station monopolies have in recent years exploited regulatory loopholes to establish de facto control over stations nominally controlled by smaller competitors through quasi-ownership schemes like service agreements. This consolidation has led to a further homogenization of content and a decline in the diversity of viewpoints, leaving the public with fewer and less reliable sources of information.

In recent years, one of the few elements holding this system together has been live sports. Live sporting events consistently dominate television ratings and have been one of the primary reasons for viewers to tune into legacy broadcast stations, which in turn helped keep advertising dollars flowing. In fact, ads served during sporting events in many instances have actually increased in value in recent years.

Further, until recently, live sports programming also provided viewers a big incentive to maintain expensive cable subscriptions, which, in turn, provided local broadcast news with another vital source of revenue, generated from being carried by cable and satellite providers under “must-carry” regulations. In recent years, it has been these retransmission fees, which are mandated by the FCC under law, that have primarily kept the remaining broadcasters afloat.

But this pillar too is now crumbling as the dominant tech and streaming platforms have launched an aggressive campaign to acquire premier sports rights. Streamers like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple are now successfully bidding for exclusive rights to NFL, NBA, and NASCAR events. The tech giants’ deep pockets enable them to easily outbid less powerful and less diversified corporations in order to expand their control over digital commerce and information streams.

The overarching consequences of the decline of local television have been dire for the public. Due to the ongoing collapse of local and regional newspapers—which is similarly being fueled by the tech monopolies’ stranglehold on advertising revenue—broadcast television stations are in many regions of the country the only remaining semi-reliable source for local news.

Over the last 50 years, an increasingly illiberal and authoritarian movement on the right in America has refined a strategy to restructure the information environment to promote their particular social and political viewpoints. In addition to their successful, decades-long agenda to destroy the FCC’s original pro-democracy regulatory mandate—which was aided nearly every step of the way by liberals—the right has for years systematically attacked the legitimacy of incumbent news organizations with spurious claims of anti-conservative bias. More recently, they began to build alternative media networks and online platforms, while applying ever stronger political and economic pressure on the dominant digital platforms.

Then over the summer, these groups capped off these efforts by convincing Republicans in Congress to enact an almost gratuitous gutting of the last remaining public supports for television and radio in the U.S., despite the fact that these systems often provide the only real service in much of rural America.

Meanwhile, the center and left—still largely under the sway of the thinking and political influences that led to the disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996—have remained shockingly oblivious to the extreme concentration of power and control over the news and information systems that have enabled liberal democracy since the earliest days of the nation.

The Kimmel controversy demonstrates just how dangerous this ignorance and passivity has been, and how urgent it is for American liberals to relearn how to regulate and build news and communications systems that protect and promote democracy and true intellectual and political liberty. It is not enough to simply shout in the streets in defense of Jimmy Kimmel’s right to tell the jokes he wants; we must immediately also address the underlying structural problems that have made our media landscape so vulnerable to authoritarian pressure.

Luckily, we can look to our past for solutions—including specifically to how we regulated legacy media. The principles that once guided the regulation of broadcast television can be updated and adapted to the digital age, and we should start to do so immediately.

First and foremost, we must demand aggressive enforcement of the antimonopoly regulations that still govern our legacy broadcast system, which despite its long-term decline remains of great importance to ensuring diversity and plurality to the national news and information system. Practically, this means regulators and lawmakers should preserve and strengthen caps on station ownership and cross-ownership regulations, rather than further increasing the number of stations a conglomerate can control, as the FCC is now doing.

Next, liberals need to translate old principles to the new information gatekeepers. Streaming services operate almost entirely outside of the purview of the FCC, even when they carry live programmed television content that mirrors the content available on broadcast television. Just as broadcasters were once required to serve the public interest in exchange for the use of the public airwaves, so too should these new media giants be held to public interest standards.

This could take many forms. We could, for example, reimagine the “must-carry” provisions the FCC has long imposed on cable providers for today’s streaming platforms by requiring those platforms to carry local news content and create compensation frameworks that encourage quality and diversity. This would provide a much-needed lifeline to local journalism and ensure that all Americans, regardless of where they live or how they watch television, have access to information about their communities.

Third, enforcers and policymakers should move aggressively to force today’s new online platform gatekeepers like Google and Facebook to share revenue with broadcasters and other providers of local journalism in a sustainable manner based on fair-market valuations of the content. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which has enjoyed strong bipartisan support from lawmakers for years, provides one potential path forward.

But even as liberal policymakers move to prevent a final collapse of the legacy broadcast news and entertainment system, they must move simultaneously to master the true challenge of this moment, which is to shape the structures and behaviors of today’s dominant digital platform monopolies to protect and promote American liberty and democracy in the 21^st century.

