The Antitrust Theory of Everything
· The Atlantic
“I helped set in motion a revolution that aims to rebuild something like a true liberal democracy in America,” Barry C. Lynn wrote two years ago in Harper’s.
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The claim is notable less for being impossibly grandiose than for being more or less correct.
Lynn is the intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement, which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States. “It is vital to understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters, “that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our society today.”
When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”
The movement that he leads has reshaped progressive thought on economics, antitrust enforcement, and political strategy. Lynn and his acolytes run a handful of nonprofit organizations, including the Open Markets Institute, where he serves as executive director. But they also influence liberal magazines, Democratic elected officials, and other key nodes of discourse on the left. Members of his movement held important positions in Joe Biden’s administration, and his followers are waging a vigorous—even vicious—campaign to ensure that they regain their power in the next Democratic administration.
I met Lynn in March at his office near the Treasury Department, just around the corner from the White House, where he once made frequent visits to his many allies in the Biden administration. The shelves were lined with books by Lynn and other neo-Brandeisians. A balcony overlooked the Treasury building, and the proximity to the executive branch was an advantage, he said, when “our friends” were in office. Lynn regards his factional triumph as a fait accompli. “We’ve largely won the intellectual debate,” he told me matter-of-factly, allowing that the only remaining liberals who disagree with him are “those who are paid to do so.”
Over the past two decades or so, Lynn has revived, modernized, and enlarged on a long-dormant antitrust ideology, spreading its tenets with astonishing energy. He operates in the intellectual and political realms simultaneously, waging both an evangelical crusade and a bare-knuckled factional struggle for power. Lynn’s inside game has worked so well that, even though the average Democrat can barely detect the transformation, many party leaders have adopted his sweeping theory of everything.
Lynn has won so much that the Democratic Party may soon be tired of his winning. The effects of his revolution on the party and its ability to govern are far greater than many intellectuals, politicians, and staffers seem to grasp. To attribute all problems to a single cause is to reject every solution but one. It is also to dismiss anyone who thinks differently—that is, anyone who thinks about the world like nearly any Democrat did until very recently—as a corrupt enemy who must be expunged.
Lynn began developing his monocausal view of the world when he was a business journalist in the 1990s and early aughts. Walmart’s leverage over its suppliers was a particular fascination. “Wal-Mart and other monopsonists,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s 20 years ago, “are slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal that holds each of us ever more tightly in place, and that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock.” Instead of inexorably taking over the economy, however, Walmart eventually lost market share to Amazon and other competitors without government intervention. If Lynn was perturbed by the failure of his prophecy, he gave no sign, turning his attention to the monopolistic power of Facebook (which has also subsequently lost market share) and Amazon.
Like conventional antitrust enforcers, Lynn faulted these corporate behemoths for overcharging consumers, undercutting their competition, and preventing innovation. He went beyond the liberal consensus, however, and argued that large firms were inherently dangerous. The goal he set out for antitrust policy was not merely to prevent firms from blocking competition, but also to reshape the economy to place more economic and political power in the hands of small-business owners.
“We may have democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” the Progressive Era jurist Louis Brandeis is supposed to have said, though there is no evidence that he ever actually said it. The neo-Brandesian movement has a name of similarly mysterious provenance. Lynn told me he cannot recall who came up with the name. The first prominent usage on record is a 2017 Nation article by David Dayen about one of the conferences promoting Lynn’s ideas. “You can call them the ‘New Brandeis movement,’” Dayen wrote.
In 2001, Lynn joined the New America Foundation, a think tank that at the time relied heavily on journalists rather than research fellows recruited from academia or government. In 2011, he launched its Open Markets program, dedicated to antitrust policy. At New America, Lynn developed his thinking into a comprehensive worldview.
Lynn sees American history as a struggle against monopolization, an evil he believes the U.S. Constitution was concerned with preventing. The heroes of his narrative run from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden. Its villains include Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and, above all, Robert Bork, who reinterpreted antitrust doctrine as focused on protecting consumers—a legal transformation that Lynn deems the turning point that set America onto a path toward oligarchy.