But for a guide to that task, you will have to tune in again next time, for Part II of Liberty & Power’s series on regulating communications in the digital age to protect free speech and press for all Americans.

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This week, the “Abundance” campaign held its flagship conference in Washington. The campaign’s proponents, led by prominent authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, echoed the main complaint from the project’s namesake book: Democrats have become too focused on redistribution and corporate regulation and have lost the ambition to build. They called for a “new progressivism” to unleash the power of technology and free markets to create a world of plenty.

What they did not do is talk about one of the primary obstacles to their own stated goals: Big Tech.

On the surface, Abundance is both a smart term and an unobjectionable vision, particularly during a global cost of living crisis and an era of destructive polarization. Who doesn’t want to see a wave of innovation that magically fixes our economic stagnation and, as a result, our political dysfunction? It is curious, then, that its proponents have so little to say about the industry that is largely responsible for both problems.

A look at the conference’s list of co-sponsors helps explain the omission. The campaign’s focus on cutting regulations, its myopic obsession with the local governance issues plaguing places like San Francisco and New York City, and its downplaying of the dangers of monopoly power are perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporations and people who patronize the groups who first sketched out the Abundance “vision.”

Many of those groups, like Niskanen Center and R Street, have long had a cozy—and sometimes lucrative—relationship with the tech monopolists. But it is the role of the Chamber of Progress, one of the select sponsors that provided direct funding for this week’s conference, that really gives away the game.

Chamber of Progress is a classic Washington interest group funded by a Who’s Who of the tech industry, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. The group describes itself as “center-left,” and “pro-progress.” But its main purpose is to lobby on behalf of its corporate funders for policies that cannot reasonably be considered progressive or liberal.

For instance, Chamber of Progress has consistently opposed virtually all attempts to apply antitrust or consumer protection law to Big Tech, and it has played a leading role in thwarting new regulations. This includes leading opposition to a bipartisan package of antitrust bills introduced in 2021 by a large and ideologically diverse group of House members—including Ken Buck, Hakeem Jeffries, and Pramila Jayapal—that aimed to foster innovation and curb the monopoly power of the Chamber’s Big Tech bosses.

Chamber of Progress’s founder and CEO, Adam Kovacevich, is a case study in the power relationship between Big Tech and Washington. Before launching his influence shop, Kovacevich spent years as a top lobbyist for Google, where he helped build its formidable influence operation in the capital. Before that, he helped elevate corporate-friendly politicians, including ones now working to undermine the government’s ability to perform basic functions, let alone invest in a plentiful future. That list includes his college friend Tom Cotton, who Kovacevich supported during his initial runs for Congress, and current House Judiciary and Big Tech overseer Chair Jim Jordan, who Kovacevich donated to as recently as 2018. Early in his career, Kovacevich also worked as an aide to former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who left the Democratic Party after primary voters rejected his pro-corporate politics in 2006.

Kovacevich now collects a base salary of a half million dollars per year leading the effort to pressure Democrats not to regulate the tech industry. In recent months this includes several initiatives to push the Democratic Party back towards Bill Clinton-style laissez-faire, including a new publication called “The Rebuild,” which mixes praise for the Abundance agenda with screeds against advocates seeking to rein in these corporations.

Those efforts neatly complement the writings of Klein and Thompson, whose work has been broadly criticized for a glaring lack of curiosity about the role of corporate power in shaping our lives and society, as well as antagonism towards people and organizations working to rein in that influence, including local community organizations and unions.

In response to charges that his view of the world is naïve, even dangerous, Klein recently felt obliged to write a treatise explaining Abundance’s “theory of power.” One pillar of this theory is that the influence of immense world-spanning dominant corporations is rivaled or even surpassed by that of grassroots activists. “Corporations sometimes serve the national interest and sometimes betray it,” Klein wrote. “The same is true for governments, for unions, for churches, for nonprofits.”

Whether by design or by tacit acceptance from its leading voices, Abundance has become the perfect Trojan horse for Big Tech—a collection of inspiring but vague truisms tech bosses are eager to latch onto in order to further their own interests. This is not to suggest that Klein and Thompson are themselves on the payroll of Big Tech. But their intellectual framework, if one is generous enough to call it that, is deeply sympathetic to Big Tech’s interests and ripe for co-option.

An honest vision of Abundance would recognize that digital industries are the key arbiters of wealth and personal well-being in the modern world. Believers in such a vision would therefore strive to structure dynamic, competitive digital markets designed to protect the liberty and dignity of the individual, in part by helping new products and ideas to flourish. Yet the tech monopolists have built precisely the opposite reality: a walled garden guarded by a vast legion of lawyers and mercenary intellectuals, in which the already dominant incumbents decide who wins and who loses. This is not a recipe for a vibrant, abundant economy—it is a blueprint for stagnation and the further enrichment and entrenchment of a handful of oligarchs.