Anti-monopolization, Lynn argues, is “an all-encompassing framework for seeing and shaping power in every corner of our democratic republic.” He believes that “most prices are entirely arbitrary and political in nature.” This has led the neo-Brandeisians to embrace price controls and other populist measures that economists, even very liberal ones, generally oppose. More expansively, Lynn believes that “market forces”—which he places in scare quotes—do not exist. His indictment of economics is neither mild nor limited. He has compared the discipline to Lysenkoism, a pseudo-scientific fad under Stalin. “The ‘science’ of economics today … ,” he wrote in his 2011 book, Cornered, “has become a form of madness, a dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world.”
Lynn’s insistence that the entire field of economics is a lie has, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to persuade many economists. “The economists were the worst,” he has written of the Washington insiders to whom he has spent two decades promoting his gospel. These benighted souls “often as not were completely unable to comprehend—or in some cases to admit—the logical outcomes of gearing every economic system to promote the concentration of wealth and power. In response to irrefutable proof, they would mumble a few incoherent words before vanishing.”
When you have resisted the propaganda that has enslaved the minds of millions of your fellow citizens, and grasped the hidden truth that the authorities have sought to conceal, your burden is heavy, and the desire to share your revelations irrepressible. I read Lynn’s most recent two books and many of his articles in advance of our meeting, which ran well over two hours. After we met, he emailed to suggest that this effort, while commendable, hardly sufficed, and that “the only way to appreciate the full breadth of what we do is also to watch some of the events I have curated, read some of the speeches I helped edit, and review some of the articles and books I have shaped.”
Lynn’s own account of the effect his obsessive qualities have on others is difficult to improve on. In a Harper’s essay shortly before the 2024 election—it would be fair to call it a manifesto—he describes his impact:
I cornered Fed chairs at the conference coffee table, interrogated Nobel-winning economists in their pieds-à-terre, nabbed the empty seat next to the president’s consigliere. I overstayed my welcome in dozens of congressional offices and blocked Cabinet secretaries from stumbling from Capitol Hill cocktails to the black cars idling at the curb. I cajoled bankers and insurers to share their deepest fears. I spent a small fortune on drinks for those whose job, it seemed, was to know something, anything. I pushed friendships and acquaintanceships to the edge and beyond.
Lynn’s evangelism has won numerous converts, and he has cultivated protégés eager to soak up his wisdom. Lynn’s first hire at New America was Lina Khan, a political-theory graduate from Williams College who had served as editor of her campus newspaper. She was brought onboard to look into Amazon. “It’s so much easier to teach public policy to people who already know how to write than teach writing to public policy experts,” Lynn later told The New York Times. Khan, who later credited Lynn with “introducing me to these issues in the first place,” adopted his view of antitrust policy and its paramount role. “Antimonopoly,” she has written, “is a key tool and philosophical underpinning for structuring society on a democratic foundation.”
In 2016, Khan and Lynn met with Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. In a speech at New America shortly thereafter, which Lynn helped shape, Warren described anti-consolidation as “one of the basic founding principles of our nation” and broadly endorsed his program.
Khan began to eclipse Lynn as the movement’s most prominent avatar, even as he remained its most influential. At Yale Law School, she wrote a law-review essay about Amazon that drew national attention. “The dominant framework in antitrust today fails to recognize the risk that Amazon’s dominance poses for discrimination and barriers to new entry,” she wrote. An article of neo-Brandeisian faith is that previous administrations, in both parties, adopted a narrow definition of consumer harm, focused entirely on prices, in antitrust policy. In her essay on Amazon, Khan criticized “the current framework in antitrust— specifically its pegging competition to ‘consumer welfare,’ defined as short-term price effects.” Echoing one of Lynn’s distinctive precepts, she has written that “there are no such things as market ‘forces.’” (Khan declined to speak to me for this article.)
Rather than publish their work in little-read reports on their own website, as most think-tank scholars did, Lynn and his followers published a stream of columns in the news media. He explained to Politico in 2017, adopting the language of monopoly economics, “We can vertically integrate and do the writing ourselves.”
At first they mostly published in the Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine once devoted to the journalist Charles Peters’s idiosyncratic vision of government reform but more recently converted to Lynn’s. In recent years, they have expanded into horizontal integration. The American Prospect (which Dayen now edits), The Nation, The Intercept, The New Republic, and Democracy (the latter two of which share the same editor, Michael Tomasky), as well as Harper’s, where Lynn still publishes his big-think essays, tout the neo-Brandeisian line often, and criticize it with vanishing infrequency.
Small political magazines play an outsize role in shaping the intellectual debate among Democratic Party elites. That committed enemies of monopolization have built a sort of cartel might seem ironic, but perhaps the neo-Brandeisians have a keener appreciation than most of the power of cornering a market.
Their ideas began spreading rapidly during Donald Trump’s first term, when shocked liberals were groping for explanations as to what could have driven Americans into the arms of such an outrageous figure. Small reasons—Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity, the quirks of the Electoral College, the difficulty of a party winning three straight presidential elections, the cultural challenge of electing the first woman president, the unpopularity of the party’s stance on immigration or on a variety of cultural issues—did not satisfy Democrats’ demand for answers. A profound crisis must have profound causes, and Lynn was offering a totalistic account of social decay.
The 2016 election not only convinced Democrats that they had betrayed the working class but also marked a breaking point between Democrats and the tech industry. During Barack Obama’s administration, many Democrats viewed Silicon Valley as a benign, socially progressive force. After Trump won, their anger turned toward social media for allowing bots and Russian users to flood the internet with messages attacking Hillary Clinton. And while subsequent analysis cast doubt on the scale of the effect that social media had on the outcome, the relationship never mended. As stark critics of the tech industry, neo-Brandeisians found themselves selling a remedy many Democrats were suddenly eager to buy.
Lynn’s theory promised to resolve all their dilemmas. It explained how their party had lost working-class voters and supplied a simple message that would win them back. Cultural liberals could avoid the painful necessity of jettisoning some of the party’s unpopular stances to win back alienated voters. By redirecting all the political questions that had bedeviled the party into a simple argument about the perfidy of big corporations, neo-Brandeisian theory offered a road map to restoring the lost prosperity of the New Deal era and rebuilding a connection to the voters who had abandoned them in despair. Their slashing anti-corporate rhetoric has met with overwhelming agreement from Democratic voters; in a recent New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of them said they would like their party to “go after corporate monopolies and price gouging.”
The neo-Brandeisian climb to power appeared to stall when Warren’s presidential campaign crashed and burned in 2020. But she successfully maneuvered during the transition from President Trump to President Biden to gain influence over the incoming administration’s policy priorities and staff. As a result, the neo-Brandeisian network played an important role in promoting Lynn’s allies and denigrating competing candidates. When Biden considered appointing Susan Davies, a former deputy White House counsel under President Obama, to the Justice Department’s top antitrust post, a slew of articles savaged her as a corporate shill. Her candidacy died.
The staffing wars ended with a virtual neo-Brandeisian clean sweep. Khan was appointed to run the Federal Trade Commission, which Matt Stoller—a researcher at the American Economic Liberties project—called an “earth-shattering” event. The neo-Brandeisian enthusiast Jonathan Kanter got the DOJ antitrust job. Tim Wu, another fellow traveler, became special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. Other Lynn disciples poured into the ranks. The neo-Brandeisian thinkers Warren recruited into the administration represented the movement’s brightest minds and most energetic administrators.
Lynn told me his proudest moment came in 2021, when Biden signed an executive order declaring a whole-of-government commitment to anti-monopolization. The speech and the order were tangible evidence that Lynn’s movement had progressed “from being outliers to sort of actually having captured large portions of this administration,” as he boasted to an interviewer that year.
With Biden’s presidency, the neo-Brandeisian movement crossed over from insurgency to establishment. Its adherents wielded the power of the federal government. And unlike many other issue areas, which require legislation, their vision could be implemented through executive action.
The neo-Brandeisians rewrote guidelines to impose stricter standards for merger approvals. Khan unsuccessfully sued Microsoft and Meta to block acquisitions. Her commission imposed a ban on noncompete clauses, a measure used by firms to prevent employees from leaving their jobs that has drawn bitter condemnation from libertarians and moderates as well as neo-Brandeisians. (The ban was later blocked in court.) Khan’s greatest success was likely in deterring a larger number of mergers with the threat of regulatory pressure.
In the neo-Brandeisian account of history, Biden’s presidency was a new apogee, the moment the Democratic Party turned from what they see as the failed corporate centrism that held the party in thrall from Jimmy Carter through Obama. In their estimation, the achievements of Biden’s presidency rank alongside those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. This interpretation became the conventional wisdom, repeated as fact in, among other places, The New York Times, which stated in a 2024 news story, “Of the triumvirate of recent Democrats in the White House, Mr. Biden is the one who historians, political strategists and policy experts argue has racked up the most expansive list of legislative accomplishments.”