Look at Kovacevich’s former employer Google, for instance. Through its dominance in search, Google acts as the gatekeeper to the internet, and it has systematically—and illegally—used this power to crush potential competitors and favor its own services. All the while, the corporation uses the data it collects from those services to bolster its AdTech monopoly. That monopoly has pushed publishers big and small to the point of collapse, as Google hoards the advertising revenue that for more than three centuries supported the authors and editors of high-quality information.

In other words, Google has created the conditions for the private takeover and management of both innovation and free thought, in the form of a curated reality where the most visible choice is always a Google product—often one that is dramatically inferior to the few alternatives that still exist elsewhere. This description, while dramatic, is not conjecture. In the last year, Google has been found liable in two separate cases before federal courts of illegally monopolizing these core parts of our information system.

And Google and its peer corporations play for keeps. When governments in Australia, Canada, and California attempted to rebalance the playing field by requiring Facebook and Google to give a sliver of their earnings back to news publishers, the giants threatened to withhold local news content from their platforms altogether. And now they have enlisted the Trump administration to leverage the threat of devastating tariffs to try to stop the European Commission and other independent democracies from regulating their monopolistic and manipulative behavior.

In short, these corporations have contributed as much as any group to undermining democracy in America and around the world. And that is before you consider how the advent of generative AI stands to accelerate these negative patterns. Yet on the rare occasions that Abundance advocates like Thompson and Klein do acknowledge the dysfunction created by these world-spanning power systems, they have lazily dismissed any call for regulatory reforms to rein in the industry, instead advocating for modestly helpful but comically insufficient policies like banning phones in schools.

For a time, the gravity of Trump’s attacks on American democracy seemed to neutralize the Abundance campaign’s quest for influence. While many liberals appear to accept the narrow and vague points Abundance proponents make about the need to build more affordable housing and clean energy infrastructure, their blindness to the harms of concentrated corporate power, weak grasp of political economy and American history, and inability to detail how they would craft workable policy undercut their support even among many thinkers who might be predisposed to their worldview. It also didn’t help that poll after poll has found that Democrats and Americans at large are unconvinced by the campaign’s pitch.

Yet in certain respects the Abundance campaign today appears to be regaining some momentum. This is not because the useful intellectuals who helped attract attention to these ideas have suddenly developed a more coherent philosophy. Rather, the reason lies in the hundreds of millions of dollars that have flooded policy shops, advocacy and lobbying groups, and influence projects aligned with the Abundance campaign over the past year.

Some of this cash has been directed towards policy research—mostly of a distinctly neoliberal flavor. Some is being used to pay for a suite of new astroturf efforts, including a college initiative called Students for Abundance and a consortium of local Democratic officials called the Abundance Elected Network—both of which were announced on the eve of the DC conference. Some is even being used to fund a flashy new “pro-Abundance” publication to serve as a home for members of the cohort of writers working to push this campaign into the mainstream.

More concerningly, a vast amount of cash is being readied to directly buy influence over individual candidates and the Democratic Party as a whole. For example, in a recent appearance on the Joe Lonsdale podcast, billionaire LinkedIn co-founder, tech investor, and prolific Democratic donor Reid Hoffman said he intends to direct the millions of dollars in political contributions that he makes annually to support Democratic candidates who are aligned with the Abundance agenda.

Perhaps most concerningly, Trump megadonor and tech mogul Marc Andreessen, who published a manifesto on the principles of Abundance in 2023, has promised to open his wallet. In partnership with other Silicon Valley heavyweights, like OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Andreessen intends to steer $100 million directly into electoral politics through a new network of super-PACs called “Leading the Future.” (Coincidentally, Andreessen’s firm a16z is also a funder of Chamber of Progress.)

In all, the amount of Big Tech and Abundance-aligned campaign cash may soon rival or even surpass the eye-watering amounts currently being deployed by top influence brokers like the cryptocurrency industry and AIPAC.

So, as attendees in Washington break off for cocktails following the week’s events, observers who believe in democracy, innovation, and shared prosperity should pay as much attention to what was not said as what was.

We saw no discussion of the innumerable ways that tech monopolists constrain innovation, suppress free speech, starve the press, crush entrepreneurship, or help widen the fractures in our society. Nor did we hear a more coherent plan about how this neo-neoliberalism will actually deliver us from the brink of disaster.

The elephants who helped pay for the room—and their politically and economically destructive power —were conspicuously off-limits. That’s not an oversight, it was the price of admission.

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