Yet, by any objective measure, the neo-Brandeisians failed. Khan’s attempts to bring Lynn’s grand theories to bear on the legal minutiae of antitrust law frustrated the agency’s professional staff. “What am I going to do? Go to court and say, ‘This cement merger threatens democracy’? … The whole approach is so incoherent,” a former FTC staffer told New York magazine.
No discernible economic revolution followed Biden’s neo-Brandeisian program. The University of Michigan law professor Daniel Crane examined the record and found that “on a statistical level, the neo-Brandeisians did not increase antitrust enforcement, and in many ways were less rigorous in bringing antitrust cases than previous administrations.” A paper by Diana Moss of the Progressive Policy Institute likewise found that the Biden administration “made progress in invigorating merger enforcement in some areas but may be lagging behind in others.”
Moss, a former head of the American Antitrust Institute, told me the neo-Brandeisians’ error is to view antitrust policy “not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems—economic, political, and social.” Antitrust enforcement isn’t that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.
Even the movement’s focus on Big Tech, a source of genuine social harm, seems to misdiagnose the central issue. The iPhone and social media have created powerful addictive products that degrade their customers’ attention spans and in-person social attachments. A concentrated market would mean people pay too much for the product, or get too little innovation, or have too few choices. Instead, the tech sector is overflowing with novel, popular, and inexpensive, often free, products. Facebook, which Lynn attacked for its domination of social media, has lost market share to TikTok and other competitors. Just as the problem with the drug cartels is not that they’re cartels but that they sell drugs, the primary harm produced by Big Tech is not its consolidated structure but the fact that many of its products harm its consumers and society as a whole.
Biden’s antitrust enforcers were also wrong to believe that their Democratic predecessors had ignored all factors other than costs to consumers. Although Lynn criticized “the more modern consumer welfare standard,” Moss writes in a forthcoming paper, he misunderstood “what the standard was and what it could restrain—information that was indelibly imprinted on Lynn’s mentees.”
Antitrust enforcers before Biden assumed that the government could step in to break up concentrated markets if they resulted in lower product quality, less innovation, or the exclusion of competitors, as well as high prices. Consequently, there was no hidden trove of economic liberty that Lynn’s acolytes could unlock with more determined regulation.
The neo-Brandeisians also had a stroke of bad luck. They gained power at a moment when conditions happened to be especially unsuited for their ideas.
The dominant issue in public opinion since Biden’s election has been the post-pandemic inflation spike. Democrats have sought to turn this issue to their advantage by promising to foster “affordability.” But neo-Brandeisian dogma is not designed to bring down prices. It actually maintains that economic policy is too concerned with keeping costs down. Lynn has decried the Democratic Party’s “fixation on lowering prices,” and lauds small businesses and farms that are less able to generate economies of scale than giant corporations are, and therefore have to charge more for their products. After the Biden administration recognized that inflation was eating away at public approval, the antitrust regulators tried to uncover price-fixing schemes in industries like gas stations, shipping, and groceries, with little success.
When a radical program fails to yield its expected results, its most zealous adherents usually insist that they have been foiled by circumstance, or the machinations of their opponents. (True socialism has never been tried.)
The neo-Brandeisians do not make this excuse. To the contrary, they insist that their revolution succeeded. “The last four years have seen how powerful the movement can be in solving real problems,” Zephyr Teachout, who once chaired the board at Open Markets, wrote in 2024.
“Biden destroyed the intellectual foundations of the system of private monopoly control,” Lynn wrote in 2024, “restored the original American vision of government as a tool to break all concentrations of power,” and oversaw “the greatest period of anti-monopoly enforcement in U.S. history,” among other achievements.
I asked Lynn what positive effects he could point to as evidence of the impact of these transformative changes. The query seemed to put him slightly off. He listed some of Biden’s antitrust measures, before I interjected to point out that those were actions, not effects. He criticized Kamala Harris for refusing to commit to reappointing Khan, arguing that this waffling symbolized her inability to cast herself as an enemy of the oligarchy—but this, too, failed to explain what Biden’s populism had actually achieved.
Finally, Lynn suggested that Biden’s reforms simply hadn’t had enough time. He is not alone in offering this defense. Michael Tomasky made the same point in a February essay arguing that neo-Brandeisians have the answer to Democrats’ political needs.
That the neo-Brandeisian revolution would require more than four years to fully reshape the economy is a fair point. But if they had truly implemented an earth-shattering transformation, then surely at least some faint tremors would have registered with the public. Instead, Biden’s popularity plunged early in his presidency and never recovered. There was no uptick in Biden’s approval rate produced by trustbusting, no green shoots that promised to blossom with more time.
The neo-Brandeisians maintain that they have the solution to nearly every ill in modern life, yet somehow, despite administering strong medicine, no improvements were discernable to the public within four years, much less rewarded by voters.
The reason their unimpressive record in power under Biden left the neo-Brandeisians’ confidence utterly unshaken is that their belief system is more like a religion than an economic theory.
Last year, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asked Teachout on his podcast if she could think of any issues that cannot be solved by smashing corporate concentration. At first she ventured, “I don’t think that anti-monopoly can solve significant problems of racism in this country,” but quickly retracted even this concession. “Having said that,” she continued, “there’s a reason that Frederick Douglass and [W. E. B.] Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power.”
It would make little sense, from this standpoint, for Democrats to change anything heading into the next presidential election. And so the neo-Brandeisians have accordingly begun a vigorous effort to persuade Democratic elites to commit to rerunning the Biden agenda and strategy, but more loudly and with a younger candidate.
They have been joined by other interest groups that have held sway within the party—especially advocates of social liberalism, who are resisting demands from centrists that they retreat from some of the party’s unpopular positions. At a progressive conference last fall, speaker after speaker asserted that Republican attacks on immigration, transgender participation in female sports, or any other political vulnerability could be defused by turning the issue back to billionaires. Teachout endorsed Zohran Mamdani; Khan worked for his transition team and has joined his mayoral administration, forging another tie between the neo-Brandeisians and other components of the Democratic Party’s left wing. The “Fighting Oligarchy” tour by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrated neo-Brandeisian themes, and AOC seemed to be echoing a version of Lynn’s idiosyncratic view of American history when she claimed earlier this month, “The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time, and we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and the state.”
The neo-Brandeisians are also reaching right. They seem to believe that they can reshape the contours of American politics along a new axis, pitting populists against elitists. This configuration would cut crosswise through both parties. They see in Trump’s populist gestures confirmation of the appeal of their own ideas and potential for cooperation.
Neo-Brandeisian ideas have drawn at least some support from Trump world. J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon, among others, have been labeled “Khanservatives” to signify their admiration for Biden’s crusading FTC commissioner. Bannon and Khan exchanged praise when they ran into each other at a 2025 conference (Bannon: “My girl! We want you back. You’re the best.” Khan: “We’re all relying on you to keep the fight alive for the populist wing.”)
Open Markets praised three of Trump’s appointees as “moderately to strongly sympathetic to the antitrust enforcement philosophy of Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan.” Stoller, the American Economic Liberties researcher, gushed that Trump’s appointment of Gail Slater to the antitrust division at DOJ was “a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on big tech” and attacked “Wall Street Dems” who complained when Trump demanded that Netflix fire Democrat Susan Rice from its board.
But if Lynn’s movement has viewed Trump as a figure possessing at least some laudable populist impulses with which they can occasionally agree, this premise has proved naive. Trump’s interest in antitrust enforcement predictably has little to do with restraining corporate power and is largely consumed with leveraging regulatory threats to compel firms to support his political agenda. Trump’s FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, whose appointment received praise from Open Markets, has thuggishly harassed Trump’s critics. Slater tried to enforce antitrust law in a reasonable way, but this got her pushed out. One can only imagine the powers Trump would be employing now if neo-Brandeisian friendly proposals like regulating Facebook as a public utility or requiring any billion-dollar company to receive a federal charter were in effect.
And when the grand left-right alliance between Trump and the neo-Brandeisians scored a recent political victory, as a matter of policy the win was perverse. In March, the Senate debated a bipartisan bill designed to stimulate more housing production. Both Trump (in one of his occasional populist forays) and Warren pushed for the inclusion of an amendment to the ROAD to Housing Act that would prevent any large entity from renting out large numbers of single-family homes. The amendment undercut the bill’s intent to make housing more affordable—making it illegal for a company to build homes and rent them out would restrict the supply and drive up the cost for renters.
Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii who championed the bill, suggested that the amendment was a drafting error. But then Warren stepped forward to clarify that the ban was very much intended. “There are some folks in private equity who don’t like that,” she replied, implying that her colleague’s objection was mere special pleading on behalf of Wall Street. “But it’s a very deliberate choice.”
Warren’s position aligned with Lynn’s neo-Brandeisian dogma, which maintains that bringing down the price of housing cannot be achieved by enabling the construction of more private homes, as most housing analysts believe. The solution, somehow, is instead to prevent private firms from entering the single-family market. Nearly any economist would say that if your goal is to make housing more affordable, banning firms from building rental houses makes no sense. But since neo-Brandeisian thought rejects economics as a pseudo-science that rationalizes the desires of capital owners, that objection carries little weight.
The neo-Brandeisian strategy of forming alliances with Trump and attempting to co-opt his appeal has, not incidentally, made the Democratic Party more Trumpian—that is, more prone to demagogic solutions that fly in the face of technocratic wisdom, like price controls or other popular-sounding but half-baked policies. The shortcomings of that approach were apparent under the Biden administration, which took pride in more or less banishing economists from economic policy-making positions. This banishment likely contributed to Biden’s slowness in responding to the inflation surge until it was too late. Populism does not exactly seem to be going well for Trump these days, either.
A noxious side effect of populism is its habit of dismissing all critics as corrupt shills, a style of politics that has flowed into the party along with the neo-Brandeisians.
Lynn has summarized the so-called abundance agenda—a wonky plan to build more housing and infrastructure—as a scheme “to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over.” Khan has said roughly the same thing, brushing aside the abundance agenda—“I haven’t seen any credible analysis that suggested why Democrats lost was we didn’t have enough donors on our side”—which, whatever you think of abundance’s merits, is not the proposition.
The abundance agenda does not cover all issues, and it is perfectly compatible with stringent antitrust enforcement. (Part of the abundance housing agenda is to break open neighborhood cartels that prevent new entrants into the housing market, a very anti-monopolistic concept.) But since Lynn’s theory purports to explain everything, it regards all other diagnoses of America’s problems as challenges, and therefore, by definition, as corporate plots. This has seriously compromised the Democratic Party’s ability to formulate creative and practical solutions to real-world problems, not all of which can be solved by attacking corporate power.
Lynn expressed to me some concern that attacking liberal targets would push them away, rather than converting them. He cited Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Clinton and Obama adviser, as one of many liberals the neo-Brandeisians have alienated by assailing as a corporate tool.
The staffers who fill Lynn’s network appear to have no such qualms. They have described their liberal critics as being “of, by, and for ‘disruptors’ like Uber, Airbnb, crypto, Tesla, and other companies/industries built on knowingly violating the law.” They say their critics are operating a “business front, billionaire ploy, or bookselling grift,” or “taking bribes.” Recently, they have begun describing non-Brandeisian Democrats as the “Epstein class.” The rationale for this smear is that Reid Hoffman, a donor to moderate liberal causes, knew Jeffrey Epstein. Hoffman denies having done anything unethical, but the social relationship is close enough, the neo-Brandeisians suggest, to contaminate any idea or figure Hoffman has ever supported.
Shortly after Warren went after Schatz, the neo-Brandeisian network savaged him as a mouthpiece for private equity. The same fate likely awaits any presidential candidate who deviates from their line.
This rhetoric is not unusually harsh by their standards, nor are the people who employ it inconsequential. The movement’s professional class repeats it more or less daily on social media and in its network of sympathetic publications. They have described the party’s pre-Biden leadership, including Barack Obama, as not merely failures (a claim many leftists make) but sinister plutocrats as well. And so the neo-Brandesians have set out to drive Obama Democrats from the party.
A cynic would see this campaign—to trash the reputations of liberals who merely disagree with their policies—as a ploy to discredit the neo-Brandesians’ factional enemies and retain the movement’s hold on power. And judging by its growing prominence, and the ease with which Lynn and his allies have shrugged off a politically disastrous four years in power, it has succeeded.
Yet after talking to Lynn and absorbing his manifestos, I could not escape the conclusion that he genuinely believes his monomaniacal account. He really does think that he and his allies have discovered not a, but the, profound truth about America and the world. That monopolies function as a kind of Hegelian force that explains the movement and meaning of history. That he has precisely diagnosed the singular cause of the peril into which America has plunged for decades, and contains in turn the blueprint for its redemption.
Their fervent belief in this plan requires, almost incidentally, tearing apart the Democratic Party in order to save it. The trouble is that their theories don’t embody perfect truth, so the tearing might happen, but the saving part will never arrive.